Whole Home Mesh Wifi Optimizing

Introduction

The traditional way of setting up WiFi in our homes is by using a centralized router to which all smart devices get connected. While such a setup has historically worked just fine, there are several disadvantages to the one-router approach that make it unscalable. One of the most obvious problems that standalone WiFi routers suffer from is their ability to service distant parts of a house.

As smart-home devices replace traditional ones, there is a growing need in most households to implement WiFi systems that serve every device equally, irrespective of their location or functionality. This can be achieved using WiFi Mesh Networks.

What are WiFi Mesh networks?

Mesh Networks are a complete rethinking of how wireless internet connectivity is implemented in a home or an office space. Instead of a singular router, Mesh Networks consist of several interconnected nodes (routers or smart devices) that share internet traffic among themselves.

Advantages of Mesh Wifi-Optimizing

A mesh setup addresses the most obvious shortcoming of routers, i.e., WiFi blind spots. Your devices can seamlessly connect to whichever node is nearest or even communicate with each other by having multiple access points. This is known as auto-optimizing. Consequently, every smartphone or smart-home device that you own enjoys superior connectivity at all times.

Another advantage of mesh wifi-optimizing is that slowdowns get much less frequent. This happens because not all devices are connecting to the same access point. Hence no single node is overburdened with handling too many connections.

House-wide Mesh-networking

1. Utilizing Zigbee: Zigbee is a low-power wireless technology that is designed specifically for IoT devices. Its most recent iteration, the Zigbee 3.0 protocol, has been jointly created and is used by 300+ member companies of the Zigbee alliance.
   
   Zigbee supports low latency, highly encrypted connections to smart-home devices. That’s what makes it ideal for smart devices that run on battery. Most importantly, though, Zigbee-compliant devices feature mesh networking, which means that all devices compliant with the protocol can talk to each other. This reduces network strain and facilitates fault tolerance.

   When buying a smart-home device, ensure it supports Zigbee.

2. Using WiFi Mesh Routers: A mesh network ensures that every room and every smart device in your house is well-connected. Most mesh router kits are the ideal solution for implementing house-wide WiFi. They also come with a companion app that takes a scan of your home and shows you the most optimal places to set up access points.
   
   Additionally, mesh networks are modular, which means that if you add a new room or device, you can simply get another WiFi node for that room that connects to your main network. No finicky range extenders are needed.
    
3. Easy Control of the Home Network: Mesh networks can be controlled using just an app. This gives you a lot of power regarding which devices to prioritize, exercise parental controls, and add guest networks.

Conclusion

Mesh Networking will add a lot of value to your life if your home has many smart home devices or people with individual smartphones. Standalone routers are not suited for these kinds of workloads, and frequent signal drops or outages can significantly affect your family’s productivity. With mesh routers coming down in price and standards like Zigbee facilitating low-power connectivity, now is the best time to go mesh!