jaytalent wrote:

Yes, we do have quite a few clients connecting at 2.4Ghz because they either don't support 5Ghz or I decided they didn't need to share the bandwidth (printer, alexa devices, etc.). Will this negatively impact the devices?

No.

jaytalent wrote:

If there are clients still connected to the router because they are closer to it then the extender then wouldn't they have half the bandwidth to utilize? Also wouldn't there be some sort of bottleneck since the extender has full bandwidth on its end to the device but the communication to the router is half?

Let's start with the extender. A typical extender is using the same 5 ghz radio to connect to a client as it does to the router. That radio can only be used for one thing at a time.

When data is flowing over the internet to the client, it first is sent to the extender, and then is relayed by the extender to the the client. That takes twice as long as sending it to the client directly. The extender bandwidth is cut in half simply because it can't send anything while it is receiving.

The router bandwidth isn't adversely affected - it is only sending the data to the extender once, and it can send or receive from something else while the extender is relaying the data to the client. In fact, if the extender<->router connection is high quality, then the extender can actually improve the router's performance (because it can send something to the extender faster than it could send it to a distant client).

So sharing the router 5G radio between it's client traffic and the extender connection does no harm - it is never worse than having all the 5G clients directly connected to the router. It could still end up being the performance bottleneck if you have a really fast internet connection. If that is the case, you can get a triband router, and/or connect the extender to the router over ethernet. When the extender is connected to the router with ethernet, then there is no relay, and both 5 Ghz radios in the extender can connect to clients. And of course, the load on the router wifi is reduced.

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