Menu

Home Wifi

The area of our blog that discusses home Wi-Fi usage and how to best get the signal coming in your house transmitted to your devices wirelessly.

Ring cameras, monitors, and alarms

Five Reasons Why I Love Ring

,

Affordable comprehensive security. Five reasons why I love Ring.

ADT, SimpliSafe, and Arlo are all examples of home security systems. I’ve worked with all of them. There are certainly pros and cons between them but the standout offering is from Ring. You may recognize Ring as the video doorbell that many people have installed at their front door. Ring now offers a wide array of security devices as well as the most affordable monitoring on the market.

Here are 5 reasons why I love Ring.

  1. The Ring Video Doorbell is the first and still the best product of its type. You can choose the inexpensive model at $100, the middle of the road model at $189 or the top of the line model at $259. They all work great and if you’re willing to spend a little more you can get better motion detection, video quality and a more pleasing aesthetic and smaller size.
  2. While companies like ADT offer the widest range of devices including entry sensors, water, smoke and gas sensors, cameras, etc. they also have the highest monitoring costs upwards of $40 to $80 monthly and they usually won’t let you sign up without a multi-year contract. Everyone in the business knows that the money is in the monitoring. Most companies will break even or even lose money on the equipment if they can get you obligated to a long-term monitoring contract. This is where Ring is better. Monthly monitoring with Ring is just $9.99 and you don’t have to commit to a contract. If you do purchase at least one year of monitoring in advance the monthly cost goes down to $7.99. In my experience Ring offers enough device options and when combined with the drastic difference in monthly monitoring costs, it becomes a no-brainer.
  3. Ring offers entry sensors, cameras, motion-activated lighting, motion sensors, smoke and gas sensors and they’re always expanding their device lineup. A ring system can also be completely modular. This means that you can purchase and use as many or as few of their devices as you’d like. Want to only have entry sensors and an alarm siren and keypad? No problem. Want to have a comprehensive security system with motion-activated lighting and video recording? No problem. With Ring, you’re not obligated to buy certain equipment just to have a security system.
  4. All Ring devices and monitoring services can be easily managed from the Ring app on your smartphone or tablet or through the web interface on your computer. Every device is fully customizable via the app. Individual devices can be customized down to when they come on and off and how they interact with the security system as a whole. And best of all your system can be armed and disarmed from anywhere on the planet so long as you’re connected to the Internet.
  5. And finally, Ring is an Amazon product, which means that it’s high quality, affordable and easy to use. If there is ever a problem with the devices or monitoring Amazon is easy to get a hold of and always willing to provide technical support or replace defective devices.
ring security echo show
mesh routers for better wifi in louisville diagram image

MESH Routers – Why You Should Buy Them

,

Every year that passes we all end up requiring more out of our home and office WiFi Internet.”

Internet Getting Slower?  

New connected devices are introduced all the time. Devices such as smart appliances, smart lighting, home security, surveillance systems, and many others are being added to our WiFi’s list of things to do every day. To keep up with all of these new demands on our network resources, hardware manufacturers have had to rethink what a router is and how it works.

Without getting too technical, a traditional router sits in a specific location in your home or office and broadcasts a perimeter equally in all directions so that the resulting signal looks like the waves that emanate from a pebble dropped in a pond. This is the way it’s been for a long time. The problem with this is that for that technology to operate optimally the router itself needs to be positioned centrally in the home both horizontally and vertically oriented.

For example, if you have a basement, a ground floor, and an upstairs, the router should be placed on the ground floor as close to the center of that floor as you can get. Most people for lots of reasons cannot position their router centrally.

So, oftentimes we end up with routers in extreme corners of a house or on the other side of an external wall. This often results in a perimeter being broadcast outside of the home or to an area inside the home where it’s not needed and therefore is wasted.

Enter Mesh Routers

Mesh routers are a whole new way to approach Wi-Fi and routers. Instead of just one device broadcasting a signal equally in all directions, mesh routers have multiple devices broadcasting a perimeter and working in real-time to analyze your network resources and usage and, based on those two factors, steering your network resources towards the user and/or device that most need them.

An example of this would be my wife is upstairs checking her email, while I am downstairs streaming a movie. A mesh router knows that checking email doesn’t require significant network resources but that watching a movie does. Therefore, in real-time, a mesh router will steer more network resources to the person more in need of them at any given point in time and space.

Additionally, multiple mesh points can act as access points and can be strategically positioned throughout your home and office to give you the strongest and most reliable signal. Their ability to broadcast multiple network perimeters and communicate in real-time to analyze and distribute network usage and resources is why I recommend mesh network devices to almost all of my clients.

We have extensive experience with multiple brands and have worked in a variety of challenging residential and commercial space layouts. If you’re interested in seeing what devices we would recommend for your specific location, please give us a call. We can either help consult on the project or take this from start to finish. 

Chances are, we are going to be working from home more often as well as continue to add more devices. Let us help you maximize your home Internet capabilities. 

Check out our other residential tech services. 

Contact Us Today for More Information on MESH Routers! 

Image credit: https://www.linksys.com/