Assessment/Diagnosis
Not enough Wi-Fi area coverage.
Treatment
Fairly straight forward. I need to increase or extend my Wi-Fi area of coverage. So what is my option to increase area of Wi-Fi coverage? In a big picture, there are two major options.
- More powerful, single unit router replacement
- Add more router (router-like) units
Single Unit Approach
The bigger and louder speaker can carry the sound further distance. However, one can only do so much with a single speaker. Similarly, there is limitation how much coverage you can achieve with one single router unit.
Generally, dedicated single wireless router unit is better bang for buck than multi-unit approach described below so if this can achieve the coverage you need, I would consider this approach first.
Multi-Unit Approach
Whether it is in school, shopping mall, stadium, concert hall as one speaker is not enough, multiple speakers are placed and play audio in sync. How you connect these additional speakers and quality of each speakers can be different and so is Wi-Fi. There are a few jargons here.
Wireless Access Points (WAP) Approach
The first term to know is the wireless access point (WAP), which is often referred to as just access point (AP). The simple definition of AP is a device that allows other devices to join wired network wirelessly (ref).
Analogy here is simple. If one speaker is not enough, you add more speakers and each are connected via physical wire to the music source. Each speakers represent individual access points. The music source, drum in this example, is a router.
Many consumer routers have built in wireless access point, called wireless router. This is analogous to saying your audio source its own internal speaker or audio output.
As you cannot connect one drum to another and expect the second drum to magically play what is being played on the first drum, it is important to note you cannot just connect two routers via wire and expect Wi-Fi signal coverage extension. General concept here is you need a speaker not another drum i.e. dedicated device. However, for Wi-Fi, some routers support access point mode i.e. acts like a speaker.
If you can achieve access point setup, this is the way to go. For access point setup, you need followings:
- Ethernet (Cat 5e or above) infrastructure
- Router with at least one ethernet port for access point
- At least one access point unit
If you can achieve access point setup, this is the way to go.
Ethernet
Ethernet connection capability is the key determinant whether you can use access point setup. Modern homes may have multiple ethernet cable wall jack throughout house, but old homes don’t. Even if you have ethernet wiring in home, it must be at least cat 5e. If it is cat 5, your home network speed will be limited to 100 Mbps thought the wiring, which will likely create a bottleneck of your network.
Router
Access point itself won’t replace a router but it is rather an extension/add-on. Again, with speaker analogy, speaker alone won’t play a sound. You need an audio source. So router unit is still needed.
The specific requirement for router unit is relatively simple. You just need at least one ethernet port. Just like an ethernet cable, you want to have 1 Gbps capability here, not 100 Mbps. The router unit can be existing router you already own as long as it meets these criteria.
Access Point
Access point does not need to be from the same manufacture. However, using the same brand’s same product line, there may be some extra features and setup may be easier. Some router have capability to be used as an access point. So if you have an old router sitting, it may potentially be used as an access point.
Example:
For a short period of time, I had a setup with Asus Ax11000 router connected to Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-HD access point unit. Currently, I have UniFi Dream Machine Pro router with 3 UniFi access points.
Wireless Mesh Network Approach
In wireless mesh network (WMN), the connection between the speaker and audio source are wireless.
Analogy here may sound a bit stretch. Imagine a new innovation where speaker attached to a microphone. Unlike the case in Access point, this unit is not wired to the music source. However, the microphone can capture the audio produced from the music source and amplify the sound, which can then be heard by someone’s ear at distant where otherwise original sound source would not have reached. This microphone speaker combo unit in Wi-Fi network system is called “node” rather than access point (ref).
In contrast to the access point system, mesh network system has a major advantage of not requiring existing wired infrastructure. This is a way to go if you have a home or specific area where there is no ethernet cable connection can be established.
In contrast to the access point system, mesh network system has a major advantage of not requiring existing wired infrastructure.
The analogy illustrates a few important limitation of mesh network.
Node location
The sound quality of radio directly relates to microphone speaker combo unit (node) position. The way to look at this is the microphone captured audio can have boosted volume by speaker but lost audio quality will not be restored. So the node placement is extremely important. Practically, if you have a dead spot one end of home and the router is located in the the middle of the house, you want to place the node mid distance between the dead spot and the router. In contrast, to solve the same dead spot, access point should be placed right in the area of dead spot for the best performance.
Daisy chain
Theoretically, if you need a long reach, you can daisy chain the nodes. However, as illustrated each hop will reduce unrecoverable audio quality. In Wi-Fi, the data won’t necessary be lost but what suffers is the throughput despite you may hear adequate volume (have Wi-Fi signal).
Maximize backhaul
The above example illustrates loss of audio quality/Wi-Fi throughput between router and node or two nodes. These link are called “backhaul“, in the case of mesh network here, wireless backhaul specifically.
One of the most important design for mesh network is to minimize the loss of throughput though the wireless backhaul. Newer technology such as WiFi 6 helps this.
Practical example here is mesh system like Asus Ax92U. It comes in pair and each unit have two 5 GHz bands with one using the latest technology Wi-Fi 6 and the other band using older technology Wi-Fi 5. The faster link using Wi-Fi 6 will be dedicated to wireless backhaul and client device will use Wi-Fi 5 5 GHz band to connect to nodes. The other way around would create bottle neck through wireless backhaul between two Ax92U.
Mesh Network Resilience
Another main wireless mesh network is resilience achieved by avoidance of dependence to a single node (ref). To explain this, let’s change an analogy here.
Here I would like to use a radio/audio source to represent a router. Each person with phone are nodes. Person A is in the same room as the radio. Then person A calls B and D then B calls C. In this setup, a radio in the A’s room can potentially reach to C as along as A’s sits close to the radio and have high enough volume.
If B suddenly takes another phone call and leaves the conversation with C, C loses the connection to the radio. If this was typical hardwire system, someone needs to fix the connection.
However, in a properly built mesh system, A can potentially call C directly or may be D can call C to re-establish the connection back to C. This is one of the main feature in mesh network and in a business setting, important reason why one would . Although in a typical home network setting, this may not play much of a role as each nodes may be physically placed too far a part to make up lost link by another node i.e. people in this group may be too lazy or busy to do more than their assigned role.
In consumer wireless market, mesh network is a hot sales especially with recent pandemic where many need a better home internet coverage. This is where products like Netgear’s Orbi, Amazon’s Eero, Google Nest WiFi, Linksys Velop, TP-Link Deco, Ubiquiti AmpliFi etc.
In general, I’d recommend dedicated consumer mesh network system for those who do not have an option for wired link between access points. Though recent advancement of technology gave theoretical maximum speed of Wi-Fi to match up or perhaps exceed wired connection, wired connection still remains to be more reliable and faster. There are many factors to this but key is you cannot just look at manufacture’s claimed Wi-Fi speed number. If Wi-Fi speed ever truly comes to the point exceeding wired speed, then wired speed will become bottleneck at that point so having higher number won’t matter. However, there are already standard that allows existing Cat 5e and Cat 6 cables to transfer data even at higher throughput than currently prevalent 1 Gbps (ref) so it will be for awhile if ever to have Wi-Fi overtake the wireless connection speed.