4 Reasons Why You Need A Mesh Wi-Fi Network

Whether your game download is taking too long, or your 4K video streams are constantly buffering, a home network that’s struggling to keep up with your needs can be frustrating to tolerate. For many people, a mesh network could be the best solution for an underperforming Wi-Fi network, especially if your existing router is struggling to deliver the full speed of your internet connection. If you’ve got Wi-Fi problems and want a quick and effective solution, upgrading to a mesh could be your best bet.

4 Improve your coverage

Get whole-home coverage with a mesh

Mesh Wi-Fi can also improve coverage outside your home

The most obvious reason someone should build a mesh network is for whole-home Wi-Fi coverage. Whole-home Wi-Fi with a mesh system not only gives you an internet connection throughout your house, but also makes it more consistent with stronger average speeds, even if you’re a few rooms away from your router. Even if you see a full signal displayed on your device from a standard router, your speed and connection quality will start to fall off more sharply than it would with a mesh.

Wi-Fi connections need to travel from the router to the device, as well as from the device back to the router. On a standard router, upload speeds can suffer more than download speeds for this reason, and if you’re a streamer or are uploading large files, this speed discrepancy could be very noticeable. With a mesh system, your device is able to connect to a mesh node while allowing the hardware in the mesh node to handle the connection back to the main router.

Related

A beginner’s guide to mesh networks

If your router can’t provide reliable Wi-Fi coverage throughout your house, you might want to look into a mesh setup.

3 Improve your network performance

Let the mesh do the heavy lifting

As you get further from a router, the performance will start to fall off, but since you’re connecting to a much nearer mesh node when you’ve got a properly set-up mesh, you should see an increase in speed. Plus, if you’re near enough to the primary mesh router, your device will connect to that, so it’s not even going to be impacted by the overhead of the mesh in that case.

While adding an extra new hop for your connection on its way to the internet will result in some added latency, it should be minimal enough to not be noticed in everyday browsing and streaming, and gaming could benefit a lot from the more consistent connection provided. Gaming servers compensate for latency by predicting where the player will move, and inconsistent connections can lead to spikes in latency that have a bigger impact on gaming than a marginal overall increase in latency with a mesh.

2 Reliable coverage for smart home devices

Smarter smart homes

If you’re upgrading your home with smart home tech like the best smart locks or smart plugs, those devices generally need an internet connection to work properly. While some smart home tech can use a hub or connect to your other smart home devices using something like thread, a lot of them rely on your Wi-Fi connection. These devices are also small and placed in suboptimal locations, like right against the wall, or outside your insulated walls, so having a mesh network can improve their connection too.

Some of the best mesh systems, like TP-Link Deco kits and Eero kits, support smart home protocols as well, like Matter and Zigbee. With this integration, you can get a great connection for your smart home tech without needing expensive hubs or dealing with laggy smart home tech.

1 Easy setup and software

It’s all in the app

Mesh Wi-Fi systems, for the most part, are designed to be easy to set up and friendly to less tech-savvy users. While setting up a custom mesh with a standard router is more involved, if you stick with a complete kit, setting up your mesh network is as easy as following a few instructions in an app. These apps can use Bluetooth, for example, to make setup easier so you don’t need to track down and enter default passwords to get into your settings.

This software can also be used to set up things like guest networks and parental controls right from your phone. While more experienced users will find the training wheels to be a bit annoying and tedious, if you’ve never set up a Wi-Fi network before, these apps make it a lot more accessible.

Should you build a custom mesh?

If you’re stuck deciding between a mesh and one of the best Wi-Fi routers, it is possible to get the best of both worlds. When it comes down to it, the main difference between a mesh router and a standard router is the software. Some router manufacturers, like TP-Link, Asus, and Linksys have added mesh functionality to their routers.

Asus and Linksys are mostly sticking to their own brands for expansion, with strong compatibility. For example, you can pick up an Asus router with AiMesh, like the affordable Asus RT-AX57, and expand it with other AiMesh routers, including Asus’s gaming brand ROG and ZenWiFi mesh kits. If you want the features of a high-end gaming router where you need, it but mesh coverage through the rest of the house, this can be a great option.

One more note is that TP-Link has been working its way towards EasyMesh standard, which opens up compatibility with other brands of routers. Keep in mind that EasyMesh adoption has been slow overall, and it’s not actually compatible with some of the TP-Link models, including some Wi-Fi extenders.