OCTOBER 2020 PCWorld 107125-foot CAT 6 cable, I was able to get a
box of drywall-dust-coated bulk CAT5e
cable from a friend, and buy a crimper,
connectors and cable tester for $17 (go.
pcworld.com/crmp), so I could return the
$26 CAT 6 cable.
Yes, this meant running a cable
through the floor (where the coax for the
long-gone cable system had run) under
the house, and then along the garage
ceiling and up a heater vent, but in the
end, I ended up with far better
performance than running an AiMesh
network on just two bands.
With demands—and high performance
routers—still quite high, you may want to
consider this option if you have a newer
AiMesh Asus router. Most router experts, in
fact, recommend running a wired backhaul
for that dual-band mesh setups for the best
performance.BEING CHEAP CAN
COST YOU, TOO
While I’m generally happy with my $17
speedup, and it did increase node
performance to the Internet from 30Mbps to
60Mbps, I was pretty disappointed by the
performance of my five-year-old RT-1900P
node. I do think getting a stable 60Mbps on
the 5GHz band was a marked improvement
from 30Mbps--but that was sitting three feet
from the node. For those near that node, it
was great, but in my garage and in a
bedroom kitty-corner to the node,
performance was only 30Mbps even withIn an Asus AiMesh,
you plug one end
of your LAN cable
into the WAN
port (where your
internet modem
would normally
go) and the other
end goes into an
open Ethernet port
on the primary
router.