I then had to unhook my two Apple routers. In a sign we are living in a mobile first world, it can only be managed from iOS or Android. The first step was downloading the Google Wi-Fi iOS app. I decided that while it’s probably crazy to try to overhaul my Wi-Fi in an hour, I would try it as a “test”. I arrived home from work at 4:45, but had to leave an hour later to head to a Christmas program. It came in a long box, and each router was placed inside in a slotted piece of plastic. The Google Wi-Fi 3-pack comes in a long skinny box with each router placed in a plastic slot.Īfter what felt like weeks of waiting, my order from Best Buy finally arrived (Amazon was out of stock when I ordered). My house has had two Apple Airport Extreme routers powering it for the past few years, but with the recent news of Apple abandoning development of their router products, I decided to look elsewhere. They include Eero, Google Wi-Fi, Orbi, Luma, and AmpliFi HD. There are countless companies making similar home mesh products. The throughput isn’t great and I don’t recommend it. I won’t go into all the technical details, but they are a really bad technology. With that being said, the current mesh technology has improved greatly, and it’s really perfect for home use.Īnother technology that has been common place up until now was repeaters. The best way to truly increase coverage is to install a couple of access points/routers around the house that are wired into ethernet. By adding additional radios spread out around the house, more devices can talk at the same time at faster speeds. These mesh products are trying to solve two problems: provide additional coverage and additional capacity. Wi-Fi is also distance limited, so you get less throughput the further you get from the router. This is why your Wi-Fi gets slow as more devices are on it, and as they try to do more (stream video, etc.). The more people trying to come and go at once, the more crowded it can get. Wi-Fi is like having ten people and one door. If you have ten people and ten doors, everyone can get in and out with ease. Let’s imagine a switch as doors to a home. Switches (vs hubs) allow for multiple devices to be transmitting data at the same time. In modern wired ethernet networks, each device has its own “door”. So what is mesh networking? Before I answer that, I want to explain a little of how Wi-Fi works, and how it is different than ethernet. What we are really seeing are companies bringing the technology to the home in an affordable/attractive/simple to use package. While mesh networking products certainly aren’t a new technology, they are just now making a splash in the home market. While there has certainly been options for higher-end routers for the past few years (See Wirecutter), a new crop of devices have come to the market lately: mesh networks. This has brought the home Wi-Fi market to a place where the $30 router you bought in 2012 just can’t cut it. We expect to be able to stream Netflix in HD on 4-5 devices at a time on top of keeping up with basic web browsing. ![]() ![]() On top of the massive increase in the number of Wi-Fi devices, we are also asking them to do way more. Now, we have iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, laptops, Apple Watches, and then countless “smart home” style devices (thermostats, door locks, etc.). Homes used to have a desktop and maybe a laptop. With 802.11ac, Wi-Fi speeds are quickly matching ethernet speeds (especially when you consider the bottleneck being on whatever cloud service you are connecting to).ĭuring the past few years, we’ve also had a transformation in the number of devices in our homes that use Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi used to be quite a bit slower than ethernet, but we used it for the portability. We started with 11b and we are now at 802.11ac Wave 2 ( here is a little history on Wi-Fi standards). The Wi-Fi industry has come a long way in the last decade and a half. I remember in 2003 when I hooked up my first 802.11g router (from Microsoft oddly enough). Huawei ax3 repeater mode.Wi-Fi is something we’ve all come to expect in 2017.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |