Estimate throughput at the edge of a wireless mesh after per-hop backhaul loss, for shared-radio and dedicated-backhaul designs.
A mesh node with one radio must both receive a frame and retransmit it on the same channel, so each hop halves the available throughput. A dedicated backhaul radio avoids that store-and-forward penalty and only pays normal RF and protocol overhead. Mesh is sold as a way to skip cabling, but three shared-radio hops turn an 800 Mbps root link into 100 Mbps at the edge, which is usually worse than the cable run you avoided.
Mesh Wi-Fi
edge throughput = root throughput × (1 − per-hop loss)^hops, where a client-sharing radio loses 50% per hop because it must receive and retransmit each frame.
edge throughput = root throughput × (1 − per-hop loss)^hops, where a client-sharing radio loses 50% per hop because it must receive and retransmit each frame. A mesh node with one radio must both receive a frame and retransmit it on the same channel, so each hop halves the available throughput. A dedicated backhaul radio avoids that store-and-forward penalty and only pays normal RF and protocol overhead.
Mesh is sold as a way to skip cabling, but three shared-radio hops turn an 800 Mbps root link into 100 Mbps at the edge, which is usually worse than the cable run you avoided.
This calculator takes 5 inputs: Throughput at the root node, Hops from root to edge node, Dedicated backhaul radio (not shared with clients), Per-hop loss with a dedicated backhaul, Client-serving nodes sharing the edge link. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.