Yeah I have no doubt about that based on my test of mesh with these same units. It was nightmarish 
Well heck... I think you've convinced me to give the WDS route a try to see how it works in my place.
It just works, and works very well. Mesh used to work on these devices in a stable way, but something broke it badly around October 2021. So a snapshot older than then may work fine, if you need the slower performance mesh.
By the way about the above, the 750 Mbit/s is between two nodes on different floors. I think that's pretty good.
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That's really too bad because I like the dynamic nature of mesh. But it's not worth trying to go back in the time-machine to find a setup that works. 
Looks like I know what I'm going to be working on this evening. I better give my wife a heads-up that she will want to flip over to 5G for a while 
Won't you set up WDS on 5G? That's what I did - main router as WDS access point, and then the extension routers just connect as WDS clients. There is a setup guide somewhere. Anyway keen to hear how you get on and let me know if I can help with any configuration settings. I definitely love these devices. Official release just around the corner.
Whoops--syntax snafu there... I was talking about having her switch over to 5G on her phone and off WiFi for the evening while I bounce the wireless radios a bunch. As for 5Ghz on the RT3200, I will absolutely be setting up WDS on that band.
If you happen to have a good guide that worked well for you, I would love to take a look. It's been years since I last messed with WDS and I'm likely to miss something obvious without something to keep me in check.
Another curiosity question since you've been using these for a while... is there a reason you aren't using 160Mhz? Does it not play nicely with WDS?
Ah I see concerning 5G. Wish we had that here. But we get 30-70 Mbit/s on 4G so it is not too bad.
Regarding 160 MHz with WDS have a read from here:
And next few posts.
It seems 160 MHz isn't so hot on these devices. It didn't work well for me in WDS so I switched back to 80 MHz and everything worked great. Maybe software updates will improve that but I gather that the hardware is not well optimized for 160 MHz.
I looked again through the guides but I don't think I followed any of them entirely. For example the main guide states to set DNS forwardings to the upstream router, whereas I instead just set custom DNS to the upstream router. Not entirely sure what the difference is? I also didn't enable STP.
Here is the main guide:
Sorry but my question is:
Who tried wifi-mesh?
For example, i don't need you to advertise your RT3200 which does not use MESH
Any comments outside of this topic are irrelevant.and so delete them
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Yes sorry. But do you even need mesh? It seems mostly individuals don't actually need it and WDS is more suitable and gives higher performance.
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Sorry but my question is:
Who tried wifi-mesh?
For example, i don't need you to advertise your RT3200 which does not use MESH
Any comments outside of this topic are irrelevant.and so delete them
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73 (MM1 ICE).
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You are really starting to piss me off.
I'm talking about wifi mesh, nothing else because i know
Sorry but my question is:
Who tried wifi-mesh?
For example, i don't need you to advertise your RT3200 which does not use MESH
Any comments outside of this topic are irrelevant.and so delete them
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Dude, settle down. 
@Lynx and I will continue the RT3200 WDS discussion elsewhere, no problem. But @Lynx and @slh have both raised excellent points here that many others in the community will surely find beneficial when considering the mesh vs WDS options.
In the spirit of answering your questions (almost feels like you use bold type to "shout" stuff, which isn't cool):
I have tried wifi mesh, specifically 802.11s with and without batman-adv and found it to be extremely underwhelming on the hardware I tested it on.
So to be completely fair, you asked an extremely generic question to begin with and you're going to get a broad range of answers. If you aren't interested in feedback from RT3200 users, you should update your question to a more specific, "Who tried wifi-mesh on hardware XYZ?" On RT3200 hardware at the time of writing this, I would say "No, it does not work well." An Archer C7 or Netgear R7800 user may have a completely different take on it.
1, 2, 3, 42, 834? How is anyone supposed to answer this because you gave no clue as to how much area you are trying to cover, the type of wall materials in your space, what kind of hardware you're considering, 2.4Ghz vs 5Ghz vs 6Ghz, etc, etc.
Generically speaking a "mesh" would consist of 2...N nodes. The basic concept of mesh technology is that it dynamically configures routes between nodes and recalculates as you add/remove more.
Thanks!
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I've also tried mesh on Openwrt with and without batman-adv.
I initially had it set up between two routers using 802.11s, one in a shed/workshop to connect to an outdoor IP camera, because its built in wifi kept dropping out.
Not using mesh currently, but I eventually got it working with Batman-adv and setup for both 2.4ghz and 5ghz, so that the router outdoors could connect to either of the two in the house which both have wired LAN connections. Reason for using this setup was neither 2.4 nor 5ghz were reliable due to multiple neighbour's access points frequently switching to whichever 2.4ghz channel I was using, and the lower range of non-dfs 5ghz channels being swamped too.
here's an iperf3: routers are bthub 5s using 802.11s with batman-adv
Accepted connection from 192.168.1.5, port 54386
[ 5] local 192.168.1.253 port 5201 connected to 192.168.1.5 port 54387
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-1.00 sec 6.21 MBytes 52.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 1.00-2.00 sec 5.59 MBytes 46.8 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 2.00-3.00 sec 5.96 MBytes 50.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 3.00-4.00 sec 6.65 MBytes 55.8 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 4.00-5.00 sec 6.68 MBytes 56.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 5.00-6.00 sec 6.37 MBytes 53.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 6.00-7.00 sec 5.49 MBytes 46.1 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 7.00-8.00 sec 6.08 MBytes 51.0 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 8.00-9.00 sec 6.48 MBytes 54.3 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 9.00-10.00 sec 6.71 MBytes 56.4 Mbits/sec
[ 5] 10.00-10.03 sec 196 KBytes 55.3 Mbits/sec
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bitrate
[ 5] 0.00-10.03 sec 62.4 MBytes 52.2 Mbits/sec receiver
-----------------------------------------------------------
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Can you share a link to wherever you continue the RT3200 WDS discussion? you are correct that other users would find this useful!
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Well, if you want to talk about your RT3200 in relay or WDS, create your request
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I have a mesh network over 802.11s+batman-adv+ospfv3, where ospf protocol announces ipv4 addresses over batman-adv
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I've used mesh (with wpad-openssl and mesh11sd) for months.
It works well for roaming between APs
Performance-wise (both latency and bandwidth) it is much worse than e.g. routed AP or WDS.
Hardware is 4x Netgear r6220 (MT7621)
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I'm using mesh, with only two static nodes. Not the best option probably, but it works, it's solid stable for me (two Xiami AX3600) and it has not give any problem. I tested WDS too for curiosity, it worked too. In my case the phy rate is between 1400 and 1900 Mbit/s.
I'm curious if someone has done some tests between WDS and MESH, to see the results.
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@McGiverGim Curious why you chose 802.11s over WDS? Did you ever give performance between the two options a look?
Looking to make a very similar setup as you.
I'm not an expert, but I tested both and I didn't notice any benefit in WDS. I liked the idea of mesh and it has worked flawlessly without problems since the beginning.