September 3 2020

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.

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