Nice detailed article!
Finding it increasingly difficult to avoid bottlenecks though. Even with wifi 7 I still get 1.3 on my mac and 0.5 on iphone. More than enough realistically, but upstream internet is 1.7 so tiny bit unfortunately
Think I'm just going to wire the place with 10 gig fiber
>The speed advantages that Access Points have over mesh systems will become much more obvious with Wi-Fi 7.
From what I've read mesh devices generally can detect when they've got wired backhaul so they can stay in mesh mode for the clean handovers while not relying on it for actually moving data
My house is built out of reinforced concrete, so wireless signals reach almost nowhere. I got Ethernet put into the living room and bedroom and put in 2.5 Gbps USB ethernet dongles on powered hubs, so when I plug into my phone/laptop to charge they get wired ethernet automatically.
how many spatial streams are you using (2x2, 3x3, etc) and are you using an 80 or 160 MHz channel?
If you have a set of full capability 802.11be clients you'll see the best performance with a 3x3 AP and 160 MHz channels.
Due to boring circumstances outside of my control, I have to use WiFi for the most part, so I've got quite some experience with making it run optimally (or rather, as optimally as I managed to, not as optimally as I would like it to).
And yeah, you pretty much already have to have a visible line of sight to get anything even close to 1 Gbps. And still be on channels with little interference. (DFS helps if you're not near radar, which intentionally causes you to get kicked off those channels and lose connection entirely.) And even then you might have to mess about a lot with positioning, because of reflections and generally multipath propagation.
I'd say it's not worth the headache. I would love to lay down Ethernet cable, even if it was just cabling only suitable for 1 Gbps (for which there's no good reason to, might as well do 10 Gbps).
But yeah, any mesh system worth its salt figures out the topology and absolutely favors wired links over WiFi for the back haul. Anything else wouldn't make any sense at all, there is basically no situation where you'd prefer an RF channel over a wire, unless the wire is maybe made of wet string.