All about Mesh Networks and improving Wi-Fi infrastructure

All about Mesh Networks and improving Wi-Fi infrastructure

In today’s world it is very important to stay connect with the world through your devices. Hence the connection of the device  with the use of Wi-Fi infrastructure is very imperative and important more so in qualitative terms rather than quantitative. Here is an article that throws light on mesh networks and why they are important to improve your Wi-Fi infrastructure at home, office, or outdoors.

Ubiquiti’s mission is to give you unbeatable value, performance, and usability through our networking devices, including routers, access points, switches, firewall gateways, IP cameras and point-to-point radios that keep you connected for 100km+. 

Why is Meshing Important?

Most people have heard of Wi-Fi “Range Extenders” or “Boosters”. These devices extend the range of your existing network by rebroadcasting its own signal letting your Wi-Fi cover a greater area. However, users often run into connectivity issues because these devices don’t actually talk to each other and your phone or computer doesn’t know which access point to connect to for the strongest connection. As a result your client devices keep switching their connections between the router and the extender. In the case of a device like a mobile phone, your phone doesn’t automatically switch networks as you walk around but instead it “sticks” to one device and stays connected to that even if other devices offer better connectivity signal. This leads to poor Wi-Fi experiences.

Here is where mesh networking comes in. Mesh devices are intelligent and communicate with each other to create a web-like net of coverage that can keep expanding as you add more devices. In a typical mesh network, there is one “base” access point (AP) which then wirelessly connects to other mesh devices. All these devices are constantly communicating with each other to decide which one should connect to your phone or computer to give you the best possible performance. Mesh networks are especially useful when you cannot or do not want to run ethernet cables to connect your devices.

Wireless Uplinks with UniFi Mesh

Good News! All latest UniFi devices support wireless uplinks. Wireless Uplink allows any supported access point with a wired data connection to act as a Base Station/Uplink AP for up to four other access points on a single band. APs can be adopted and configured in the free UniFi controller via the Wireless Uplink connection. Once configured, the wireless access points can broadcast SSIDs and relay network traffic to and from client devices through the uplinked AP. The UniFi Mesh access points also let you create wireless “hops” – enabling wirelessly downlinked Mesh APs to also act as an uplink to other access points. Wireless uplinks will almost always result in throughput losses for the wirelessly uplinked APs. Therefore, we don’t recommend using wireless uplinks when traditional wired connections are feasible.

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