Did you know the average person spends nearly seven hours online every single day? Over a third of our time is spent online: shopping, gaming, streaming, socializing, and learning. There’s nothing more annoying than experiencing slow WiFi or buffering while you’re surfing the web, which is why it’s more important than ever to have a fast, reliable internet connection. That’s where a WiFi mesh network comes in.
With a mesh network, you can move freely through your space without worrying about slowing down or losing your connection. Wireless mesh networks ensure all your devices stay connected by expanding your WiFi coverage with improved reliability.
What exactly is a WiFi mesh network?
While a traditional WiFi network relies on a single router, a mesh network employs multiple WiFi sources placed around your home or small business. These devices are called points or nodes, and they wirelessly connect to each other without a router. Each node broadcasts WiFi from its location, providing greater coverage than you might get from a standard router.
The more nodes you have, the greater your network footprint will be. This makes wireless mesh networks a great choice for large single-family homes, multifamily buildings, and small businesses.
What are the benefits of a WiFi mesh network?
Thinking about making the switch to a wireless mesh network? Let’s go over some of the benefits, such as additional coverage, flexibility, high levels of parental controls, security, and optimized streaming.
Reliable coverage
Because WiFi mesh networks are scalable, they help provide more consistent coverage throughout each room of your home or business. It’s easy to bring additional nodes into hard-to-cover areas, such as a garage, basement, or attic, for example. Are you trying to extend coverage to your porch or patio? A mesh network can handle that, too! Unlike WiFi range extenders, extra nodes provide greater coverage without reducing bandwidth or speed. So no matter where you’re working or streaming, you’re always covered.
Flexibility and adaptability
The benefits of mesh networks don’t stop at coverage. Because each node is connected to several other nodes, they offer increased reliability. When a traditional router goes offline, the entire network is affected. But if a single mesh network node goes down, your WiFi will be rerouted through another point. You can also secure your WiFi to make sure your personal information is kept safe and secure.
Having the flexibility of several nodes provides the flexibility of routing traffic between the gateway and device in many ways. Rather than trying to go through a particularly bad obstacle, multiple nodes can find a path around it.
Parental controls
There are four different levels of parental access that help protect young children and teenagers from content you don’t want them to see. With parental control, you can:
- Assign devices to each family member so you can easily apply content access rules to all their devices at once.
- Apply content rules to specific devices.
- Schedule device freeze to set limits on when family members have internet access.
- Give a person or specific device a short timeout when needed to help family members use social media mindfully.
Limiting your childrens’ access to online content can also protect them from cyberbullying, which can occur via text message, social media, online forums, and video games. Check out our top three internet safety tips to stop cyberbullying.
Security
Online security on mesh networks leverages a global threat intelligence service as a starting point to protect the network.
- 360 WiFi product: Blocks device communication with untrusted domains, known to host malware, bots, phishing, spam and other harmful code. It protects the network from harmful attacks by continuously scanning for threat level detection.
- Advanced IoT Protection: Monitors the behaviors of smart home devices and quarantines them from the network if they access a previously unknown domain. It safeguards the entire network from being affected through the most vulnerable of your connected devices.
- Ad Blocking: Blocks known ad servers from web and video advertisements on any device.
Streaming
If you or someone in your household is a gamer, a WiFi mesh network is a great option for internet coverage. The system should support households running four simultaneous 4K streaming sessions. And when the system is under high-capacity load, low bandwidth applications can be run so you maintain coverage.
Find answers to your questions about 360 WiFi or learn more ways to get the most out of your home technology by exploring the articles on the Quantum Fiber blog.
