MESH WI-FI
Router too slow? Extender not extending? It may be time to mesh.
If your home is a wireless disaster area, with streaming video reduced to a trickle, then it might be time to open the floodgates with a mesh Wi-Fi network. Just because your home Wi-Fi network is good enough for checking your email and surfing the web, that doesn’t mean it’s up to the task of reliably streaming music and video around your home. Great Wi-Fi isn’t just about speed, it’s about dependability — which means eliminating black spots, dropouts and buffering in every corner of
your home.
What is mesh Wi-Fi?
Rather than relying on a single Wi-Fi base station at one end of your house, a mesh Wi-Fi network spreads several base stations around your home to offer blanket coverage.
The base stations talk to each other wirelessly to work in unison, appearing as a single network to your wireless devices. This is a lot more convenient than using a Wi-Fi booster/repeater which often wants to create a separate network at the other end of your house which halves your connection speed.
With your mesh Wi-Fi network in place, devices stay on the same wireless network but seamlessly switch to the nearest base station even as you move around the house — just as your mobile phone switches between towers without dropping a call when you’re on the move.
Getting around the problem
There was a time when you’d improve your home Wi-Fi network by simply upgrading to a new wireless modem/router, sporting a stronger signal and faster Wi-Fi standard. The idea was basically to ram through any obstacles that were hindering your wireless coverage with brute Wi-Fi force.
Mesh networks take a different approach. If something is blocking the path between your lounge room and the Wi-Fi base station (which is perhaps alongside your broadband modem in the study), the network can relay the signal via another base station to get around the obstacle.
Of course it’s generally best to run your home entertainment over Ethernet cables rather than Wi-Fi, including your media server — although even that hard-and-fast rule may be broken. As regular readers will know, we often find AV equipment which lacks Gigabit Ethernet, so can be outpaced by an effective Wi-Fi network operating to the latest standards.
Besides, it’s not always feasible to run cables to every corner of your home. Mesh Wi-Fi can be especially helpful in multi-storey homes, with a base station on each floor, as base stations tend to radiate signals sideways more than upwards.
When you’re setting up a home mesh Wi-Fi network, it will run tests to ensure that you’ve placed the base stations in the best locations. If they’re too close together then you’re not getting the full benefit, while too far apart and they’ll struggle to talk to each other.
You need to plug one base station into your broadband modem so it can access the internet and share this with the others. Some mesh Wi-Fi networks will also let you connect subsequent base stations via Ethernet, which helps if they need to be far apart.
“There was a time when you’d improve your home Wi-Fi network by simply upgrading to a new wireless modem/router. Mesh networks take a different approach.”
Visualise the problem
Before you start, it’s worth using a Wi-Fi analyser app to map your existing Wi-Fi network, so you have a clear view of the problem areas.
On a mobile device you can try the ‘Map My Wi-Fi’ features in Telstra Home Dashboard, even if you’re not a Telstra customer. On a laptop, take a look a NetSpot for Windows and Mac. It helps to create a Wi-Fi heat map before you start working on your network, so you can see the results as you make changes. There’s also the fingbox solution (which we currently have on trial).
Of course home Wi-Fi woes aren’t just caused by obstacles, they’re also caused by interference. The crowded 2.4GHz band is prone to interruptions from microwave ovens, cordless phones and other household appliances, which is why many Wi-Fi devices also support the 5GHz band. Those 5GHz signals are faster and less prone to interference, making them better for streaming content around your home. But they don’t travel as far as 2.4GHz signals, and they’re not as good at punching through solid objects. This means as you get further from the wireless base station, your device is likely to switch across to the stronger 2.4GHz signal, even if you’d be better off on 5GHz.
With mesh 2.4/5GHz Wi-Fi base stations spread around your home there’s always a base station nearby, which means your 5GHz-capable devices are more likely to stay on the faster and clearer 5GHz band.
What are your options?
In Australia you can look to the networking world’s usual suspects for mesh Wi-Fi systems, although Google has also thrown its hat in the ring. Prices start at around $500 for three base stations, with the option to buy extras to cover a large home. Some mesh systems are more expensive, typically because they contain extra transmitters in order to use more radio channels when directing wireless traffic around your home
Google WiFi is a ‘dual-band’ mesh Wi-Fi system, meaning that it runs a combined 2.4GHz and 5GHz network with a single network name and shifting your devices between bands as it sees fit.
Meanwhile, ‘tri-band’ mesh Wi-Fi systems run an extra invisible 5GHz network. The base stations use this private network to relay signals between each other. Think of it like adding an extra express lane. Netgear’s Orbi is a tri-band mesh Wi-Fi system (with a new outdoor model and smart speaker mesh unit announced at IFA in Berlin), while Linksys Velop and D-Link Covr offer both dual-band and tri-band options.
While dual-band systems are cheaper, the trade-off is they’re forced to sacrifice capacity when relaying signals between base stations.
For example, Google WiFi’s 802.11ac wireless network offers theoretical maximum speeds of 867Mbps on the 5GHz band. In real-world conditions you’ll see data transfer speeds closer to 500Mbps. Considering that Ultra-HD video streams demand around 25Mbps, that 500Mbps should be more than enough to go around in your average home, even if you’re forced to surrender some of that capacity as the base stations relay traffic.
Realistically you’re only likely to notice the difference in stepping up to a tri-band mesh network if you tend push your network to the limit, such as using a lot of Wi-Fi devices simultanously and/or regularly transferring hefty files across your Wi-Fi network while streaming demanding video formats.
That said, keep in mind that some of the cheaper mesh options lack a few advanced features, that which might encourage you to favour their rivals. For example Google WiFi and D-Link’s dual-band Covr-C1203 both lack “bridge mode”. This means they insist on sitting at the heart of your home network to play traffic cop while you put your broadband router/modem in bridge mode. This might cause problems if you need your broadband router to keep playing traffic cop, especially if it’s running your NBN home phone.
Adam Turner