The throughput is a little subpar. Bit ease of use is nice.
Since I really don’t know do the AC lites mesh?
Yes, all their recent APs will do mesh.
Wireless backhaul will of course hurt your speed no matter what vendor you choose, that’s just inherent to the technology.
Yea its a tough balance…
Ease of use, throughput, overall performance, stability, meshing hand-off/roaming proficiency, QoS, and mobile app support…
IIRC - AC Lites you can use in a mesh
Still would have to use a router.
Well looks like I ain’t moving to that place so I get to drag my heels a little longer.
You can always grab a usg to have your ac lites configured together with your router in unifi. They all support smartqueue (htb+fq_codel configured via ui dropdowns), if usg is too slow for the amount of qos shaping and policing you need, you can get a faster usg pro (150mbps should be ok with the pro), if you want even faster qos, you need to go with a more complicated to manage solution.
How much qos traffic do you need to handle?
Not much just the server. I will be running a laptop and phone wife has a laptop, phone and desktop. There is also a shield TV and a ZigBee controller. Would like room for two outdoor cams
You have less than 50Mbps of upload? You could enable smartqueue for upload only - which will make a regular usg fine for you.
In the future, once you realize how much mesh sucks compared to cat6 despite all the marketing you can always wire your other ap (speaking from experience, of having moved a year ago and trying mesh because it’s simpler)
No ISP offers over 50Mbps upload here.
To be honest I don’t use much outside my phone and shield in day to day use.
I use ASUS AImesh. I have two 86us and one 68u and it was fairly easy to setup.
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Ask Tom Lawrence. He always installs unifi for people.
Mesh is better than not-mesh but yeah, much worse than wired.
What I would suggest for a larger house or apartment is MOCA 2.0. That works great.
Oh I have a switch. It is more for roaming around the house’
Hey how does your band width steering perform? (I have the same setup, minus a 68u)
I’ve had lots of issues with devices dropping off the network, reconnecting, then dropping… repeatedly. (Most notably my wife’s iPhone and a few Chromecasts)
Back in mid-2018 when I set it all up it was great but somewhere around December there was a firmware update that really screwed things up. I’ve since factory reset and tried to read up on the most stable firmware to use, but I still have lingering issues.
I’m thinking about just turning band width steering off entirely.
Whats your experience been?
EDIT: I’m a silly goose
It’s band steering (not bandwidth), it works by kicking devices off the network in the hopes of them selecting a faster band (the 5GHz one). Usually 5GHz is faster despite lower absolute signal quality. Usually band steering will do the kicking despite network activity and with no regard to previous kicking around. Conclusion: disable steering and have separate SSIDs for different bands if your clients have issues.
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I have separate bands, just need to turn steering off and let jeebus take the wheel 
Thanks!
In the last 13 years I have redone my wireless network topology several times in my 6000 sqft home. I’ve got gigabit ethernet running from front to back and one cable goes up to the upper floor where the sleeping rooms are. I have had several different modem/routers and also had a pfsense server in place.
Throughput is never a problem for me, I have a fiber to the home (FTTH) with an up- and downstream that reach 200 MBit/s. The kids can stream full HD as much as they want and I still get normal respons.
Just last month I did another redo because I had problems with all those different Wifi access points, they were confusing and when one of the four AP’s went south I had enough.
I replaced all Gb ethernet switches and installed an Orbi mesh system. Now it really works like a charm and I am impressed by the coverage the Orbi system realises - somehow it is better than I got from the previous generation of assorted AP’s. I can fully recommend the Orbi system.
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You have any idea if the Orbis will work as purely as Mesh APs? I was quite torn between Netgear and Linksys when deciding mine. Since I couldn’t find concrete evidence of people using them as APs for an existing router, I went with Linksys Velop instead.
You might consider the Ubiquiti mesh system. I don’t have any first hand experience with it, but I do have extensive experience with their routers and APs. I particularly like the fact that they have a long track record of supporting their gear with security and feature updates for a extended periods.
Ubiquiti’s mesh system can be managed by their Unifi Controller and they’ve also released a highly regarded smartphone app, which can control basic Unifi Controller functionality.
Granted, the Ubiquiti system is more of a Hub and Spoke / repeater system, but it does do failover, in the event that an AP goes down. Also, as already mentioned, I know that Ubiquiti will continue to provide support via software updates, whereas the manufacturers of most competing consumer grade equipment simply will not.
That’s what I would do too, but the OP wants to simplify and specifically move away from Ubiquiti, so recommending it isn’t really helpful.
My mistake. I thought that it was pfSense with which he had a problem.