Hi everyone.
In spite of searching endlessly, I could not get a definite answer so I'm hoping that posting here will finally make it clear.
I am moving to a new house, it has a basement floor, main floor and second floor, each of the three is roughly 1700 sqft. I am thinking of placing 3 RT-AX86Us -- one in each floor, with a wired backhaul to get full house coverage with great speeds.
Option #1: I set all units as an AiMesh and disable band steering (I don't care for it). I then get a single SSID per band across all units, but each band will operate on the same channel across all units. I imagine this will cause some level of interference as each two adjacent floors would probably overlap.
Option #2: I set one unit as a main router, and the other two in AP mode (non-AiMesh). I manually set all three to use the same SSIDs and passwords, but pick different channels (or at the very minimum make sure that the main floor is using a different channel than the top floor and the basement). I can potentially also enable roaming assist on all three to disconnect weak connections, to maybe assist with "seamless transitions".
It's unclear to me which of the two is a better choice, mainly because I don't understand if "AiMesh" does anything more than just unify the administration of the units to simplify it or there's actually some technical advantage it provides. For instance, do the units share any useful operational information between them that make roaming more intelligent? Am I actually gaining anything other than a simpler initial setup by using AiMesh? Because if not it would make sense that Option 2 would be better. And if I do gain something by using it as an AiMesh, is it worth doing at the expense of the same-channel overlap between floors?
Appreciate any insight and any technical depth you guys can provide.
Cheers!
In spite of searching endlessly, I could not get a definite answer so I'm hoping that posting here will finally make it clear.
I am moving to a new house, it has a basement floor, main floor and second floor, each of the three is roughly 1700 sqft. I am thinking of placing 3 RT-AX86Us -- one in each floor, with a wired backhaul to get full house coverage with great speeds.
Option #1: I set all units as an AiMesh and disable band steering (I don't care for it). I then get a single SSID per band across all units, but each band will operate on the same channel across all units. I imagine this will cause some level of interference as each two adjacent floors would probably overlap.
Option #2: I set one unit as a main router, and the other two in AP mode (non-AiMesh). I manually set all three to use the same SSIDs and passwords, but pick different channels (or at the very minimum make sure that the main floor is using a different channel than the top floor and the basement). I can potentially also enable roaming assist on all three to disconnect weak connections, to maybe assist with "seamless transitions".
It's unclear to me which of the two is a better choice, mainly because I don't understand if "AiMesh" does anything more than just unify the administration of the units to simplify it or there's actually some technical advantage it provides. For instance, do the units share any useful operational information between them that make roaming more intelligent? Am I actually gaining anything other than a simpler initial setup by using AiMesh? Because if not it would make sense that Option 2 would be better. And if I do gain something by using it as an AiMesh, is it worth doing at the expense of the same-channel overlap between floors?
Appreciate any insight and any technical depth you guys can provide.
Cheers!
