What are the disadvantages to enabling mesh?

You can't use the 5Ghz band for the device, because it's used for the mesh link (if my remembers are good)

Believe it halves the theoretical bandwidth. A reason to avoid having it enabled unless you really need it. A wired AP can theoretcially provide a possible 300Mbs to it's clients whereas a meshed one only 150Mbs (please correct me if I'm wrong someone)!

Reduces WLANs per WLAN group from 8 to 6.
Reduces max possible VLANS from 256 to 192

To remove Mesh also requires ZD reset to default, in other words back to square one.
Problematic if you thought it was a good idea to enable it but didn't really need it. You can disable it on the APs but it will always remain enabled on the ZD until a default reset.

So think before you apply..

Thank you guys for replying.

I'll be giving it some thought before I activate it.

You can however disable MESH manually on a per AP basis, but think wired first, MESH as last resort.

Note that enabling it and using it are 2 different things. If you enable it (from factory default state) - then you can't disable it with also doing a factory reset. So even if you don't use it in your network topology it's "active". This will affect how an AP behaves when it's ethernet goes down for example (it will try to mesh..)

I would say leave it off (I think we finally got this changed in the ezsetup default..) unless you know you need it - you can always turn it on later, you just can't turn it off (easily..)

Note that enabling it and using it are 2 different things. If you enable it (from factory default state) - then you can't disable it with also doing a factory reset. So even if you don't use it in your network topology it's "active". This will affect how an AP behaves when it's ethernet goes down for example (it will try to mesh..)

I would say leave it off (I think we finally got this changed in the ezsetup default..) unless you know you need it - you can always turn it on later, you just can't turn it off (easily..)

I was thinking that if I just enabled it, it would do nothing until I needed it :)
Then I could test it and still have my network intact without having to reset everything to turn it off.

From the recommendations it seems like it is best to leave it off until I know that I will be using it.

If it is on, and not disabled on each AP, the APs will keep looking for other APs that might need meshing, even if all are wired. So it will steal CPU cycles from the APs and add noise.