Good connection - Poor speed

I may have discovered the panacea!!!

I have been trying since 9am (it is now 10:15pm) to configure a Linksys WRT1200ac Router and a Netgear EX6200 extender.  From the beginning and using their  tools, everything worked EXCEPT I could not connect via the extender to the 2GHz band.  I tried every solution I could find and nothing worked.  Then I tried playing around with the security methods.  Both the 2GHz and the 5GHz bands were always configured in the router to use WPA/WPA2 Personal.  I first switched the Security Method for the 2GHz band to NONE and, lo and behold, everything worked as advertised and at unbelievable speeds.  I was getting 45-60Mbps on the 2.4GHz band.  Not wanting to leave the band completely open I tried configuring it with WEP.  The system warned me that his would disable WPS and also would not accommodate devices using N-protocol.  I did it anyway and now it is unbelievable.  On the 2.4GHz band after 5 speedtests, I got speeds averaging  45 Mbps (down) and 22.7 Mbps (up).  On the 5GHz band my speeds were consistently better than 50Mbps (down). And this is through the Extender!!!  The speeds from the router on the base bands (2.4 and 5) were breaking all records that I have ever seen before.

One would think that both Linksys and Netgear would have discovered already something as significant as the effect of Security Methods on throughput, but I searched again and found nothing on the web that speaks to this discovery!!

Don Brown