At the end of last year, I worked on the ‘Network is Slow’ Project which culminated in several changes to the home networking. What did not change was the WiFi mesh system I was using. I had four of the first-generation Google WiFi access points spread around the house. In the past six months, I have started noticing a general degradation in the quality of the WiFi speed. This would frequently happen once per day where the only fix was a reboot of the base system. I suspect that the quality of the updates has gone down since Google laid off tens of thousands of employees, but that’s likely baseless speculation.
The next step in fixing the WiFi situation was to replace the Google WiFi with a different mesh system. I had many people advocating for Unity equipment. I scouted the possibility of running ethernet up to the second floor, but given the number of floors, walls, and attic partitions, this would end up being a lot of work. I decided the work was too much for me especially since we had just wrapped up all of the wall and ceiling patching we had outstanding. Since I decided to not run more ethernet and I did not want to take on the hobby of network administrator, I went with the NETGEAR Orbi Whole Home Tri-band Mesh WiFi 6 which would reduce the number of access points to two. I figured I only needed two as most of the items in the basement are hardwired now. The primary access point would be hardwired on the first floor and the second would be a wireless mesh connection but would allow the second floor office to be directly hardwired into the secondary access point.
When I installed the new networking gear, I thought it would be clever to create an entirely new network name and password, and then slowly and intentionally migrate over devices. I had moved many of the primary devices over and unplugged the old networking gear. This proved to be a bad decision as there were so many devices I had not considered that required network access - cameras, smoke detectors, appliances, entertainment devices, etc. The quick calculus on time to reconnect these items versus just renaming my new network to the old name led me to go with the easy solution. Inside the application for the WiFi router, I wanted to name all of the devices so I could better understand access. My favorite device I had to track down was one named “Universal Global Scientific Industrial” which sounds like a committee of supervillains had named it. Turns out it was the oven.
The project was a success and there have been no more complaints about the network. I think the combination of bigger antennas, fewer mesh devices, and the newer WiFi spec have been a boost to overall household internet satisfaction.