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Hands-On Tech 267: Wireless Access Points vs. Mesh
00:22:32
Home Network Setup Advice
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Coming up on Hands On Tech. It's a category we all love. It's home networking. Stay tuned for this episode of Hands On Tech. This is Twit. Hello and welcome to Hands On Tech. I am Micah Sargent and as is always the way of this show and of me, I guess you I should remind you can email me hot TV when you have questions. But yeah, someone already has and that's what I'll be doing today is answering their question on the show. We got a question in from George who is asking about home networking. As George is preparing to get things up and running in the home, George says, I am getting ready to do some ethernet cable runs around the house and I'm considering an upgrade to my WI fi router system at the same time we have a multiple floor house so coverage can and be challenging. It seems I have two options. Either do a mesh router system or install multiple WI FI access points with the same network ID and password. I would use the mesh system, but I don't love the cloud based system that a mesh router employs. Am I being paranoid? Are the mesh systems significantly more usable and are not susceptible to cloud issues? I am fairly adept technologically, so the access point option is not a big deal for me. Is there an advantage to running multiple access points like in an office environment? If I want to do the multiple access point setup, now is the time when I run the ethernet cables. Really interested in what you think about this. Oh George, I'm so glad you've asked this question before you've gone through with it because frankly the short answer is you're not being paranoid. Multiple wired access points that are wireless themselves is the better setup. If you are running ethernet, a wired AP system will outperform a mesh system in all almost every single way. Throughput, latency, roaming, longevity, all of those are superior when you're using a wired AP system. And that is because mesh systems exist primarily to solve the problem that you're about to eliminate by pulling cable. Mesh systems are the in between of having one router in the home that is supposed to provide network access across the house. But you want it to be better. How can we do that? That is where mesh comes in. If you can't run a bunch of ethernet cable all over the place. But the full true solution is this wired access point system. Why? Well, it has to do with using wireless backhaul of your mesh network. Okay, what does that mean? Well, satellite nodes, those devices that you have throughout the home and the main router have to use the same airtime as your client devices. So what does that mean? Well, it means that sort of there's only a limited amount for the pedants out there in our current understanding of and use of and the sort functional outcome of WI Fi, there's only a limited amount of bandwidth and a limited amount of ability to communicate with devices to send and receive signals. Right. And so if you have wireless mesh nodes, then they have to use half of the bandwidth to be able to, to send signal to and from that main, that main device. Part of the, the, the part of the brain within this node is being devoted entirely to phoning home and making sure that home knows what's going on, because it has to. That's the only way that you can actually get the, you know, whatever it is you're trying to watch to get that YouTube video to load. When every AP has its own dedicated ethernet run back to the switcher router, then each one is able to deliver full wireless performance to clients in its zone. It doesn't need to use some of that for backhaul. So instead of having to devote part of it to communicating with the thing that has the actual Internet connection, that cable provides that back and forth connection to home. And that way it can use all of its wifi magic to devote to connecting to your devices. So that is why a wired access point is better than a wireless access point. There's another aspect though, because there's actually sort of a third. If we think of the traditional one router with a bunch of antennas, wireless router with a bunch of antennas on it option as the standard default. And then on the complete other side is, you know, you go to a hospital for example, and you see those little pucks on the ceiling and a business environment, same thing, those wired access points that's over here. And then I said in the middle was the mesh, right? It was the step up from just the one router. There's actually technically another option that's a little bit closer to the business environment. And it is how I have things set up in my home, which is that I am using mesh networking, but I am plugging in via ethernet those nodes so that they can do backhaul over the ethernet cable. So it's technically turning them into wired access points, however, because it's not a classic wired access point company and it's mesh networking, some of the things you're still not getting. So let me talk about what you do get. If you do, if you go the wired access point way with business class Access points like Ubiquiti, Unifi, TP Links, Omada, Aruba's, Instant on and then Engenius. Those support what's called 802.11 K, 802.11V, 802.11R. And this helps client devices handoff cleanly between APs as you walk through the house. So that means that where you may. I've seen this happen in my home. Even though I've got the wired backhaul going and I've got everything set up as professionally as I can with my eero. There are times where I will walk down a flight of stairs and it takes a moment to switch over to the next access point and I suddenly notice some buffering issues business class APs try to solve for this. There's also per access point tuning. So that means that each of those access, you can set the channels that you use on there, you can decide how much power is pushed through them. You can change band steering so that there's not interference between floors. I mean you have so much control. I do not have that level of control with my EERO devices. So even though I have improved connectivity by plugging an ethernet cable into all of my access points, it's still not quite that step up where you have so much control over it. There's also VLANs, virtual LANs and guest networks that are more powerful because you get true segmentation for IoT, true segmentation for a guest network. You could also have special work devices network, et cetera. Plus, and this is I think very important. A good access point is going to run for 7 to 10 plus years. Whereas consumer mesh systems, they do, they get abandoned in three to four years. And when they have cloud services, while those cloud services get sunsetted and then the devices get bricked and not. They, they get shut down and they're not usable anymore. Oh dear. Modern lingo anyway. And then lastly local control. With most of these prosumer AP ecosystems, you can actually do everything that you want to on your local area network and you don't have to have a cloud account. That's another issue that we have with eero. So I recently, I think I've talked about this before on the show. When I first moved here and got fiber, I set up my EERO with the fiber company here. And at the time it's, it's a long story, but essentially the way that the fiber company Once assigned IPs, the method for doing so was different than what it is now. And so at the time and it also did this thing called VLAN tagging that was not user accessible. The point is, there were things about it that made it so using my EEROS as the IP assigning tool, the DHCP was not possible. I had to have my router in what's called bridge mode and instead let the company's device serve as the IP assigner in my local area network. But because of that, it meant that a lot of the cool things that my EERO setup could do I was not able to do. The filtering, the ad blocking, the dynamic DNS options, all sorts of stuff I was not able to do. And honestly, that kind of bothered me. Right. Finally, recently, the company that I get my Internet from was acquired by AT&T. And in doing so, they switched over to a more modern means of network stuff. That's what we'll go with. And it gave me the ability to set up my EERO finally as the true router in the home. But I had to go without Internet for a short period of time as I sort of unplugged and replugged and set up different settings and enabled VLAN tagging on the. On the special unit from Fiber. But everything else was coming. So many different little settings. But here was the problem. You were talking about being paranoid about cloud access. With good reason, because cloud access was required for the eero. And so if I didn't already have the, it's required to set up a new ero. Okay? And so if I didn't already have that set up, if this was like my first time setting up a new EERO in a new home and I didn't have Internet access, I wouldn't have been able to do it. That's annoying. That's a problem. That is something that you can avoid by doing this, because most of these AP ecosystems managed entirely on your lan. You don't need a cloud account to do so. So Eero, Google, Nest, wi, fi, they do have cloud dependency set up. Ongoing management, even basic settings sometimes require an account and an Internet connection. If the vendor goes under, if gets acquired, if it decides to paywall features, then you're stuck. And then also you have to be mindful that there's every chance that telemetry is being sent to the owner, the vendor of your router. Hey, let's take a quick break here because this episode of Hands on Deck is brought to you by Melissa, the trusted data quality expert since 1985. 84%. That is the percentage of organizations that struggle with inaccurate or duplicate data, which impacts everything from fraud prevention to AI performance, Melissa has been solving this for going on 41 years now. Here's what that means for your business. Global Address Verification, which validates and standardizes addresses across more than 240 countries. Mobile identity verification, which matches customers to mobile numbers, cuts fraud and opens SMS channels. On average, A database contains 8 to 10% duplicate records. Melissa's matchup technology can identify non exact matching duplicate records that would traditionally be missed. 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Melissa's solutions and services are GDPR and CCPA compliant, FedRamp and ISO 27001 certified and meet SOC2 and HIPAA high Trust standards for information security management. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissa.com TWIT that's melissa.com TWIT thank you Melissa for sponsoring this week's episode of Hands on Tech. Let's get back to the show. Now I will say it isn't the case that all mesh networking is cloud locked. Asus has, I think it's called Imesh, it's Aimesh. But it's not as an artificial intelligence, it's a lowercase I I mesh. And then Synology also has a mesh system that can all be run locally. But if you're pulling Gable, do this. Yes, absolutely do this. Get full on wired access points throughout your home because this is just such a good way to go. So what do we need to do here? You know, maybe you've already started running or you've already picked up the cable that you want, in which case you know it's moved on past this. But if you haven't run Cat 6 or Cat 6A, don't use Cat 5E and frankly you know greater than Cat 6 is overkill. But it if you do Cat 6A, then what you're doing is you are making sure you're ready for the next step up in home Internet when that comes. And why not just be ahead of the game? It's a little bit more expensive, but hey, why not? You also want to pull two cables to each of the locations if the wall is open, one for the AP and one as a spare. Because you just want to do it while you have this option. It's going to be so much more annoying later if you have to run this cable, right? Don't take the risk of having to go in and do this all over again at some point in the future when you have the option to do so. Now. You know, pulling two cables might seem like overkill as well. But what was I talking about earlier, about those of us who are techie, right? We, we want to have backup plan after backup plan and I think this is one that's worth running. And I think people. My dad was a cable guy and he, you know, would climb the poles and fix the things, but then he would also go in and do installs and he would talk about how when they were doing installs in new builds that were, you know, still being built, that the dual cables was sort of the default. But he would have to sometimes get called to a place where someone was, you know, trying to hang a TV on the wall or something and they ended up drilling through a cable and then they had to pull drywall off the wall in order like it's just a nightmare. So have that spare. You also want to plan AP your access point locations as much as possible on the ceiling of central rooms or hallways. You don't want them in the corners, you definitely don't want them in closets. And honestly probably only need one access point per floor for a multi floored home. Unless you have huge, huge, huge, huge floors that. And you're also worried about, you know, I don't know, chicken wire in the walls or something. So obviously it'll depend on your personal setup and what you're dealing with signal wise. But one access point in a central room on each floor is a good place to start. And then lastly, get a POE switch that's power over ethernet so that the APs are powered over the same ethernet run. That way you don't have to run a wall wart to each of those from power to each of those APs, right? Instead they're all powered by that one cable and it's just clean. It's nice, it's clever. I don't know why POE just really speaks to me. One cable to do both things is just, oh, I love a multi use Cable Next there are some different options for you. Ubiquiti very popular. The Unifi system. It's the most popular prosumer choice. Great hardware. People say the interface is really nice. Importantly, it can be self hosted. You can even host it on a Raspberry PI. It does not have mandatory cloud requirements and there's a lot of not just actual support out there, but also by that I mean support from the company, but there's also a lot of support from other people who love using their Ubiquiti devices in their home. There's also TP Link, Omada, kind of like Unifi, it is less expensive, also supports local control. And then there's Aruba Instant on, which is a business class option, easy to manage. Does have a cloud option, but the APs can work on their own. So ultimately dear I think that was George. Yeah, George, you're not being paranoid when you're talking about whether you want to do mesh or wired access points. In fact, you're being thoughtful. You're explaining in your home the exact scenario where wired access points are the right call. Pull that cable, get that poe switch, get two or three business class APs and in that way you're going to have a network that's going to last you a lot longer. In fact, like three generations of mesh systems will probably go past. I go to the EERO page once a month and there's some new EERO available for purchase. And in the meantime Ubiquiti just keeps offering great wired access points that you can put in your home and set it and forget it. So yeah, this is the way to go, George. And I think that unless I haven't gotten to your question in time and you've already run the cable and you've decided not to go with the wired access points, then this is the way to do it. And great question that you've written in with. Alrighty folks, that brings us to the end of this episode of Hands On Tech. If you have a tech question you would like answered, email us Hotwit tv I also want to remind you about Club Twit at Twit tv. Club Twit. That is where you can go to join the club. You can also use the QR code in the top corner there. Doing so will let you sign up for the club. $10 a month, $120 a year. When you join the club, you'll gain access to some awesome every single one of our shows ad free. You also gain access to special feeds we have a behind the scenes before the show. After the show feed we have a feed that has our live coverage of tech news events like the upcoming WWDC just around the corner and access to our feed that has our shows like My Crafting Corner, Our Club Shows, My Crafting Corner, Stacy's Book Club, Coffee Time, Photo Time, and so much more. If you haven't joined the club yet, now's the time. You can also become a member of our Discord, a fun place to go to chat with your fellow Club TWiT members and those of us here at TWiT. Join the Club TWiT TV Club TWiT. We can't wait to see you. Thanks everybody for tuning in this week to Hands on Tech. I'll be back next week with another episode, but until then, goodbye.
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