[davidron]

I've had an Orbi for some time now. What sold me was that it doesn't actually create a mesh network. Instead, it sets up a 1.7 gigabit wireless backhaul connection completely separate from the frequencies used by the client devices you connect. This avoids all of the interference (noisy clients disrupting the access points) and latency (hopping from one access point to another) pitfalls you often encounter when using a traditional mesh network or wireless extender.

The Orbi is basically the wireless equivalent of running wires through the walls.

[hueving]

Well it's still a mesh in the sense that the wireless APs are connected to each other wirelessly.

You can have a mesh network without wireless clients at all if you wanted. For example, you can connect two locations together via a mesh of access points by each end plugging into the ethernet port of an AP, then the mesh provides multi-task redundancy.