Last week, I finally got tired of my Nest Wifi Pro-powered mesh Wi-Fi home network and decided to switch to a single mid-range router paired with a relatively cheap range extender.

I've used Google's Nest Wifi Pro mesh router setup for roughly three years, and I've encountered what feels like countless issues. Whether it's random disconnects, weird Wi-Fi dead zones that don't make sense, or just disappointingly slow speeds, I've never really gotten Google's Wi-Fi 6E-compatible Nest Wifi Pro to work well in my home.

At one point, I even tried reducing my main router and two mesh node setup to just the router and an additional node, assuming that my tiny townhouse was just too small for a three-point mesh setup, but the situation didn't improve, even though all three devices maintained a solid connection with each other.

I ditched a mesh system for a single router

The goal was to simplify my home network

After a bit of research, I landed on TP-Link's $300 (it's often on sale for $175-$200) Archer BE9300 tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router, which offers 2.4GHz, 5GHz, and 6GHz wireless bands, along with up to 2.5Gbps wired speeds. This is more than enough speed for me, given my internet connection tops out at 1Gbps and rarely even hits that (it usually hovers around 850-900Mbps). My thought here was that my house is small enough to switch to a single router and that I could, in theory, ditch the mesh system entirely, simplifying my home Wi-Fi setup considerably. Since it's a mid-range router and one of the cheapest Wi-Fi 7 options, it also fits within my under-$300 budget.

Sure enough, my hypothesis was mostly correct. The speeds in my basement office consistently hit roughly 950Mbps. My living room is at about 600Mbps, and depending on where I am upstairs, I get between 350Mbps and 400Mbps. This is a marked improvement over the speeds I was getting with my Nest Wifi Pro setup, which sometimes hovered around 50-100Mbps nearly everywhere in my home that wasn't directly beside the router in my basement office. I haven't run formal signal tests yet, but I plan to at some point. Right now, I'm just satisfied that I can doomscroll social media wherever I want in my house and that, at least so far, I haven't encountered any outright connection drops. Will it stay that way? I'm not sure, but I definitely hope so.

The only issue I've encountered so far is that my Ring Doorbell 3 has an extremely poor connection to my new router, despite being relatively close to it. While I could still connect to the smart doorbell, the video feed would sometimes take up to 30 seconds to appear, and when it finally did, it was often very pixelated. My best guess is that the brick wall it's attached to beside my front door is the culprit. First, I tried forcing the device to connect over 2.4GHz rather than 5GHz by creating a separate 2.4GHz IoT network through the TP-Link Tether app and connecting the smart doorbell to it, assuming the longer range would help, but it unfortunately didn't.

I then realized that my Nanit Pro baby monitor, which is on a completely different floor, was also suffering from a weak connection and poor video quality. At this point, I was ready to switch back to the lackluster Nest Wifi Pro because it seemed like the only way to maintain consistent Wi-Fi coverage throughout my house was to set up extra satellite nodes (I blame the poor internal antennas on these devices). The other option was to pick up a second Archer BE9300, which would blow my budget. Unfortunately, TP-Link's Deco mesh Wi-Fi system isn't compatible with the Archer BE9300 either. This is when I remember that range extenders are a thing and that, as far as my setup is concerned, it's really just these two devices causing the issue.

A cheap range extender solved all my issues

The top-of-the-line option isn't always necessary

TP-Link sells a lot of different range extenders that work with its EasyMesh system, allowing you to create a makeshift Wi-Fi mesh network. My top choice would be the tri-band $149 TP-Link BE11000, which supports Wi-Fi 7. However, both of the devices I wanted to connect to the extender only support 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz Wi-Fi connections. I also planned to use the extender to create a separate SSID for those specific devices, rather than a mesh network, given the whole point of ditching my Nest Wifi Pro setup was to get away from mesh. This is why I landed on the $20 TP-Link AC1200 WiFi Extender. It's not the most modern Wi-Fi range extender out there, maxing out its upload/download speed at roughly 300Mbps on 2.4GHz and 867Mbps on 5GHz, but this is more than enough for my Ring Doorbell 3 and Nanit Pro baby monitor.

The only hitch in this plan was that I needed to turn off TP-Link's EasyMesh when setting up the AC1200 Wi-Fi Extender. After I plugged in the extender on the middle floor and added it to the app, I turned off EasyMesh by unchecking it at the top of the Tether app. Next, I tapped on Extended Network, changed the network name to something different from my main network, and then connected both my Ring and Nanit Pro baby monitors directly to the range extender under its unique SSID.

At least so far, my setup has been pretty flawless. If I run into more network issues, I might end up picking up a Wi-Fi 7-compatible Archer BE11000 range extender to use with EasyMesh, though this is definitely something I want to avoid since it's overkill for the size of my house and would also mean I'd need to drop another roughly $200.