Wired vs Wireless Mesh Backhaul Speeds

[MV05]

I currently have three nest routers linked together via wired backhaul. They are the ones that run at AC2200. 

if I were to use one as a wireless point to move the point to a different room would I loose speed? 

I know that wired backhaul makes the satellite routers have the same wireless speeds as the original router. But is there a speed decreased if the satellite router is connected via wireless mesh? 

I have one located in the basement as the main router. One in the main floor living room and one on the second floor in the room above the living room. The house is 3500 sq ft.  Is three routers too much? 

thank you all for your consideration and any insight I

[MichaelP · Accepted solution]

Hello @MV05 

The wireless mesh interconnect uses the same 5GHz radio (and therefore the same 5GHz channel) as 5GHz client traffic. So, it is a trade-off of more coverage for lower performance, since any 5GHz client traffic will have to go over that channel twice. When you connect secondaries back to the primary/router via Ethernet, you preserve all of the 5GHz channel capacity for client traffic, since their traffic is now going back via Ethernet instead of using the 5GHz channel again.

So, in short, yes, you would likely lose speed by removing the wired connection to an access point. But, there's more to it than that. With your primary in the basement instead of in the center of the home, any wireless mesh connected secondaries would need to be no more than one or two rooms away from the primary to get a "great" wireless mesh connection for themselves. So, if you disconnect the Ethernet connection to your second floor access point, for example, it would probably struggle to get through to the primary. Note: wired secondaries do not extend the wireless mesh connection, since the mesh protocol doesn't run over Ethernet. So, I would caution against doing something like that.

It's hard to know whether you have too many for a 3500 square foot house, but from your description, it doesn't sound like it. Honestly, it sounds like you have a pretty good setup. If it's not causing problems, I don't think I'd change it.

[MV05]

Thank you very much for the detailed response. I had my assumptions that this would be the case, but I appreciate the validation. 

I have since scaled down to only using the three routers linked together via wired Ethernet backhaul  I have checked signal strength from wireless devices and the connection strength and speed are all great. 

Thanks again