Building a wireless LAN without laying cables, advantages and disadvantages of "mesh Wi-Fi"

Mesh Wi-Fi is another technology that supports the construction of corporate wireless LANs. Mesh Wi-Fi is a technology that overturns "common sense" in a sense. Until now, even with a wireless LAN, it was necessary to lay a LAN cable from the LAN switch to the wireless LAN access point (AP).

Wiring work to pass LAN cables under the floor or in the ceiling was costly and time consuming, and was a hindrance to AP installation. If you use mesh Wi-Fi, you can install and add APs without laying LAN cables.

To use a wireless LAN in a place where a LAN cable could not be laid, there was no choice but to use a repeater to extend the reach of radio waves. However, a repeater cannot perform complicated route control.

Since the route from the terminal to the AP is fixed, even if an AP on the route fails, it is not possible to avoid it by using another route. Also, since it does not support handover, the connection will be interrupted if the terminal goes out of the range of radio waves of the repeater.

Mesh Wi-Fi eliminates these shortcomings of repeaters. Mesh Wi-Fi builds a network between Wi-Fi routers (children). The major difference from repeaters is that each child device calculates the optimal route and communicates.

If a failure occurs on the route or there is a place with a high communication load, you can avoid it and continue communication on another route. With handover, even if the connection with the child device is lost due to the movement of the terminal, it can automatically connect to another child device and continue communication.

Mesh Wi-Fi has been strongly associated with home use, but some vendors have begun to sell devices that are aimed at businesses. Netgear, for example, offers a mesh Wi-Fi device for businesses called the Orbi Pro. "We have improved the hardware specifications to improve the processing performance and make it compatible with business applications," said Toshio Watanabe, Netgear Japan Sales Manager.

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