Hardwire two wifi nodes together. Connected wirelessly to router. Will this work?

[Kdoll]

I have a 2 story house that's long and narrow. Internet is fine in the front but really bad in the back. I'm looking to share the wifi between 2 floors. Currently my router is on FL 1 and gets about 300Mbps. When I go upstairs (front of house) it's about 180 but as I move toward the back it drops to 5.

Currently renovating my 2nd floor and want to run wire through the wall so I can hardwire the puck in the front and the back. For numerous reasons, I can't hardwire the node to the router between floors so wondering if this configuration could be a good workaround to get me close to 180Mpbs in the back of my house?

Verizon Router WAN - - > Nest Router LAN

Nest Router --wirelessly--> Node 1

Node 1 WAN< -hardwire- > Node 2 LAN

Side view of building

[Marcosl7926]

Hello, Here is a Help Center to help you to Hardwired your Google WiFi Devices Properly.

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/7215624?hl=en-SG&sjid=6099193658717143949-NC#zippy=

On Supported Setups and Setups to avoid are some examples to hardwired your devices.

I hope it is helpful for you!

[MichaelP · Accepted solution]

Hello @Kdoll 

The short answer is, the mesh protocol does not run over Ethernet (it's based on 802.11s, which runs inside the WiFi stack). So, when secondaries are wired, they have to withdraw from the wireless mesh interconnect. When you wire two secondaries directly to each other, things get a lot more complicated. I see what you're trying to accomplish. But, the reality is that topology isn't going to work reliably. Or it might work sometimes, but not others.

The issue is, while you really want Node 1 to connect to your primary Nest WiFi Router via the wireless mesh and then provide connectivity via Ethernet to Node 2. But, you might actually end up with Node 2 connecting to your Nest WiFi Router via the wireless mesh and then provide connectivity via Ethernet to Node 1. This will be quite slow.

The solution is to connect both Node 1 and Node 2 back to the Nest WiFi Router via Ethernet rather than trying to rely on the wireless mesh interconnect at all. Yes, this will require running at least one Ethernet cable between the first and second floors.

[Kdoll]

Thanks Michael! I have been seeing your comments on other posts and it has been super helpful. I wonder if because the node 2 is so far away it will more likely connect to node 1. Did a speed test at the back of the house ~50ft away and I only get 5Mbps. Ideally the system will connect to the one that’s closer by

[MichaelP]

The mesh topology is really about each node deciding which is the best "next hop" to get the traffic where it needs to be. In order to do this, the mesh protocol needs a "metric" – something it can measure easily in order to make that decision. The 802.11s mesh uses "fewest hops" as that metric – not "signal quality". Point being, Node 1 and Node 2 both see a direct connection to the primary as "one hop", even though Node 1 could get traffic over that one hop faster than Node 2 could. But, Node 1 and Node 2 don't exchange any information about their pair-wise signal quality measurements – the mesh protocol only lets them share hop counts. So, we have no way of knowing which one will end up connecting to the primary and which one will use the Ethernet link.

So, even though we, as humans with global knowledge, can see what the optimal traffic path "should" be, the network, as a peer-to-peer distributed system without global knowledge, can't figure that out automatically (especially in an unsupported configuration like the above, where the mesh protocol doesn't even run over Ethernet, instead relying on the lower level Spanning Tree Protocol to eliminate loops).