how does mesh wifi work and how is it different from old school extenders?
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Modern MESH systems work just like any semi-modern enterprise wireless system (with multiple wired APs). The real differences is the backhaul to the rest of the network is expected to be wireless to a node with wired access versus each AP being wired directly to a switch and tied into a controller (on-prem, networked or cloud). Because the backhaul between nodes is wireless, you do see some increases in latency and reductions in throughput capabilities compared to equivalent configurations in a wired setup (but it could be much worse using older technologies).
Really old MESH systems (15+ years) used the same technology early extenders did which was store and forward. As WiFi is a half duplex protocol, data can either be received or transmitted, it can’t do both. Back before dual radio extenders became popular APs and extenders only had a single radio on board. So the extender/MESH AP would listen for packets, then retransmit those packets which would double the latency and half the maximum throughput. Add more MESH APs and things would just get slower and slower to a point which is roughly an exponential factor of 4 in designs where a loop isn’t created.
More modern extenders are essentially cross band repeaters. Packets are received on one radio and transmitted almost instantaneously on another radio. Typically you see these with either a 5 GHz uplink to the AP with a 2.4 GHz client radio or vise versa. Greatly reduces the latency issue but using the different bands and channel widths without considering their throughput limitations can lead to some issues. Their biggest downfall is a lack of fast roaming support to hand off to/from the main router and they don’t scale well beyond one repeater.
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