Hi all. I'm struggling to find an answer to this specific question about path selection.

I'm looking at building a prototype mesh out of the banana pi BPI-R3. That's a dual band wifi 6/6e router that runs open-wrt. 1x 2.4Ghz and 1x5-6Ghz.

I would build this as a quasi-dual radio mesh. ie, I want to favor the 5-6Ghz radio and add a large hop penalty to the 2.4Ghz so that it's only used for backup. The 2.4Ghz is a fraction the speed of the 5-6Ghz.

What I'm considering is that as I saturate the 'single radio mesh' that the 5-6Ghz radios is essentially making since 2.4Ghz is purposely high-cost, I may want to add a second unit starting from the main uplink out as a secondary mesh, then linking both units together via 2.5-5GbE ports on the device.

The question is, can I make the hop penalty zero so the mesh treats this pair of routers basically as one? for instance data comes into node10a's 5Ghz radio, I'd like that to try to go across the 'zero cost' ethernet and exit via node10b's 5Ghz radio to make this effectively a dual radio mesh. Ultimately the same would be true of the 2.4Ghz but again, that's ideally for backup meshing as it should look like an expensive hop.