Put your house in the fast lane
Google Wi-Fi
From €139 ★★★★
The single tech question I’m asked most often by my friends and family is how can home Wi-Fi be improved. Everybody seems to have a signal blackspot upstairs or towards the end of the house where you’re disconnected from the digital world.
Wi-Fi extenders have been available for some time and their technology does manage to improve signal strength, but not for the entire house. Google Wi-Fi is now on sale in Ireland and uses the principle of mesh network. This is designed to layer a signal over the area between the devices with a WiFi signal that’s almost as good at the end of the chain as it is back at the broadband router.
Unpacking Google Wi-Fi reveals three nicely designed units. They are less than three inches tall and only four inches in diameter. They don’t look like unwieldy networking gadgets, they’re more like stylish Bluetooth speakers, which was a pleasant surprise.
Also in the box are the power adapters for each unit and a network cable to connect one of the units to your home broadband. After I’d placed the little units around my home, I downloaded the accompanying Google Wi-Fi app.
The app is a very useful part of this set-up and is available for Android and iOS. Home network set-up can be a chore but Google has done an excellent job on making this a stress-free 15-minute task. I connected the ethernet cable to the primary Wi-Fi unit and plugged it into my broadband modem. Using the app, I was able to identify the first Wi-Fi unit and set its location to easily identify it later. Adding the additional units is also very easy. They work best when they are no further away than two rooms’ width and ideally should be placed in an open space. Connecting them to the network is also done using the app and in no time my mesh network was established.
Performance is the critical measurement of this piece of tech though, and it didn’t disappoint.
I was able to run my own network test and all of them performed almost identically, with a good signal across my entire home. The app has useful features where it checks the transfer rate between the units. This can help you position it in the optimum spot. It also has features for prioritising traffic from individual devices, such as games consoles. While the features are great and consumer-friendly, if you’re looking for advanced networking features, there aren’t that many.
Also, at this price, it isn’t a cheap option but there is a single pack version of this set-up for large apartments or smaller homes.
Overall, this is a great product. The ease of set-up and additional features help you create a safe and secure Wi-Fi network with minimum fuss and effort.
In an era when the whole family nearly always needs to be online, Google Wi-Fi does the trick, upstairs and downstairs.
THEY’RE LIKE STYLISH BLUETOOTH SPEAKERS