Hey @hoobass,

The Short Answer to your question is: YES! The speeds that the new Wi-Fi standards provide should definitely produce a noticeable increase in both the speed and connectivity of your devices. When your device is connected to the main hub using the newest Wi-Fi technologies you will potentially see higher speeds up beyond 1000 Mbps on your device, when connected to your M9 Plus devices on the network you will only see speeds up to 867 Mbps (as this is limited by the Wi-Fi 5 Standard and the individual node); however you will be much more likely to see numbers higher than what you had before.

The M9 Plus offers up to 2200 Mbps bandwidth which, for most situations, is enough to sustain a stable connection for devices across the mesh network. Comparably, the Deco X90, which uses Wi-Fi 6 technology, can achieve a total bandwidth of up to 6600Mbps. This means that you can potentially send 3 times as much information at once, which sounds like it could be useful give the amount of routers in your network. We actually advertise the X90 as being able to connect to 200 devices, compared to around 100 that the Deco M9 Plus offers.

Our Deco Products are all meant to work together and allow you to easily upgrade your system. For this reason, you can take one of our newer products and use it as the main unit for your network and get the latest and most advanced features, all the while using your old equipment. Your main unit will understand what each of your older units is capable of and will continue to send data just as it did with the old router.

The new routers such as the X90 have features that will further improve the stability and performance of your mesh network: like AI mesh to help when interference is detected, improved Home Shield Protection for all your IoT Devices, and beam forming technologies to increase stability. If your internet provider provides higher speeds, then there is also a 2.5Gbps port that can be used for LAN or WAN connections.

tldr; For all of the above reasons, I would recommend upgrading your main unit and continuing to use your old system. If you would like to have much higher realized speeds on your network; I would recommend looking into an additional Wi-Fi 6 Deco node, so that devices that connect to this node could also benefit from the speed increases available with Wi-Fi 6, and could also extend the backhaul network.

Let me know if you have any other questions, or what you end up deciding to go with.