Mesh network versus a simple Wi-Fi extender

@designsfx Thanks for the good info, and Ouchee on your internet speed! That’s awful, and frankly I’m surprised you can even stream hi-res music without dropouts but glad it works for you. Where are you BTW — northern Alaska???

We had internet via cable provider until 2 years ago- 7 Mbps was the max up to my place. Finally a cable modem carrier brought lines up to my area so we went with a 250 Mbps service- which is hit and miss. Even with the old service we could stream to two televisions at once but it was always dropping out. Things are much more consistent now.

Believe it or not this is not Alaska but 15 minutes outside of downtown Los Angeles! I live in the foothills about a mile outside of Angeles National Forest.

@designsfx Get out!!! 15 min outside the second-largest city in the US and you can’t get 1-Gig speed??? That’s just astounding. I’m 20 min outside NYC and have several providers for 1-Gig service. What up with that? Somebody’s seriously failing you guys.  Maybe consider moving to northern Alaska?  Weather’s a little cooler, and yeah you lose the sun for several months, but you can probably get better internet service, cut your living expenses in half, and completely avoid traffic forever other than the occasional moose blocking the road.  Jeez.

@soix There are 2 different speeds when dealing with wireless routers.  There is the internet speed that you pay for from your ISP and then there is the wireless speed in which your computer, streamer, wi-fi extender, etc. connects to your main router.  For example, an Orbi AX4200 has a 5ghz max connection speed of 1200Mbps, but a real world speed of maybe 8 or 900Mbps depending on how close you are to your router and if the connecting device (computer, streamer, etc.) even supports that speed to begin with.  So then if you connect a wi-fi extender, it's only going to have a max connection speed of 4-450mbps.  Even if you only got a few hundred Mbps speed, that still is more than enough to stream music.  It's nice to have a fast in-home network connection for copying files between different computers, accessing files on a NAS and so that you are getting the full internet speed that you pay for. It can become very confusion and I hope I made it easier to understand instead of harder.

“I live in the foothills about a mile outside of Angeles National Forest.”

The price you pay for living in wilderness. I knew a friend who lives away from city and the only way he can get internet is through a satellite provider.