Velop AX Whole Home WiFi 6 System (MX5300)

Linksys Mx4200/Mx4300/Mx5300/Mx8500. You can purchase these off eBay for under $100. The hardware is great and will last a long time for routing purposes (supports Qualcomm hardware acceleration).

Do you have Spectrum Mobile if you do the router acts as a tower if you don't just get your own. (https://computers.woot.com/offers/linksys-ax5300-atlas-pro-wi-fi-6-system-1?utm_medium=share&utm_source=app) this one will fit most people needs and you get 3 nodes.

Look at Linksys mesh. Couple of months ago I picked up two Velop wifi 6 nodes on Woot for $20 each.

In 220 sqm, you shouldn't need more than 3 nodes, unless you want more coverage outside, but with too many as you've already experience, they will sometime fight for the best signal, even more so when they are just wifi based. If you can get more Cat6 installed, the location of the router (primary node) becomes irrelevant since they will all share the same exact signal with the same bandwidth so you should be able to test it now and confirm better coverage. If you have baseboards, they make 1/4 round that has channels in them where you can hide the Cat 6, and if that's not an option there are some manufacturers who make flat cables. As for me personally, both system have been challenging but that is more related to my own person situation than the hardware. The Linksys Velop system started out great, but as my need for IoT devices grew, the system struggled a bit. I came to find out well after the fact, the nodes which I thought I set up as wired, someone defaulted back to wireless which impact my bandwidth for devices connected to it. I ended up giving them to my inlaws since the coverage at their home sucked and they have been working perfectly since. I moved over to the Night Hawk system on the recommendation of a friend who has their gaming router and overall it has been really good. It took a lot of additional setup and tweaking to get it up and running at full capacity. The biggest challenge I had (again my own issue, not product issue), was I forgot how many of my IoT devices only run off 2.4 gHz. The Night Hawk system (unlike the Velop) has a default SSID that combines the 2.4 and 5 gHz bands. The Velop had these automatically separate with different SSID's. Due to this, some of my IoT devices had trouble connecting and I regularly lost their signal. (see Ring Cameras, smart switches/outlets, etc) so this meant I had to reconfigure my network with customized networks. But on the Nighthawk system this works differently than I was used to. The main 2.4/5 ghz network will always remain, so I had to create a custom standalone 2.4ghz network and then reconnect all my IoT devices to that. This was a tedious effort, but again, this was my fault, not the hardware/software. Since I have finally got all of that figured out, its run flawlessly. I have a 1GB fiber line. If the device is hardwired, I will get 850 Mbps (up and down) on average (www.speedtest.net). On a wireless device it will vary from 100Mbps to 500Mbps which is dependent on how much bandwidth is being used at any give time. The coverage is better than the Velop overall. I have a few friends who have the Orbi systems and swear by them. Since I run a lot of wired, I wanted some more raw high performance in certain locations. (Night Hawk lets you prioritize devices better IMO) I both game and run a home theater server so I stream not only from the net, but also across the network from that service to 4 different locations in the house. Even if they are all running at the same time, the wired connection means they don't bog down and don't impact the wireless bandwidth that is remaining. The Orbi overperforms with wifi only based stuff and provides a stable network across a larger area. From what I understand the setup is also easier on the Orbi. If and when my night hawk system dies, I will seriously consider and Orbi system but thats not going to be for quite a long time.

I had a TP-Link BE85 setup before this and returned it because of constant disconnects which is a known issue with them. I felt like their speeds were higher than Eero but the disconnects and the complexity of three separate SSID’s versus a single one made Eero a better choice. Prior to that, I owned an AMPLIFI Alien setup that I really liked. One of my units started having issues and needed replaced after several years. AMPLIFI has decided not to continue supporting the Alien product anymore so that was stuck on WiFi 6. Before the AMPLIFI setup I owned a Linksys Velop system and it was absolute trash. I don’t think there is a such thing as a perfect mesh system because if there was I would have bought it. That being said, I am sharing the same frustrations as you with the recent firmware updates.

Mesh systems were built for this application. I'm a longterm satisfied Linksys Velop user.

I have just moved to Unifi from Linksys due to the constant issues with the Velop mesh. All wired and seems to be working very well. Even the Mrs is happy