EX7300 & CAX80 compatibility?

[jesmith602]

Are these two devices compatible/connect well together? I already have four EX7300 range extenders, and thinking of replacing my Cox modem/router with the new AX8.

[plemans]

Wow, 4x EX7300s? I'm impressed. Usually people have issues when they have 2 extenders running together. I usually recommend people more to an actual mesh system when they need more than 1. The fact that you have 4x running stable is fairly impressive. 

I've got the CAX80 and I've connected my EX8000 to it fine/without issues. so it does work with the triband extenders. 

[jesmith602]

@plemans -- I didn't do any research and just bought 4 when we both started working from home, so I didn't realize this was uncommon or that there were better options? What's the difference between a mesh system and this?

[plemans]

A full mesh system has something controlling it. Its usually the primary device that gets setup as router and the other devices act/are satelllites. 

Reason it helps is (for orbi anyway) the router can choose which satellites will connect with a star configuration (directly to router) and which will connect in a daisy chain setup (router---extender----extender). 

It tends to help with stability and speed versus just using a mesh extender.

Mesh extenders can sometimes end up connecting to each other and not back to the primary router when there's multiples of them. It doesn't happen all the time but it does sometimes happen. Or they can end up connecting in a daisy chain setup when its not optimal. 

If you've already got the extenders (and aren't returnable) you can set it up and see how it works. If there's issues, one thing to try disable the "onessid" function on on or more of the extenders and run them with their own unique ssid. 

[jesmith602]

@plemans When I was using the Cox modem/router, the extenders were faster than connecting directly to the router over Wifi (even though I was using one SSID on everything). Now that I have the CAX80, bypassing the extenders and connecting directly to the router over Wifi is faster. I guess I will experiment with FastLane mode, as well as giving each extender a unique SSID.  Sounds like I should have gotten an EAX80?

[plemans]

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@jesmith602 wrote:

@plemans When I was using the Cox modem/router, the extenders were faster than connecting directly to the router over Wifi (even though I was using one SSID on everything). Now that I have the CAX80, bypassing the extenders and connecting directly to the router over Wifi is faster. I guess I will experiment with FastLane mode, as well as giving each extender a unique SSID.  Sounds like I should have gotten an EAX80?

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I haven't played with an EAX80 yet but its a dual band. So I'm not sure how it'd compare versus a triband. the tribands have lower latency and tend to have higher throughput because they dont' take the speed hit the dual bands do. 

A standard dual band takes a 50% speed hit because it has to send and recieve on the same wireless chip. And they can't do both at once. Versus the tribands have a 5ghz chip dedicated for just router---extender communication.

so again, not sure how one would compare in performance to the EX7300 or even the EX8000. 

[plemans]

the EX7300 is dual band. The EX7500, ex7700, ex8000 are tribands.