I started with original Google WiFi and it was rock solid for a few years, if not super fast. I added nodes over the years as I needed coverage into the garage, out to my driveway and deck. I eventually replaced a few Google point with Nest router and points. Again -- never got more than about 300Mbps over the mesh despite feeding it from a gigabit gateway. But it was solid. Then it went nuts in early September, corresponding to one of the firmware updates, and became virtually unusable for weeks. I thought I had it figured out - simplifying my mesh again - down to a router and 3 points laid out well -- performance improved and I was getting about 600 to 650 Mbps from the point in my basement office. I saw others here still struggling but I was ok... with my speeds still in the 600 range...until a couple of days ago. Interestingly, I read that "Google was fixing the problem", and my mesh became unusable for about 24 hours, with WiFi throughput dropping to 1 Mbps or less. I restarted the mesh a couple of times. I physically power cycled the router and points. Sometime today it became more usable, but the max mesh speeds that I get now -- despite verifying feeding about 875 to 900 Mbps into the Nest router -- are generally in the 240 to 325 Mbps range at best.
This is incredibly disappointing. We've had folks here telling us they're in contact with the Nest WiFi product team, but in more than a year, we have never been given ONE piece of information regarding what the product team thinks is going on.
Several folks with original Google WiFi or the Nest WiFi have recently upgraded to the new 6E units -- which, sadly, are not backward compatible. But it seems the experience is the same, and apparently horribly disappointing if you've just dropped $500 to try it out, thinking your experience would improve.
After the last few months with performance first having been stable, then unusable for weeks, then the best it had been in years, dreadful again earlier this week, and now passable but disappointing, I don't have any faith that the situation will improve. I really do wish we'd have some transparency from the product team, but it doesn't seem that this is anything we can expect.
Looks like I'm probably going to start checking out black Friday sales on other mesh platforms.
Great potential, but reality doesn't seem to be living up to it.
- Jon
