No wired backhaul! - major downside.
Roaming between WAPs (wireless access points) is dependent on so many factors - the biggest factor being the wireless device you are using. Some devices will cling onto their current WAP long after they can see a much stronger signal from a neighbouring WAP. How this is handled and when they will let go, is outside of your control - it's down to the wireless chipset and OS.
I continue to be a strong advocate for installing CAT 5e around the house and using a wired connection whenever possible. If you can limit Wi-fi usage to things like 'phones, tablets & home assistants that is by far the most reliable method.
An inexpensive device such as a TP-Link TL-WA850RE (£15.99) works really well as a WAP.
It fully supports wired backhaul, and provides 300 Megabits per second (2.4 GHz). A few of these around the house and you've got a very reliable solution for a fraction of price of a mesh system.
Many of the 5 GHz Wi-fi speed advantages aren't usually realised due to its very poor ability to penetrate walls and ceiling.
All the Home Mesh solutions are expensive for what they offer.
Regards,
James.
Are you sure about the capabilities of that wifi extender you linked to? I have one somewhere and it caused more trouble than anything else. I thought it only support Bridge mode - where the Ethernet port can be connected to wired devices, not back to the router. I never found a way to change this.
My experience is that the Decos do give a significant performance and reliability increase over using off the shelf WAPs. I know that some of them use beamforming and packet forwarding only to the AP the device is using, so the bandwidth overhead is reduced. They also seem to do a better job of handing off devices from 1 AP to the other, but I have no proof of that.
I had a network of Waps prior to moving over to Mesh. This consisted of a number of Netgear and TP-link routers (5 in all) set in AP mode and connected via Powerline and wired connections back to the router. It was complex to configure, reliability was poor and devices refused to roam, despite SSID, passwords and frequency bands being set the same. Mesh cured all of these and I really would never go back.
*Edit: The reviewed devices do have wired backhaul, they are just not tri-band wireless with dedicated wireless backhaul. My experience is that with just 3 units, this does not cause any slow down. We have a symmetric 100Mb internet pipe at work and even with 40 people connected and using the system, I was still measuring a wireless speed of 90Mb 20' from the nearest AP!