As ‘Working From Home’ (WFH) becomes the ‘new normal’, what are the best ways to supercharge our connections to our workplace?

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Author: Max Boker

If you’ve landed here it’s probably because of one 1 of 2 things. 1) What on earth is Mesh Wi-fi?! and 2) How on earth do I stop my zoom calls from dropping out in other rooms around the house.

The Pandemic has changed everything, some for good, some for bad but we can all safely say there has been a complete shift in the way we live. We’re going through testing times and being forced to adapt but one of the biggest changes a significant amount of us are going through is the way we work and your internet connection is the heartbeat behind it all.

We’ll save the chat around your ISP for another day but we’re going to focus on how to make the most of that internet being supplied to you.

The demands that WFH brings means that some of those routers being supplied by ISP’s are simply not cutting the mustard. More and more consumers are experiencing dead spots and there is no surprise that Wifi extenders and the like have seen a surge in sales during lockdown.

There are a few different ways to boost your signal for consistent speeds. Some people opt for a standard wifi extender and some choose to hardwire and extend via powerline adaptors. Another method being adopted my many as the market grows is Mesh Wi-fi, but what exactly is it?

What is Mesh Wifi

Mesh Wifi, also dubbed “whole home wifi” is when you use your existing modem to supply an internet connection but use satellites or nodes to talk to each other throughout your home to create one (or more) networks.

Whilst the traditional wi-fi router set-up may work for some, for others you often find that you’re getting only a fraction of the speed coming into your home when you move further away. Similar to how a speaker will start to lose its volume as its audio waves begin to wane over larger distances.

Mesh Wi-fi effectively blankets your home by distributing new waves from each of its satellites, the beauty of it being that it’s completely modular so you can daisy chain nodes in more than one dead spot and it doesn’t matter how far you are from your original router.

Why is Meshi Wifi better than a range extender

A lot of people having coverage issues in their homes with simply opt for Wifi extenders but compared to whole home wifi, they have their limitations.

When using Wifi extenders, you’re essentially setting up an extension of your current network but more often than not it sits on its own SSID. What you’ll often find is that your devices will drop out when trying to connect to one or the other and it also proves troublesome when you’re trying to control devices over wifi such as Chromecast and Sonos that require you to be on the same network.

Mesh Wifi works differently in that you each node is still on the same network with the same SSID, so no matter where you’re moving to in your home you’ll always lock onto where the strongest signal is which is also optimised on the right channel.

In order to get around sloppy wifi signal altogether, some people often like to hardwire their connections using powerline adapters allowing you to network your home through your existing electrical outlets.

It doesn’t have to be a one or the other however as there are products on the market that now offer the best of both worlds.