GOOGLE NEST WIFI mesh Wi-Fi

Multistorey home? Thick walls? Sometimes a conventional Wi-Fi router can’t get the signal through in enough strength to stream video. Google’s Nest Wifi aims to make mesh networking as easy as one, two three.

Wi-Fi woes? Google’s latest Nest Wifi improves on the original version to offer a possible answer.

With many of us currently having more time than ever to devote to video streaming from catch-up and subscription services, you need to ensure that your home Wi-Fi isn’t a weak link in the chain. If wireless woes are throttling your flow to a trickle, then Google’s new Nest Wi-Fi mesh network might be just the thing to help unlock the floodgates.

All for one

Nothing kills movie night faster than constant buffering, which makes a reliable home network one of the cornerstones of a great digital AV experience. This is where mesh Wi-Fi can come to the rescue.

Rather than depending on a single powerful wireless base station to cover the entire house, mesh networks rely on a handful of hubs working in unison to help reach the furthest corners of your home.

The primary hub (the router) plugs into your broadband modem via an Ethernet cable. This primary hub then links wirelessly to the secondary satellite hubs spread around your home.

Unlike a traditional Wi-Fi extender, the hubs all appear as a single wireless network — allowing your devices to roam seamlessly between hubs as you move around the house, just like your phone roams between mobile towers.

So if you’ve exhausted all the usual home Wi-Fi troubleshooting tips without any luck, then a mesh network is the way to go — particularly in multistorey homes, where the whole mesh concept can really come into its own. Mesh can be a lifesaver if you struggle to get decent streaming video coverage up in bedrooms, down in the rumpus room, over on the deck or out in the backyard.

Speed boost

Enter Google’s latest Nest Wifi mesh network, which is faster and more powerful than the original Google Wifi. It comes in a $399 two-pack with a wireless router and one satellite, or $549 as a pack with router and two satellites. Beyond this, extra satellites sell for $229 each.

The Nest Wifi router itself now sports more transmitters with a ‘theoretical’ top speed of 1733Mbps — that’s AC2200 4×4 MU-MIMO for those who like to study the spec sheets. But the satellites still rely on AC1200 2×2 MU-MIMO for a theoretical 866Mbps.

Of course, we all know you can take theoretical speeds with a grain of salt. In real-world conditions you’ll achieve about a third of those speeds, and they taper off as you move further away from the nearest Wi-Fi hub. Even then, with a strong signal it’s still more than fast enough to do justice to a 100Mbps broadband connection.

That’s more than enough bandwidth to watch a few 15Mbps Ultra-HD video streams from the likes of Netflix, assuming your incoming connection supports such data speeds. You might make the most of the faster in-house Wi-Fi speeds if you’re wirelessly streaming hefty 100-ish Mbps HEVC Ultra-HD rips around the house, such as from a NAS drive to your smart TV.

Of course the first rule of home streaming still stands: cable when you can. Use Ethernet connections to do the heavy lifting wherever possible, while treating Wi-Fi as your fallback. If you can run Ethernet to the lounge room, then your smart TV, streaming boxes and games consoles will all thank you for it.

Even on a rock-solid Wi-Fi network, you still might find that UHD video streaming from your NAS drive in the study to your smart TV in the lounge room presents challenges if both devices are relying on your Wi-Fi — meaning the video stream needs to traverse your wireless network twice. Even moving just one of those devices across to Ethernet can make a big difference.

Full coverage

Unless you really push your Wi-Fi network to the limit, the improvement in data transfer speeds when upgrading from the Google Wifi to the Nest Wifi is mostly academic. If you care about the specs, it’s worth noting the Nest Wifi still relies on 802.11ac (Wi-Fi 5), even as the first 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) gear hits the shelves. To be fair, that’s not likely to be a deal-breaker if you’re upgrading your Wi-Fi today.

The Nest Wifi’s most noticeable improvement is the router’s signal strength, letting you place the satellites further away to better extend your coverage. The improvement is clear in my multi-storey home, with the Nest Wifi hubs maintaining a strong wireless link between floors when sitting in distant corners where the old Google Wifi hubs struggled.

Thankfully Google’s app lets you test the signal strength between the hubs, so you can move them around to find the best location — keeping in mind they need access to a power socket. The result is more reliable music and video streaming in the furthest reaches of your home, including outside — which is great when you’re outdoors working.

Strike up the band

Keep in mind that, unlike some mesh Wi-Fi networks, the Nest Wifi presents its 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands as a single network name — using ‘bandsteering’ to automatically shunt devices between them.

Unfortunately this can cause problems if your home is a hotbed of 2.4GHz interference — yes, microwave oven, we’re looking at you.

While 5GHz is faster and less prone to interference, the signal doesn’t travel as far as 2.4GHz, and has more trouble punching through walls.

This means at the far end of the house, your devices can roam onto the stronger 2.4GHz signal, even though they would have delivered smoother streaming by sticking with the weaker 5GHz signal. This can potentially cripple streaming video in particular, and Nest Wifi doesn’t offer the ability to force some devices to only use 5GHz. But by spreading hubs around your home to ensure good 5GHz coverage, you’re reducing the likelihood that your devices will switch across to 2.4GHz.

Get smart

The other key change with the Nest Wifi is that the satellite hubs now double as smart speakers, offering similar sound quality to the Nest Mini. That’s nothing to get excited about if you care about music quality, but you still might find it handy to be able to talk to Google Assistant in a few locations around your home.

With this comes a few new voice-friendly features. The ability to order Google Assistant to pause internet access for a specific group of devices is a great way to get everyone in your home’s complete attention! Thankfully there’s physical mute button on the back of each satellite if you’re not keen on inviting Google Assistant into your home.

Google has also thrown in the Thread and Bluetooth Low Energy wireless IoT standards for talking directly to smart home gear. Frustratingly it has snubbed the popular Zigbee and Z-wave standards, which means you still need a bridge to control devices like Philips Hue smart light bulbs.

Another annoying trade-off is that Google has ditched the Ethernet ports on the satellites; instead you’ll only find two ports on the router — one for connection to your broadband modem and the other for connecting all the Ethernet devices in your home. This is a major hassle if you need Ethernet on the satellites to connect devices at the other end of the house but, if you’re stuck, you can still connect an old Google Wifi hub to your new Nest Wifi network.

It’s also important to note that Nest Wifi still does not support ‘bridge’ mode if you want to combine the hubs as a true mesh. This means the Nest Wifi router insists on sitting at the heart of your home network to play traffic cop, expecting you to either ditch the router supplied by your ISP, run all your Ethernet devices via the Nest Wifi (likely requiring an Ethernet switch) or put your ISP’s router into bridge mode. The latter might cause problems if you rely on that router to run your NBN home phone.

Conclusion

So what’s the verdict? If wireless woes are crippling your music and video streaming, then the Nest Wifi is a winner, rather than simply upgrading to a more powerful single Wi-Fi router. And it’s an even better deal if you’ve been considering adding a few Google Assistant speakers to your home, assuming you’re relying on them more for chatting to Google than for listening to music.

Adam Turner