Finally got my hands on 2 Black/WiFi 6 pods from virgin (The one that look like a mini hub5).
I can confirm that they DO indeed support ethernet backhaul! I've been looking all over internet and couldn't find an answer.
I was finally able to test it myself.
So initially, where my WiFi connection to my phone would be great and achieve around 650/700mbs, I decided to plug in the pod in the same spot and test it out as logically, it should have the same speed? Well, it didn't... I got around 300/450mbps and it fluctuated every other minute, +/- 100mbps...
When I connected my ethernet cable and ran it through my house, to the WiFi pod, I was able to achieve the same speed as I did right by my router with my iPhone 13 Pro Max.
Same story for the other Pod.. The office at the end of my house was receiving around 300mbps and when I ran an ethernet cable from the HUB 5 to the pod, I was now easily getting 650/700mbps. Only thing to point out is that by the router, I was receiving around 16ms ping, whereas with the pods, it's around 25ms which isn't bad at all.
I'm on the 1130mbps package and through the 2.5gb port and 2.5gb card on my PC, I easily receive the full 1130 speed (connected to the hub via 2.5gb port and 2.5gb card)
As the pod has 2x Ethernet Ports, One is occupied by the cable running all the way back to my router and the other is connected to my work laptop (For test as I'll run WiFi from now on), it receives full 950mbps speeds as you would with a 1gbps ethernet port.
I was worried that although i would finally have WiFi in my office, any other devices that connect to the pod when it's connected to the router through WiFi would suffer slower speeds when there's no need.
Now My whole house has a stable WiFi without any drops, issues or slowdowns.
Quite happy with the Pods and I'm glad you can use ethernet ports as backhaul.
Screenshot below are showing you that I am indeed connected to the pod and receive the full potential of WiFi as my phone can't physically go any faster
On the basis of general technical knowledge, if the WAP has Ethernet backhaul, the WiFi path is inhibited. Fairly obvious actually because it would be nugatory for the WiFi packets to have to be discarded. Someone please prove me wrong.
When a unit, be it a WAP or mesh, is backhauled with Ethernet cable then WiFi is disabled as connection for all backhaul traffic as wired trumps wireless every time. It's kind of similar to WiFi being disabled when I plugged an Ethernet cable into my STB. However this backhaul WiFi is not to be confused with the unit broadcasting broadband WiFi - which is its function.
