How to extend Wi-Fi coverage throughout your whole home or office | ExtremeTech


How to extend Wi-Fi coverage throughout your whole home or office Now that Wi-Fi is becoming an integral part of just about every new piece of consumer electronics, and even many appliances, it is more important than ever to have a usable wireless network throughout your home and office — and possibly your yard. Unfortunately, the typical ISP’s simplistic model of providing a single “all-in-one” modem+router+wireless gateway for your site quickly breaks down when faced with the real-world challenges of serving larger, or sprawling, homes or apartments. This is especially true for buildings with lots of wiring in the walls, lath and plaster walls, or metallic heating or air conditioning infrastructure in the floor or ceiling. The good news is that there are several ways to solve this problem, with varying costs and complexities. An interesting article that does not delve into the depths of how to do each one, but does give a good overview of what the different options are that can be looked at. With broadband speeds, older WiFi repeaters and range extenders are no longer cutting it. Mesh WiFi seems to be a good choice in terms of ease of setup and functionality (apart from not usually having extra LAN ports if you buy the typical commercial offerings). Two prominent names here are Eero and Luma. Luma does appear to be quite a bit less costly for 3 devices. Another option not named in the article is Open Mesh - they have optionally cheaper devices but these do come with lower hardware specs. See http://ift.tt/1KZkljJ

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