I wanted to write a little but of my experience with this Mesh system.

 

To Start with, my home is 99% HomeKit (WiFi, Thread), with some IKEA Zigbee in the mix via Dirigera Hub.

 

I have tried to keep it "Clean" as an echo system.

I have about 60 IP Addresses in total in the house (Phones, Switches, Dimmers, Speakers, Sensors etc.).

 

I was with another provider before - where i could set the modem in "Bridge Mode" but with my current provider there is no option for that (I have read about some DMZ modes but have not explored them further to date).

 

As I got the new Fiber modem, I had purchased the Nest WiFi Pro (6e) trio, and set it up.

As expected this caused a double NAT to exist (as the modems router had a NAT and the NEST has a NAT.

I saw issues with latency right away, and I was not able to make it work (Even got a 4th node).

 

I ended up selling the NEST WiFi Pro and got the Bell (ISP) "Pods" - they are made by Plume but OEM as a BELL Pod (6e).

At least no more Double NAT - and the Bell WiFi App was easy enough to use (Albeit a little simple / limited in what you could do with it.).

 

I later helped a friend of mine that also has Bell, install the XE50 line in his house, fully expecting it not to work well.

But to my surprise it did work well (he does NOT have many smart appliances, and they are NOT HomeKit).

 

In any event after a month for him with no hiccups, I decided to return the WiFi Pods (You lease them from Bell), and get the XE75 Pro (as I wanted 6e).

Initial setup was okay, even with the Double NAT.

All my devices seemed to latch on (Same SSID/PW as before), and all looked good.

 

After 2 weeks, I started to see some of the smart devices dropping and re-attaching.

First one to do so was my Smart Doorbell (Netatmo) - it is a canary as it is very sensitive that way - usually it reconnected within 5 minutes.

 

I then decided to active the "IoT" SSID on the XE75 nodes. This is essentially a new SSID on the 2.4 (and 5)GHz spectrum.

I then decided to migrate most of my IoT Devices over (took 2 days) to the new SSID, and they all started to show up in the Home App on my iOS devices.

 

Only after one day of this - things fell apart completely - Doorbell refused to even connect when reset (5 tries).

I also decided to test the speed on the IoT network and was shocked that many times of re-joining an already joined IoT network I was told the "Password incorrect".

This struck me as the most strange thing as I had never changed the Password in the first place after setting it up.

 

Once I was able to join it, the speed was abysmal (no wonder latency or connection drops were frequent).

Loading a google search page took 30 seconds (under 1 sec on the other SSID).

 

I also tried turning on IPV6 after reading the forums, but this has no affect on my issues.

I also tried changing from Router mode to AccessPoint mode - This needed several reboots for all devices to back back to "working"

But over all there was no effect.

This leads me to believe it is more a radio issue (ran many Optimizations) than it is a Double NAT issue.

 

 

I then spoke with TP Link Support and they suggested a wipe all settings and start over (without the IoT network on).

 

Last night I did a full reset (Delete network in the app, then reset (pin hole) each node, then setup again.

I also rebooted the modem for good measure.

 

After that I tried to migrate my IoT Devices back to the main SSID, but many of the struggle (was never an issue before).

 

As of now - I have re-ordered the Bell Pods (this was at least working well) and I intend to return the TPLink system to BestBuy for a refund

 

I am not sure if there was other steps I could have taken, but reading the forums I also saw that others had issues with the 2.4Ghz band being unstable.

 

EDIT:
I did go back and re-punchase the XE75 Pro - loaded a beta firmware and it now works much better! 
No more drop offs, but some latency that I hope will disappear.

At the moment, I have not enabled the IoT SSID, and all devices are on the same SSID, I have even put the 6Ghz on the same SSID (as Apple recommends)

IPV6 is not enabled.