Replacing Asus XT8 setup

[jimmyca]

Hi all,

I am looking for some advice on a setup to potentially replace my current pair of Asus XT8's in my house.

Since I hard wired the backhaul with Cat6 most of the issues I've had with the XT8 have gone but it's getting old with limited updates and it still struggles sometimes with furthest spots of the house especially upstairs. I was contemplating a new Wi-Fi 7 mesh setup but also considering whether with my setup, something less complicated like a Router/AP setup might work better.

My house is 2 floors, around 190m2 (newish build timber frame with plasterboard walls) with the router XT8 connected to my 1gb connection downstairs, with 2 devices (Hive and HP Dock) hard wired into ethernet ports. I have Cat6 cabling from it to the other XT8 upstairs. On the second XT8 in my son's room it has 2 devices (Xbox and Gaming PC) plugged into it. Device wise most that connect wirelessly in the house (around 30 in total) are 802.11ac with around 8x 802.11ax and 2x 802.11be and they tend to be split quite evenly across both devices.

I was looking at the BT10 as a like for like replacement but I'm questioning if it will be that much better with the devices I have and if it will actually address the signal issue in the low spots furthest away from both devices. Would a router/AP setup be cheaper and actually be better than the current XT8 setup?

Any advice on the approach for my setup would be good, as well as recommended hardware.

Many thanks

 

[2301]

Read this, some good points mentioned.

Wi-Fi 6 in 2025: Still the Best Standard to Have! | Dong Knows Tech

Wi-Fi 7 doesn't make Wi-Fi 6 obsolete. Quite contrary, it makes clear the fact the 6-year-old standard is still excellent today!

dongknows.com

 

[tgl]

If you don't have adequate coverage now, it's very unlikely that replacing the two XT8s with two other devices will fix it. Wifi range is largely limited by the laws of physics and the legal restrictions on transmit power. A plan that's much more likely to succeed is to get another AP, possibly moving one or both of the units you have to spread the coverage more evenly.

You could get another XT8, or maybe one BT10 to use with the XT8s if you want to have some 6GHz service (in a localized area) for those newer devices. It's hard to recommend the idea of buying three BT10s though: you're paying for three routers and three wifi APs when you only need one router and three APs. This is about the amount of gear where it starts to make financial sense to move out of consumer wifi and look at SMB gear that separates the router and AP functions.

Personally I replaced a multi-XT8 setup awhile ago. I'm currently using a pfSense router with some UniFi APs, and I'm pretty happy, but it's definitely a nerdy setup that's a bit complex to manage. If you want easy management you could do worse than go with an all-UniFi setup --- @Tech9 will be happy to sing the praises of that approach, I'm sure.