In my Orbi RBKE963 review, I saw lower speeds than are possible with 6GHz but with much more flexible node placement. Netgear, for example, stuck with 5GHz for its quad-band Wi-Fi 6E mesh router. While 6GHz is very fast, its inability to penetrate walls as well as 5GHz makes it a big compromise with mesh Wi-Fi. This is exacerbated on Nest Wifi Pro which uses 6GHz to link the nodes. Walls have a devastating impact on signal strength with 6GHz Wi-Fi. The more peaks you have inside an object, like a sheet of drywall, the weaker the signal gets. Waves on 2.4GHz are wider than 5GHz which is wider than 6GHz. The space between those peaks however gets ever nearer as frequency increases. Radio waves, like those used on a router, have peaks and valleys which correspond to the signal strength in height. Unfortunately, to explain this, we need to talk a bit about physics. This is pretty good for a mesh system without device prioritization enabled. Ping times average between 2ms and 4ms to the nearest test server (within my ISP) with 15-25ms jitter on most tests. My internet is provided by a local fiber provider with about 940Mbps down and up during an off-peak time when I test routers. In the end, every device used 5GHz in the speed tests. Since this is a mesh system from a company other than ASUS, all WI-Fi bands were combined under a single name so I had no control over which band was used. Each location had a node positioned in the same room or one room over for the garage. To get some numbers on Nest Wifi Pro's performance, I performed speed tests in three locations in my home. For all intents and purposes, Nest Wifi Pro acted like an 80MHz router as far as my devices were concerned. In my testing, I left 160MHz mode on but neither of my 160MHz devices, a PC with an Intel AX210 Wi-Fi card and a Zenfone 8, connected at more than 1,200Mbps. It’s nice that Google has included these options, especially given the brevity of the rest of its settings. As with any standard, it will take years for most folks to upgrade their devices to support them. WPA3 is also supported but off by default for the same reasons. Google says that enabling 160MHz could lead to incompatibility with some devices but I had no issues with mine. While 160MHz connections are supported, they must be enabled in the network settings in the Google Home app. The 2.4GHz band is more than sufficient for the smart home devices that will be mainly using it with 574Mbps of capacity. This means that the 5GHz band and 6GHz band each get a 160MHz band with up to 2402Mbps speeds. Moving on to the main attraction, Wi-Fi, Nest Wifi Pro has a tri-band AXE5400 connection. They are labeled separately as WAN and LAN but either port will work as LAN on one of the remote nodes. The two Ethernet ports only run at gigabit speeds so there’s no support for multi-gig network speeds here.
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