Hello,
im not an Apple product pro but I am a network architect. I suggest you try something on your router to see if it helps with you iPhone Wi-Fi speeds. Turn off the 2.4ghz SSID if you can on your Nest mesh access points, (APs) which will force your iPhone to connect at 5GHz, giving you less range but faster speeds closer to the Nest APs.
The other thing you can try is to enable the Wi-Fi directly on your modem/router combo if it available on the modem provided by your internet service provider. You see, the biggest problem with mesh Wi-Fi technology prior to some Wi-Fi 6e and Wi-Fi 7 mesh products, so mesh Wi-Fi 6 and below…is that most don’t have a dedicated backhaul channel that connects the APs together. For example, depending on the product and how it’s setup, a typical mesh Wi-Fi 6 AP will connect to another AP using either it’s 5GHz or 2.4ghz radio, and use exactly half of that bandwidth to connect the AP to the “mesh network APs,” leaving you with only half of the available bandwidth of that radio for your device to use.
Some mesh access points with Wi-Fi 6e have a dedicated backhaul 5GHz radio that is not the same 5GHz radio used to connect clients to the wifi. This means these models of mesh APs can connect to other mesh APs at nearly gigabit speeds wirelessly, while also providing nearly gigabit speeds to wireless clients from the same access point. But that cannot happen without a dedicated backhaul.
Wi-Fi 7 has a completely different but clever way of solving this issue that makes far more sense and doesn’t require dedicated backhaul radio like older Wi-Fi standards because it can literally use all of its radios at once to connect to a single client, multiple clients, backhaul mesh networks and more.
One final thing to remember when you’re dealing with Wi-Fi “speeds;” the speed you see reported by windows on your network adapter is half duplex. This means that if windows is reporting a 400 mb (MegaBITS, not MegaBYTES) connection to your wireless router, then you will typically see a maximum of 200 megabits download speed, and if your internet is capable you will also see 200 megabits upload speed. It cuts the bandwidth in half which is deceiving, but it is what it is. My WiFi 6 repeater is currently connected to my main access point at 1733mb and I can squeeze roughly 900mb download speed out of it when cables to the repeater, but I’ll get a full 2 gigabits when I plug into my layer 3 core router with a 2.5gb NIC.
TLDR; Sorry for the lesson Wi-Fi 101 lesson. Try to connect to your internet service provider modem/router with its Wi-Fi ‘ IF ‘ it is capable of broadcasting Wi-Fi in the first place. Second, try to disable the 2.4ghz radios on your Nest mesh access points. That will force your devices to connect to your mesh access points at 5GHz, it will force the access points to connect to one another with 5GHz, and it should improve the speed a little bit…..but it will also drastically reduce the range. You may have to do some tweaking with Neat Wi-Fi options, but I’d be more than happy to help you improve your overall Wi-Fi experience for your home. Good luck, and take care.
Sprite160