@arobert74,

Other Decos are often used because they can be more powerful, or they may provide higher-capacity ethernet ports. Others will use Wi-Fi 6E Decos to take advantage of the 6GHz band that is broadcast, but this is more useful in fully upgraded 6E networks.

Also, make sure that your decos are not near appliances or sources of electrical interference and are not in an enclosed space. All of which can severely impact your connection.

Lastly, and maybe most importantly:Decos will also prefer to broadcast up and around, but not down - otherwise it may be broadcasting directly into a floor or table. You may have better luck using a wall mounted Deco-X50 PoE so that the signal will broadcast both up and down.

The most effective way, but not the easiest method of improving your coverage would be to provide an additional wired connection to the satellite nodes, as this doesn't have nearly the performance loss as to when communicating wirelessly to the main node. In your situation, you should really see what you can do about wiring your basement node.

  @arobert74,

For the record, if your gateway has more than just your Decos connected to it, your Gateway is likely not in Bridge Mode. You will want only your Deco to be the only device connected to the Gateway, and then all devices and PCs should be downstream from there - meaning that ALL network traffic will have to pass through your main Deco.

If not placed in Bridge Mode, you would need to change the operation mode of the Decos to AP or Access Point Mode.

When testing the Wi-Fi speeds, what are the speeds when connected to the basement deco, main deco, vs top deco? If the only place that you are having problems is the basement, I would be led to believe that it is because of how the signal is broadcasted out from the main.

You would need to try and narrow down if the slowdown affects the entire network, just wireless devices, and then if the behavior is limited to specific nodes.

  @arobert74,

Your network should work a lot better with all your devices being under the control of the Deco, rather than your two routers fighting for control.

As for wireless bandwidth - It CAN be. Wireless is super dependent on its environmental conditions, as all speeds you see listed are achieved in an ideal environment. Unfortunately, there are additional losses from wireless communications. Essentially, each wireless packet includes additional information in its "header" telling the client device how to decrypt and how to organize packets. This will immediately result in a somewhat significant loss of bandwidth. For wireless satellites, this happens twice - once for the node, and then again for the device.

Try wiring a laptop to the satellite nodes, and you should see speeds higher than the wireless tests.

Your wired connection will be able to achieve speeds nearly equal to your expected ISP speeds simply due to there being no loss or latency in the connections.

If your nodes are super far apart, I would try rearranging the satellites so they may be able to better communicate back to the main.

Hey @arobert74,

If you are looking at the options that I think you are for your main network and not for your IoT network, then yes - this would mean that the connection speed of all your wireless devices were capped at the max speeds available over the 2.4GHz networks. The default setting for your main network should be 2.4GHz and 5GHz.

All the Deco Nodes usually try to connect back to the main node if possible, simply because it is less "wireless hops" - where each hop introduced between Decos has an impact on overall throughput. Saying that, they will have no difficulty communicating with each other over wired or wireless connections. 

If you are finding that your Decos are not behaving the way that you would like them to, or you want to test other configurations, the latest firmware updates being pushed to Decos include options for connection and signal preferences - allowing you to set a preferred configuration for your Deco network. For the behavior I think you are looking for, you would want to look potentially wiring that node to your main, since there is minimal, if any, loss over a wired connection.