It’s always annoying that the WiFi signals get weaker when we come to the dead zone. It’s a good choice to adopt a mesh WiFi network to solve this problem. WiFi extender is also useful. If you don’t know how to make a decision, you can refer to our previous discussion about the difference between mesh WiFi and WiFi extender. In this article, we aim to introduce how to set up mesh WiFi networks.
Part I. How does a mesh WiFi system work?
Before getting to know how to set up the mesh WiFi networks, let’s learn how a mesh WiFi system works exactly first.
A Mesh WiFi system usually consists of one main router and several slave routers. These additional routers can be seen as the different access points. The main router contributes to building up the backbone network and offers slave routers a multi-hop Internet connection.
With the mesh WiFi system, each node can communicate with each other and the WiFi signals are spread out all over the room. The signals will automatically change into the most efficient route flexibly. Therefore, the nodes can reroute themselves from one point to the other point if one point goes down. If you want to extend the range of WiFi signals, you can easily add more points. What’s more, you don’t have to change the network manually because the networks share the same SSID and password.
Thus, with the powerful mesh WiFi network, you can use the wireless network fluently at any corner of your home.
Part II. What should you consider before setting up mesh WiFi networks?
There are many brands of mesh WiFi routers in the market. Their price and performance are different. When you are considering the routers, you should take these elements into account: speed, coverage, set-up difficulty, security. Here we will take V-SOL mesh WiFi routers as an example.
1. Speed
There is no doubt that a faster Internet is always better. Greater speed also allows for more bandwidth-intensive things like 4K media streaming and deals with network congestion. On the market, it’s easy to get a device whose speed is about 400Mbps or lower. But if you require it to reach 1Gbps or higher, you’d better look at devices with dual bands (2.4GHz and 5GHz) or labeled tri-band.
The V-SOL mesh WiFi router is dual-band (WiFi 4 and WiFi 5 wave 2). It adopts MIMO 2×2 for 2.4 GHz and MIMO 2×2 for 5.0GHz. What’s more, there are four 5dBi external antennas and the rates reach up to 1.166Gbps.
Notes:
Lower cost Wi-Fi routers often only have a single antenna, which limits the throughput to a single stream of data at a time. Besides, the higher the dBi rating, the larger area the signal covers.
2. Coverage
The number, signal strength, location of the devices will affect the signal coverage and cost when setting up the network. We should choose the best place to deploy each router to reduce the number of devices and cost. Remember to take the floors, walls, doors into account in that they will influence the transmission of the signal. Besides, the larger area the signals can cover, the fewer devices you need to use.
3. Security
The more nodes you set up, the easier the device may be attacked by physical attacks, denial service, passive monitoring, etc. Although some systems will automatically update the security status, it would be better we could maintain the network’s safety by ourselves. However, some wireless networks adopt app-assisted installation, which might not enable you to use advanced security settings such as whitelisting MAC addresses.
4. Set-up difficulty
There are different ways to set up the mesh network. Some wireless mesh networks require you to install a mobile App, others may need you to use the browser and operate on a specified page. You can choose the one that’s easy for you. V-SOL mesh WiFi system adopts the latter and we will introduce the process below.
Part III. How to set up mesh WiFi networks?
Different brands of mesh WiFi devices have their own mesh approaches via different technologies. They also use different set-up ways such as using an application and operating on a page. As a result, you can’t use different brands of mesh devices to set up the wireless network. In this part, we take V-SOL Wi-Fi EasyMesh networks for example to show you how to set up a Mesh WiFi network on a specified page.
Tips:
Wi-Fi EasyMesh networks is a mesh technology offered by the Wi-Fi organization’s opensource program. It’s easy to use and flexible, which helps provide smart and efficient WiFi.
Set up Wi-Fi EasyMesh Network:
Here we use V-SOL mesh WiFi HGU HG323AC-B as the main router (controller) and device HG3610ACM as the slave router (agent).
– Step 1: Enable EasyMesh function on both HGU and Slave Router according to instruction.
– Step 2: Setup EasyMesh controller
Press the WPS button, the HGU will be automatically enabled as EasyMesh Controller.
– Step 3: Setup EasyMesh agent
Login web, restore the device to default mode or press the reset button for more than 10 seconds to reboot the device. Then, press the WPS button for 3 seconds then release. The device HG3610ACM will be enabled as the EasyMesh agent.
– Step 4: Finish connection
It will take a few minutes for the EasyMesh network to generate. Once finishing the connection, the agent’s SSID name, psk, and other WLAN settings will be the same as the controller’s. If you change the controller’s SSID or other WLAN settings, the agent will sync the changes.
