Those who live in large apartments or private houses are often faced with a situation where a wireless router, good as it may be, cannot provide full and constant Wi-Fi coverage throughout the house. As a result, in one room the speed is perfect, and in the other part of the house, there are so-called dead zones where the signal level is too low to be useful or disappears altogether.
Until recently, this problem was ‘fixed’ by installing a second router, and its most important feature was repeater mode support. What does that mean? In short, more effort and often more trouble. You can configure the second router to expand the signal of the first, making a connection a little more stable. But although the coverage area increases and stabilizes significantly, there is another problem: the connection speed on each new repeater drops noticeably.
Eero is a great example of the new generation of WiFi systems, as they developed the first home WiFi products created specifically to solve this problem, using a technology called ‘Mesh Networking’. Unfortunately eero sales were previously limited to the US, but now you can buy eero in Australia so we thought it was time to help people understand the new way of doing things and why Mesh Networking is the way to go.
The eero Wi-Fi system (or any mesh network) consists of several devices: at least one ‘base’ station and several smaller, cheaper beacons, designed to fit anywhere as needed and expand network coverage. Most products have preconfigured packages intended for particular size homes: eero has packages for 1-2, 2-4 and 3-5 + bedroom homes consisting of 1 eero + 1 Beacon, 1 eero + 2 Beacons and 3 eeros respectively.
To configure it, simply connect an Eero device to the network and place other access points in remote rooms that provide a stable Wi-Fi signal. Eero engineers implemented the mesh network model, which means that all nodes are formally the same and the system is self-managing.
So unlike the “router, repeater 1, repeater 2” scheme, where the main router is used to manage all network and routing problems and the other devices just try to pass that information like dumb extenders, all three eero devices are routers complete, creating a mesh network where each node serves as a transition point for another node in the system, working together to provide a powerful signal evenly distributed throughout the entire mesh. This eliminates dead spots and weak spots in your home WiFi – wherever you have WiFi within the mesh, you will have a strong signal.
Also part of this new generation of WiFi systems is the possibility of integration with a dedicated application on your phone to allow easy management of all aspects of the system, speed tests and more. If you’ve ever had to log into a strange web address and use an ugly and confusing web interface to configure a router, you know how important this is. For example, in addition to providing all the management functionality you would expect, the eero app can automatically connect to your wireless network, see how many devices are connected to the network, test your network speed, and see how much traffic is being consumed. These new systems are also smart enough to automatically install updates and enhancements that make the system work much more stable – they stay safe and up-to-date, without the need for any “fiddling”.
While we’d love to list all the features that are possible because these systems have a dedicated app, they vary, and time is short! With that said, we think being able to easily create a new network from your smartphone or quickly add a guest without having to share or remember your password – time savings become super simple with a few taps on your phone – rate a quick mention.
Finally, while routers in general can be hideous, peppered with antennas and cables, some of this new generation of routers are pretty enough to take pride of place in any home. Since we all have WiFi in our homes, it’s amazing that it took so long for the design of these devices to be a major consideration (I guess Apple used to make nice routers, but they were the exception and now they are completely out of date with their router technology. Wifi). Again, as an example, eero’s design is extremely minimal and elegant – it looks like the kind of device Apple might launch if they decided to become relevant on WiFi again …
We hope this has helped you understand what Mesh Networking is, why it is better than older WiFi systems, and how you manage to be, and we hope that you are now interested in looking at the options available. Better and faster WiFi connection is possible! If you are looking for more information, typing keywords like ‘Mesh Networks’ into Google should give you a lot.
Best of luck and may your videos never get paused to buffer again!