I bought a new router recently as my three Netflix Orbis (Mesh Wifi) were having some issues. This is the ASUS RT-BE96U which is like a small pizza sized thing surrounded by robust spear-shaped ritual obelisks. It is large. The obelisks are large. It also has a very cool feature where you can turn the LEDs completely off, which I like.
I originally bought two of these and tried to use them in a Mesh configuration as I was curious about the “AI Mesh” feature. It turns out that setting up mesh on the new Asus was not fun, so I don’t recommend it for that, but I was able to return the second router I bought intending to use as a mesh node. Attempting mesh or using any of the advanced router features without an engineering degree and an accompanying troubleshooting mindset would be an exercise in pain, and I’m using it fairly stock.
Surprisingly, things are actually better (marginally faster) without the second mesh node, or at least about the same, so it was clear the extra node was creating some interference at best. Most devices seemed to want to connect to the first node, leaving me some questions about the downward throw of the WiFi beams (?). The manual also indicates something about putting the router higher, which isn’t really going to happen.
While I can’t say my whole (small) yard is covered with Wifi with my old 3-node Orbi setup, it’s good enough inside and I won’t have to go rebooting things every few days. My office computer, which I used the most, is on the other side of the house and is only getting about 60mbps, which is fine. The phone walking all over the house can get some amazing speeds over “6G” and the “bad” speeds are about 60mbps which is fine. Some metal beams may be involved, I don’t know.
Outside, wireless has gaps, but it’s enough to get a few IoT cameras and a doorbell to be happy, as well as my weather station pole. The gaps seem largest where the house is involved, like there’s a particular line of sight that goes through all of my bookcases or something.
Some things I wrote about earlier also changed, I also abandoned by Dual WAN setup with the Firewalla, and the Dual WAN on the Asus was furthermore very hard to setup and I locked myself out of router admin a few times. The firewalla was unable to find previously configured devices behind the Asus’s NAT and was no longer able to pin devices to specific interfaces (ah well). I intend to keep my backup internet connection for now, just as I’ve had some estimates like “Fiber is going to be down for a week” before - though thankfully those never were the case.
TLDR: maybe you don’t need mesh, if you get something with enough sufficiently large ritual obelisks. Megabits for the megabits God! I like this router so far if you are buying just one. Its expensive but does better than other attempts to cover the house with just one access point. Don’t buy two and try to link them.