Originally Posted by
HDQDD
For a novice, there's nothing wrong with your setup...except with that many different devices, you're likely causing a ton of unnecessary noise. Instead of having 4 APs, you could probably just use two prosumer APs and get a better experience.
I have a large property that could well be described as a "compound," with multiple dwellings and outbuildings. They're bridged using MoCA 2 adapters over an existing cable infrastructure; this has provided rock-solid service since we moved here 3 years ago. The WNDR3700 and 4500 are running dd-wrt. Until very recently, buggy ath10k drivers for the R9000 prevented me from taking advantage of dd-wrt on that device. Fortunately, Netgear has, as of late, been fairly responsive in addressing CVEs. I do plan to move to dd-wrt once the latest betas prove their stability. The EA8500 (which was gifted to me by Linksys as part of a promotion) serves as the guest network for the main house. It's currently running the latest Linksys release, but since it's behind the firewall and rarely used, switching to dd-wrt hasn't been a priority. All are configured with careful consideration of channel selection, and bandwidth/latency across all routers is excellent.
I have trouble with retail routers, for the reasons I mentioned. More specifically: Poor design, cheap under powered components, buggy firmware with little functionality, and slow updates to fix CVEs. We have 4 people in our house including two teenagers. Streaming/gaming is near constant. I work from home (even pre-CV19). We use a ton of data, over 50GB/day on average. We run multiple VPN connections, both in and out. We have a Gigabit fiber ISP connection, multiple APs with overlaid SSIDs and separate VLANs. Netgear and Linksys junk doesn't stand a chance in our house. Right now, I can pull 500Mbps up and down via wifi (with over 50 other devices connected to 2 APs) to my local speedtest server. Good luck with that on retail devices.
The only retail router/APs I would touch are those that will take a good opensource firmware, like dd-wrt, pfsense, etc. However, that doesn't fix the under powering issues, they still eventually burn up.
My usage isn't too far off from yours; we're averaging 30-40GB per day. The R9000 is directly supporting 50+ devices and
all of the internet traffic; it's not even breaking a sweat.