Working From Home – Part 4
Continuing on from the last article on working from home I will cover the latest offering that can be used to increase WiFi coverage in your home. Parts 1, 2 and 3 of this series can be found by visiting the links provided at the bottom of this article.
Mesh Wifi
A mesh wifi solution consists of two or more “smart” pod devices (usually there are three in the set) which provide a mesh or grid of wifi throughout the location covered.
Mesh wifi solutions differ in one very important aspect when compared to the older solutions and that aspect is the intelligence of the devices. The system has two main components the base station and one or more pods scattered throughout your home. The base station connects directly to one of the Ethernet ports on your broadband modem and broadcasts a wifi signal to the other pods and your wifi devices. Each pod then provides a wifi signal to connect your device.
Smart Features
The wifi signal has the same name regardless of your location.
The system can identify if a particular pod is not working and reroute via the other pods until it comes back online.
Many of the units feature parental control and or bandwidth management meaning you can stop or limit any wifi device from “sucking” the life out of your internet/wifi connection.
Installation
Mesh wifi systems are designed to be installed by the consumer and provided you have done your homework the installation process should be fairly straightforward. As mentioned previously do your wifi coverage survey to see where your need to locate the pods.
Once you have the base station installed do the survey again to find the best location for the next pod and again for all other pods in the system. At the end of the installation do your survey again to ensure the coverage is what you wanted. You can easily move a pod if you need to but be aware doing so changes the whole map of your mesh wifi coverage.
Once installed you should never need to re-install but that really depends on many factors.
Ease of Use
Many of the systems now come with a smart phone app and in those cases you won’t need to use your desktop or laptop to setup the system.
Costs
I am writing this article on December 19th 2020 and a quick Google search found mesh systems ranging in price from €79.99-€169.99 from Irish Retailers. Before buying make sure the system meets your particular requirements and you are confident enough to install it.
Oliver Reidy is a computer technician and has been in the industry since 1981.You can contact him via email at help.desk@reidyonline.com, by the telephone numbers listed on this page, and whatsapp @08779707040. This article, and all previous articles, are available to view online at http://reidyonline.blogspot.ie/ or www.reidyonline.com/blogspot.htm