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Getting WiFi to every corner of your home is made much easier these days with a mesh network, which uses a specialized router and individual nodes that can configure themselves. Companies like Netgear, Samsung and ASUS all have kits of varying price that can help you make one in your own home, but you generally have to purchase a whole new set of devices to make it work. Now, ASUS is offering AiMesh, a system that uses your current ASUS routers to create a mesh network without pricey extra hardware.
Since you're using routers that you already own to create a mesh network, you can decide which one is the primary and which will act as nodes. You simply find the router with the best capabilities, drop it in a central location, then use the built-in software to configure the network.
AiMesh only runs on routers from ASUS, though.
Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/03/asus-mesh-wifi-aimesh/
(Score: 4, Informative) by Zinho on Thursday January 04 2018, @03:27PM (3 children)
This is already something you can do if you're willing to re-flash your router's firmware with open source. DDWRT has a howto page [dd-wrt.com] that's well developed, and OpenWRT is at least thinking about it. [openwrt.org] Some assembly required, though, and not for the faint of heart.
So, how long before the open source WRT community starts publishing pre-configured Mesh builds?
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday January 04 2018, @04:36PM (2 children)
I investigated doing this in my house a few years ago, but gave up on it.
1. As far as I understand it, mesh networking inherently halves your bandwidth. If I connect from my laptop wirelessly to my router, I get full speed between the two in uploads and downloads. When I connect through a mesh node, the node has to take half the time it's sending or receiving data from me to relay that data to the router or half the time it's receiving data from the router to relay it to me.
2. Wireless connection speeds already suck unless you're so close to your router that it's practical to use wired networking. So you go from 'annoyed at slowness' to 'double annoyed at slowness'.
3. All of these problems are worse if you have multiple wireless devices or users.
4. In my experience, consumer grade wireless routers wear out over time. So even if you get everything working, ever few years you have to replace pieces.
My house is small but the original center was a tiny stone barn. I gave up on wireless and ran cat6 cable around anywhere I could, including a few ugly spots where it's in grey conduit piping along the outside of one wall. All of the wired gadgets in the house can transmit and receive to each other at about 600 Mbps. I'm not sure what's preventing something closer to the advertised 1 Gbps of our gigabit ethernet, router, and switches. But 600 Mbps blows anything I've done with wireless to hell. I can't get a 500 Mbps speed with wireless when my 802.11ac 2x2 card is three feet from the wireless access point.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @06:16PM (1 child)
what i know is that originally there was a microwave (2.4 Ghz) network that spanned
the united 'muricans from one ocean to another ocean (with some sat uplink backup).
code-run-google-A.I.fetch:references (lol)
so it is possible.
in other news, the faster-then-executed stock market brokers were considering a microwave
link for themselves to link physically remote stock exchanges to be faster then phiber optics.
so there.
wifi could/is really fast.
the problem from my experience is, that wifi is considered a cheap and convenient solution.
unfortunately the universe doesn't work that way.
it is totally possible to install a costly 10Gb fiber BADLY and get excellent 100 Mbps.
it's thesame with wifi.
installing ONE AP is like dirt cheap. if extension (or mesh) is required then it all gets
vastly more complicated and expensive.
for the first: people think that the second repeater will just amplify the "light" from
the central AP.
this is wrong: it is called a REPEATER not a AMPLIFIER.
the second repeater might extend the range, but it doesn't AMPLIFY the original APs signal.
this means that the second AP has to be installed just like the first AP:
with a good uplink connection and situated at a spot where the signal can travel.
first: the repeater needs to SEE the first AP at full speed.
second: the NEW emitted (not AMPLIFIED) signal needs to be able travel far and unimpeded.
also the central AP signal needs to be on ANOTHER chan then the REPEATERS channel.
the real and difficult and costly solution can only be that the repeater is acctually TWO APs.
the first is a client that connects to the central AP and the second one is the one that
might connect to a 3rd and so on AP (with the same constraints as mentioned above) -or- a
client ... that is you ... who thought it's a AMPLIFIER. ;]
AP-radiowaves(chan1)-[AP-inside-AP]:repeater-radiowaves[chan2]-...
p.s. batman [protocol] .. maybe ... or stochastic cooling
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Friday January 05 2018, @01:46PM
Multi-antenna routers are already set up for use as a repeater in most cases. "Range extender" is already a typical use case for a wireless access point, and if it has access to 4 antennas it can easily dedicate one each to receive and transmit on two different channels.
The biggest problem with mesh networks is contention for the limited number of channels available. When radio guys talk about bandwidth, they're talking about footprint on the EM spectrum, not data throughput. Put too many mesh nodes close together and eventually some of them will start stomping on each other.
As long as you approach it with competent hardware and an understanding that it's not all upsides, the downsides can be worked with/around.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin