Thanks - that’s very encouraging and something to aim for once the AE’s cease functioning adequately.
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Thanks … my eyes have been off the ball these last ten years so have missed the improvements in WiFi. My cottage is two one-up one-down 17th century buildings joined by a single storey back addition. At each floor level the two buildings had a connecting door, where I placed an AirPort Extreme, and I placed another in my study in the back addition. The WiFi signal is good in the study and bedrooms but very poor in the rest of the ground floor. The stone walls are 0.7 m thick between the two buildings, without the interconnecting doors I would not get any overlap in coverage.
Since I configured my WiFi network to ignore gigaclear’s own WiFi access has improved but is not ideal.
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Or so I thought … AirPort extremes failing again … can they last until the next generation of Mesh systems come along? If not which Mesh is best given my circumstances (see above) Linksys or Netgear or AN other?
Mesh systems will always have issues when compared to a normal lan cable! Repeating the backbone is always going to have additional latency and stability issues. What people tend to do is put the mesh nodes too far from each other… possibly to save money. Remember each mesh node needs to get the very best signal from what it’s repeating from and, of course to present the best backbone signal to the next node down the line. On the other hand too many mesh nodes increases latency 
The best mesh units currently available have 3 radio interfaces: One for backbone in. One for backbone out. One for local clients. So each radio device can separately talk to a party without upsetting the others.
The other issue is the available channels… If you’re using 11ac wifi then that’s 80meg per band and there are only so many channels/bands! So you need wifi units that can see the full range of UK/EU legal 5GHz channels… The cheaper ones don’t support DFS so they can only use the lower 80MHz band (lower 4 channels). So you can then end up with everything fighting for the one band! You need better units that can see all the bands so that includes the ones from channel 100 upwards. The rubbish units can only see 36/40/44/48 (20MHz ber channel so this is 80MHz total).
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I use the ones from Eero (Amazon just bought them, not sure how I feel about that). They are fantastic. They work well for my environment (thick walls etc). For me it was between Eero’s and Netgear Orbi’s. I was thinking about general wi-fi issues around my house as well as for streaming music. Like @anon4216120 mentioned above I do have part of my wireless network wired for backhaul as the units have 2 ethernet ports. All my wireless issues have been resolved. I’m finally getting what I paid for and no complaints about slow/no connections. I wish Apple would have bought Eero but tis life.
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So I said about needing two radios for the back bone… well the Eero units only seem to have one! This is what cnet have to say about that:
Good performance, not great
One issue to note is that the Eero doesn’t have dedicated wireless connection for the signal between its units (aka, the backhaul connection). Instead it uses either the 5GHz or the 2.4GHz signal, depending on the distance between units. This means apart from the signal degradation due to distance, the Eero also suffers from signal loss (https://www.cnet.com/how-to/untangling-the-mesh-everything-you-need-to-know-about-wi-fi-systems/) – to the tune of a 50 percent efficiency reduction when a Wi-Fi band has to both receive and rebroadcast the signal at the same time.
So it has to use the same radio for incoming and outgoing traffic. It can only talk to one backbone node at a time… either the source unit or the next one down the line. Hence 50% throughput drop. The units seem to use 11ac wifi got the backbone. As such there is enough spare wifi bandwidth to still give an acceptable overall throughput.
btw the link in the quote from cnet is worth a read.
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I had hoped to replace my Airport Extremes, which are plugged into my LAN, as WiFi access points. Do mesh systems rely on WiFi connections only or can they be wired into my LAN? Should I just go for extenders?
Yes you can lan cable to each ‘transmitter’… most mesh products support this but not all. On the other hand, if you’re going to lan cable to each then you could just get 3 top quality access points and lan them back to source. That would work out cheaper and probably better spec.
Thanks for this link - helpful stuff. So it seems that I want a router in access point mode, which I suppose is what my Airport Extremes were. Does anyone have recommendations for routers to use as APs?
This seems to be the obvious solution - do you have any recommendations?
Hard for me to suggest without infringing forum rules but, going back to what I said about meshing, you want access points that support ALL of the 5GHz channels. Note access points are not really wifi routers though, with care, you can normally use ‘routers’ - disable DHCP and use the LAN ports (not WAN).
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Thanks - understand - I’ll get to work (converting on my old pre-fibre router to an AP) and do some more research on other suitable APs
That link while it does have some good content is a little out of date. Regardless for my needs they have been fantastic. I have 3 units and they cover my entire house. Without posting a link here is a quote from WindowsCentral on best mesh wi-fi router kits in 2019
“The eero offers a sleek, minimalist design, and it can be had in a number of configurations. Three eeros offer maximum performance and wired backhaul, but for lighter networks, an eero and beacon or two is a better wireless solution that nevertheless offers a dedicated 5 GHz radio for backhaul traffic. Beamforming improves reception and MU-MIMO capabilities serve your modern devices, and you get real-world speeds up to 240 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz radio and 600 Mbps on the 5 GHz radio.”
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