cross-posted on Medium

Mesh routers are home Wi-Fi systems that promise to bring wireless internet to every corner of your house through the use of multiple satellite access point in addition to the main Wi-Fi router. Eero introduced the first consumer-grade Mesh Wi-Fi router in 2015.

Companies as well as as universities have had Wi-Fi networks with multiple access points (on different floors or different meeting rooms) for a very long time. However these large institutions use long ethernet cables that connect these access points to the main router using switches. If wireless access points are configured with the same Network Name (SSID) and the same security settings such as the password, then a device can connect to any of them!

One could build a similar solution inside a home, however this would require you to put Ethernet cables from the main router into all the rooms where you have an additional access point. This might require you to drill holes through some walls, if you don’t want to run cables over the floors and through doors.

Another solution is to use a Wireless Repeater/Range-Extender which connects to the main router as a guest devices and then creates its own Wi-Fi network. It can do this either by creating a different network or re-using the same SSID (as described before) and password. This additional hop will however increase the latency of the network as well as competing with the wireless signal of the main router.

In either one of the above-described scenarios, a connected device doesn’t automatically switch from one access point to another, even if the new connection would provide a stronger signal. This might not be a problem for a fixed office workstation, but nowadays when moving around with a phone or laptop you always want to automatically connect to the strongest signal. In case of repeater you need to disable wifi (on your phone) and re-enable it in order to connect to the access point with the strongest signal due to overlapping covered area.

This new Mesh Wi-Fi product category seems to be the latest trend for techy end-consumer who would like to increase coverage of their home Wi-Fi signal as well as creating a better overall experience for the whole household. But the feature that people love the most is their ease of use. Each one of these new Mesh Router systems has a neat App that makes setup easy and gives users additional control such as parental restrictions. This only shows that the home router business has not yet been disrupted, and many more competitors have since brought out their own solutions to the market.

For most of these systems one Wi-Fi channel (modern routers are either dual- or tri-band) is reserved as backbone communication between the satellites and main unit, which avoids competition with all other connected devices and thus keep latencies low. Most of these systems also have at least one Ethernet port through which a wired backbone to the main router can be provided. The main magic of Mesh Wifi is that it automatically manages the handoff of a connected device between different satellite access point of the network, depending on which one provides a better signal.

Another innovation that made home-networking easier, is Power-line. It allows the internet data signal to be sent from one room to another over the existing electrical grid via the help of Power-line power plug adapters. Of course data transfer is not as fast as a point-to-point Ethernet cables but it is still more reliable than a wireless connection. It is indeed very helpful to carry an internet signal through thick walls or indeed to that remote shed that is slightly out of Wi-Fi range.

As usual when a new technology comes out, one has to see past the hype as a single technology is not the silver bullet for any problem. It needs to be combined with existing standards and technologies to achieve its goal. Thus in a home internet setup I would suggest to use a Mesh Wi-Fi system with a Power-line backbone to get the best of both worlds! There are only a few options on the market to incorporate both technologies into a single system: TP-Link Deco P7 and Huawei WiFi Q2.

Looking even further into the future there already seems to be a standard for Mesh Wi-Fi such that equipment from different manufacturers could work together instead of relying on proprietary protocols which restricts the user to only be able to expand their home network with devices from the same brand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11s

As more and more devices get connected to the internet it seems clear that the future needs to be wireless and we need to upgrade our home networks to be able to talk to more devices at the same time and cover a larger area. Mesh Wi-Fi is one of the more important and exciting technologies for home networking. I believe that with the addition of a wired Power-line backbone you can create a fast and reliable network covering even more rooms and buildings than a pure wireless mesh system could achieve. Let’s see if more manufacturers agree with that opinion!