Unreliable experience with TP-Link Routers (AX6000 & Deco M5)
Background: I purchased my first TP-Link router in 2019 - a Deco M5 3 unit kit. At first, great coverage and very reliable connection. The pandemic came, we started working from home, and I also began adding some smart home devices. I read the Decos could handle up to 100 devices, so it was a no-brainer: my internet is reasonable (243 mbps down/20 mbps up), and those smart devices don't use a lot bandwidth. Problems started to occur, and, after a lot of troubleshooting, I decided to upgrade to the Archer AX6000. I'm still not happy with it.
Deco M5 issues: The Deco M5 mesh Wifi was extremely slow during basic tasks (i.e opening a newspaper homepage). My mac and my wife's Windows notebook usually took 5 to 10 minutes to be usable - they were connected to Wi-Fi, but not loading anything. I would stare to a simple Safari tab for a long time before things started working (same on different browsers, cookies/cache cleaned, routers restarted and even reseted multiple times). During the day, the connection would drop on our iPhones multiple times, and we got used to turning on LTE for basic things like social medial. Ethernet on my desktop would work just fine, but it was connected directly to the ISP modem.
Archer AX6000 Issues: I did all the setup, and created a network just for our main devices, because we need them to be reliable for work (Smart Connect is turned on) - total of just 7 devices connected, most important ones being 2 computers and 2 smartphones. I connected one Deco M5 via ethernet to the AX, and made a network just for smart devices (managing around 20 devices, such as smart switches, Amazon Echos, and so on). At first glance, things seemed fine: the coverage was good, devices worked, speed was normal. After a couple days, problems started happening again: browser navigation was slow (needed some kind of "warming up" before opening sites normally), connection was unreliable, and, out of the blue, the Deco M5 stopped working, disconnecting all my smart devices. I restarted, reseted, did it all. It only worked again after I unplugged the ethernet from the AX and changed to the ISP modem again. My wife is still having problems with the Wi-Fi on ther iPhone 11 (which has Wi-Fi 6). I even went through the app and toggled on the priotity switches, but the experience is still weird.
I am really frustrated, and don't know what else to do anymore. Having two different TP-Link routers failing on me, and investing a lot of money on a Wi-Fi 6 router to have similar issues is driving me bonkers. Those things should work. I've cornered the problem in every way I could. Now, I ask for help from you. Sorry for this outburst.