I am not having much luck with a newly purchased Orbi Pro so I am thinking about getting some RBK852, can anyone tell me if the AC connection is 4x4 at 80mhz or if its 2x2 at 160mhz?
Current Orbi AX are all 4x4:4 80 MHz devices for both the wireless backhaul and the wireless front haul.
This won't "magically" change on the fly when using AC clients - because of WiFi 6 (AX) where most of the pure speed (leaving some additional and mandatory tech e.g. MU-MIMO aside) does come from 1024-QAM, off-standard-wise theoretically making 2166 Mb/s max link rate on 4x4 AC vs. 256-QAM on standard AC making 1733 Mb/s max link rate - AX does make 2400 Mb/s (exact 2401.9 Mb/s, so about 200 Mb more thanks to additional quirks) - all on 80 MHz.
We know some WiFi 5 radios operating in 4x4 mode on 80 MHz change the operation mode to 2x2 on 160 MHz as a "hard" config - this is also here in the pure AC world not a dynamic change for the obvious resource reasons.
If you have an overall speed of less than 100 Mb/s on both the N7700 Mesh Extender and the Orbi Pro system as reported (or much less as on one of your case) there must be other problems - and the investment in a WiFi 6 Mesh system won't make you lucky either.
Note the Intel AX200/AX201 and Qualcomm QCA6391 based M.2 cards are 2x2 ... because there are rarely more than two antennas in a notebook. For the AX200 (not tested the QCA enough), the 160 or 2*80 MHz channels must be in sequence to get any advantage over 80 MHz on both AC and AX.
Last but not least, I have to repeat that WiFi 6 is not designed towards a single client maximum speed - the goal was always (and for the first time in the wireless industry) to achieve good performance for many different WiFi clients.
Thank you for the detailed reply its very helpful,
Just to clarify its not the link rate that's the issue that is usually around 866.7 Mbps, it's the throughput when copying large files that is far slower than the EX7700
When your links are near to the max of the link rate possible, but the net rates are that poor - it does not really matter if these are 100 Mb/s or as crazy low as 17 Mb/s things are wrong or out of tune.
Please put up a new thread (ideally on the Orbi Pro thread), exactly describe the network configuration for both the Orbi Pro and the N7700 Mesh Extender, primary router, cabling and switch make/model/firmware (if a wired backhaul is in place), and USB-C<->USB hub/GbE combos (with or without host active), RTS/CTS settings on all wireless devices involved, the environment (100 Miles nobody in North Dakota or dense apartment house, ...).
