Deco BE11000

Cat 5 or Cat 6 They will work fine for what you are trying to accomplish Why do you have to run ethernet cables..? Only one unit should require being connected to your modem. Also is that deal still available ? il buy it lol

Thats okay, this is how mesh is designed to work and utilize eachother to create a whole home network, place the main unit there, and the secondary unit on the oppposite corner. if this hinders your original plan of wanting on in a specific room you shouldn't have sold that third guy lmao, but honestly since your in an apartment Id bet even a single node would cover it all so just place the second unit wherever you want the best connection / want to hardwire

Routers are fine. One will have to connect to the modem with a cat5 cable, this will be your main router. The other will connect wirelessly as a mesh node. Setup is a breeze with the Deco app. Might have to move the 2nd unit around to get a better mesh connection, but they are usually pretty good unless you REALLY stretch them out.

We are using the TP Link BE 11000 and just one more than covered our longer but narrow apartment and is tri-band. We had to buy a 3 pack, but it works fantastic now. May also check as they had big sales on Amazon and TP Link site direct for the holiday

We just had to find a solution to a 3 building, 3 floor situation. We ended up with 6 TP Link BE11000 mesh routers. It’s been excellent and we only have one spot in the coach house with lower reception. For context, we have 2 adjacent 3 unit multifamily buildings with a coach house in the back of one. We placed one in each floor of the building, and one across in the top floor of the adjacent building. We then put one more in the coach house which is probably 30-40’ behind the main building. 6 is the max you want to mesh but honestly we could have gotten away with one or two less, or converted one to an outdoor to help the coach house. These are both houses built circa 1910/15 and a lot of weird old metal in some of the walls in the back. The WiFi 7 has a tremendous range and we didn’t do a backhaul and are able to stream in 4 units for televisions, a home IoT setup in one unit, and wfh bandwidth for 3 people daily. No issues at all.

Im using Deco BE11000 as my 2 main nodes (plus a few smaller deco devices to extend to other parts) in an apartment, wifi 6 disabled (as i don't have anything that supports it yet), fast roaming disabled. System works flawlessly and consists of a full Arc Ultra setup, Sonos Amp, Era 100 and several Symfonisk speakers.

Using AT&T fiber 1000 TP-Link Deco BE11000 Wi-Fi 7 Tri-Band Whole-Home Mesh Wi-Fi System 3 Getting 1.25gb speeds

I can confirm this one works well. Gives you all the settings you need to overcome the downsides that happen with most Mesh systems.

I recently bought a Deco mesh system from Costco that came with 3 nodes. I put the main node on my first floor connected to my router (in your case it would connect to the ONT and serve as the router, or you could keep using the router and put the mesh in AP mode, which I did). I put a wireless node in my basement and another on my second floor and I’m very happy with the setup.