Advice on Aimesh or AP setup with VZW router

[tylorduvally]

Hey all!

Background: we rent and our landlords, for some unknown reason, had the ethernet port installed in their converted garage-to-family room, which might as well be a faraday cage as it's encased in concrete. Of course, we can barely get a signal in the room right next to it, 5-6 feet away from the router. They won't let us have one installed elsewhere. We DO have cable TV as well, which makes this 10x more difficult.

Until recently I had the MOCA AP extender serving the rest of the house, but I wanted to move that out to the garage. Also decided I wanted something closer to hardwired speeds near the PS4 (the room 6 feet away). Because of all this, I also ordered the new G3100 to try to get better coverage but I'm having a hard time with that (it disconnects a lot, seems to be even worse coverage-wise, the LAN ports are only putting out 100mbps, etc) but that's a different problem. Unsure if we're keeping it with all this.

I've tried powerline extenders, house is too old with messed up electricity. Instead of buying some more $120 verizon extenders (which aren't working with the new router either for me, seems to be a crapshoot with everyone) or renting/buying the new wifi 6 ones (bill is high enough already) I was looking into other solutions. I also want to make sure whatever I spend money on isn't older tech. I've landed on some MOCA adapters with the Asus Aimesh ax6100 setup (which is WIFI 6, but if I have to go back to reg gateway router I'm fine without it for now). I'm just uncertain how to actually go about setting this up. I want to leave the VZW router as primary to serve that room, then connect one Asus node via MOCA adapter in a different room (PS4 room), and finally put the 2nd node upstairs. Where I get confused is if what I'm looking to do is possible (dumb questions coming up). Is it possible for the 2 asus points to work in "mesh" mode without the VZW router as part of the "mesh" system? Or do I have to forgo the mesh option and set up the 1st as an access point? If so, what is the other asus node set as, also an access point? If there's a better way to go about this I'd love to hear advice and options from those much more knowledgable than me. 😃 FWIW, if you're taking cost into account when giving advice on setup, I'm getting the mesh system half price, if that helps (so not as expensive as you may think). Thanks so much!