 How often do you replace your router or mesh setup? My current mesh is a TP-Link that is Wi-Fi 5. Her cable company Cox recently upgraded the network and now my speeds have been doubled. Yay, and she has a DOCSIS 3.1 modem, so all good there. But must I also now upgrade to Wi-Fi 6? The reason I ask is because I suspect my router may be causing a bottleneck in the speed or it could be all the wireless devices that we have connected simultaneously. I also wonder if my network ethernet switch could be causing a slowdown. I'll retest everything now that the Cox upgrade seems to be complete, but it was looking like I only get the full speed when connected directly to the modem with ethernet and then I get less than half once I connect the rest of our devices via Wi-Fi or maybe that's normal. How much should one expect the speed to be reduced when the whole household is connected via mesh Wi-Fi? So my general advice, and we'll go into details here, my general advice is don't just replace your router for the heck of it. Even if you can prove that your Wi-Fi is a bottleneck, that's still not necessarily a good reason in my mind to replace it because your Wi-Fi with today's ISP speeds that we get, I mean you can like many areas of the country and the world can get gigabit speeds to your house. Very few people are ever going to, with today's technology, see gigabit speeds over Wi-Fi. So your Wi-Fi is always going to be a bottleneck at least in a theoretical or a test case sense. Like you'll be able to prove that it's a bottleneck, but you know, like for me in my office I have Wi-Fi 6E devices, right? Like that, you know, I have the Euro 6E and I get the same when I test other things and my office is fairly, it's isolated from the house, there's not a ton of Wi-Fi devices, it's not right next to the neighbors. And I get six to 700 megabits per second in both directions up and down when I test on Wi-Fi. That's, those are great speeds, but it's not gigabit. Like my network is capable of gigabit, my internet connection, because it's fiber is capable of gigabit, but I only see that when I'm connected on ethernet. The question to ask I think is, when do I need that kind of speed on my phone or on my Mac that's connected via Wi-Fi? Like what is, what am I trying to do that is being hampered by or what do I want to do that I can't do because my speeds are hampering me from doing that? And you know, your Macs might be those things, right? Especially if you're doing some, a lot of online backups or if you're transferring large files around in an office setting, and of course, lots of us have home offices these days, but that's really the question is, what are you doing that's being slowed down and what can't you do because of this technical bottleneck? That would be the question to answer. If you're getting, my general feeling for most of us is that if you test your speeds and you're getting on your Wi-Fi devices, you're getting above 200 megabits per second, you're probably gonna be fine. If you wind up, if you're getting less than that, then it's time to look at why are you getting less than that? Is it that you have the wrong mesh technology or older mesh technology and newer mesh technology would be faster for you? If the answer to that is yes, then maybe that's the right thing. Or is it that you have way more client devices now than you used to and somehow that's slowing down your mesh? The number of devices doesn't necessarily slow you down, but it can. And certainly as Brian Monroe in our chat points out, newer Wi-Fi standards support more Wi-Fi devices at sort of native speeds. That can be a reason, yes, if you've got lots of devices for sure. But ask the question first, don't just presume you need to upgrade by default. Find where your problem is. One of the, there was some discussion in Discord about, well, I don't have any Wi-Fi, one person said, I don't have any Wi-Fi 6E devices, so there's no reason to upgrade my mesh to Wi-Fi 6E. I think that, while all those things could be true, I think another way to interpret it is that's a great reason to upgrade your mesh to Wi-Fi 6E if you need more speed between your mesh points. Because if your mesh is speaking at Wi-Fi 6E, which operates on a different band than Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 5, then you have less interference in that band because you don't have any client devices, right? And so now your wireless backhaul, which is the connection between your mesh points, is freer and clearer, I don't wanna say free and clear, but it's less congested, and that can work out really well. Remember, the idea of a mesh network with multiple access points has been around for a very long time. It was mostly only implementable via a wired backhaul, like Ethernet connecting all of our mesh points. Up until 802.11 AC hit, right? Wi-Fi 5, when that hit, that meant that we could have faster speeds for our backhaul. And even though Wi-Fi 5 is operating at five gigahertz and it's not as good as going through walls as 2.4, the signaling protocols they used for that made it so that you got faster speeds. And that's what opened the door for companies like Eero and all the others to start making wireless mesh products for us consumers. And so they did, and obviously it's worked out really well. But yeah, having greater capabilities for your mesh to talk isn't necessarily a bad thing and can be a really good thing, so. But more and more devices are doing 6 and 6E. Yeah, so I don't know, those are my thoughts, yeah. No, that's a great point. Yep, yeah, so.