📶 Wifi barely reaches our top floor, is a mesh system worth it?

The wifi from the router downstairs barely makes it up to the top floor of our house. By the time it reaches my room even basic browsing feels slow and clumsy. Streaming is out of the question, and a work call upstairs means constant buffering. I've been living with this for almost a year, mostly by avoiding the top floor in the daytime. So I save anything heavy for when I'm downstairs, sitting next to the router like a pet. I tried a cheap wifi extender plug first. It created its own separate network name. You had to switch to it manually on every device, and the speed gain was tiny. I felt like I'd thrown that money down the drain and learned nothing from it. Mesh seems to make sense on paper, with several nodes talking to each other across the house. But a decent 3 node set costs a lot more than I paid for the router itself. A shop owner near Ameerpet recommended one brand and said it suits Indian houses well. Of course he's trying to sell me something, so I'm taking that with a bit of salt. I haven't bought anything yet. It's not a daily dealbreaker, just a constant small annoyance. Maybe the annoyance isn't worth the price. Or maybe it is and I'm just being stingy. Has anyone set up mesh in a multi floor house here? Did it fix the coverage? And was the extra cost over a basic extender worth it once you used it every day?

I hesitated over the same price against annoyance question for almost a year before buying a mesh system last month. Now I kick myself for waiting that long, because video calls upstairs got smoother straight away. The daily frustration costs more patience than the price difference costs money, at least for me. Do it before summer, when everyone is home and the router gets worse.

Went with a two node mesh setup recommended by a friend rather than a shop owner, covers our entire three floor house evenly now including the terrace area which the old router never reached at all. Setup itself took maybe twenty minutes total, considerably easier than I expected going into it based on how complicated the whole idea sounded online beforehand.

Had the exact same separate network name problem with a cheap extender in my own house last year, family kept forgetting to switch networks manually and just gave up using it upstairs entirely within a month. Ended up returning it and saving toward a proper mesh setup instead, wish I had skipped that middle step entirely and gone straight there from the very start.