@woolie4runner wrote a great summary of this in a prior deal in August that I think answers a lot of questions as to why the ratings for these aren’t stellar. At the price though it’s not a bad investment.
I have this in our house. First off, they all act as Smartthings repeater hubs for both zwave and zigbee, not just one of them as the OP stated. It extends your ST footprint vastly. Second, It runs in both standalone and bridge mode. In standalone, it does router functions also. It is pretty simplistic in the options it offers, but the control for is done via the smartthings app. No, not a full featured router with vlans ect. However I use this in bridge mode. This allow it to function as just my wifi network and ST network.
Coverage is great in our house, and we have a ranch sprawling 2200 with stucco (bad for any signal) and lots of turns. I do have gigabit download speeds (940) and on wifi get 400mbps-500mbps in about 90% of the house. The other thing is this hub will cap your wireless at 866mbps max theoretical so keep that in mind.
The best way to run these is to connect each to a gigabit wall port. The exact same as you would with a Ubiquity. If you just rely on wireless mesh backhaul (only 1 is connected to a gigabit router, the other 2 are just wirelessly meshed) then you will have slow speeds. How slow? About 200mbps max and under constant load like wifi connected devices streaming, that would go lower.
Do not get this if you can not wire in 3x gigabit lines to each hub. That is the problem and main reason these get complaints of being slow.
If you have more then 10 devices on any 1 hub node, then you would want a ubiquity ect solution. I personally had issues with the wired ubiquity stuff so I am off that brand.
The other really cool things about this hub also is it has wireless backhaul and a wired secondary port. I get ~870mbps speed off my desktop attached to it.
The extension of the wifi network is great, but the best part is the extension of the Smartthings network. If you dont have this, then you have to get something that acts as repeaters, typically like a smart light switch. I dont really like the smart light switches but needed to get whole house coverage for the door sensors and fire alarms. Before that was impossible with a single hub. With these, and to be clear I returned my standalone smartthings hub, I get great signal in the entire house.
In short, buy this. It is not a Ubiquity, but its damn good.
https://www.lowes.com/pd/Samsung-…1000256453
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