SPONSORED: Don't Get Caught In The Wireless Mesh

[thiggins]

Most "mesh" Wi-Fi systems have a weakness you should know about.

Read on SmallNetBuilder

 

[Nullity]

Whatever happened to TDLS? This technology seems like it could really help, especially with mesh's backhaul limitations, yet I've seen nothing mentioned about TDLS in consumer-grade wireless for years.

 

[sfx2000]

Whatever happened to TDLS? This technology seems like it could really help, especially with mesh's backhaul limitations, yet I've seen nothing mentioned about TDLS in consumer-grade wireless for years.

No strong industry consensus with TDLS - so we get things like WiFi Direct, Miracast, Apple Wireless Direct Link and so forth..

 

[pete y testing]

this maybe a sponsored blog post but its factual and to the point , as tim and others have found out even the best mesh system cant compete with orbi as the second best solution other than ethernet and access points

pete

 

[snapilica2003]

So in the end, what is the actual improvement made by systems such as eero or Luma when you connect them with ethernet backhaul versus a traditional AP setup? Do they do some extra magic with client handover?

 

[superjet]

With all these wireless mesh products whats going to happen when you and your neighbors all around you have one? Is it assumed because the range on AC radios doesnt penetrate as well that its going to not be an issue using so much radio in one house?

 

[RamGuy]

Shouldn't be much of a issue if you are living in house. Especially with 5.0GHz you should not be interfering with neighbours all that much, if at all. When living in a apartment building / complex on the other hand things might start to become messy if every is about to start trashing a lot of bands for each apartment. With that said, most apartments in apartment buildings and complexes are all that large so I highly doubt mesh networking is something to consider to begin with.

But yeah. It seems like companies like Eero and Google amongst others are trying to sell mesh networking like it's some kind of magic sauce that can get rid of all your WiFi troubles. That sounds foolish to my ears. With the rather massive limitations in terms of performance/bandwidth when going through "hoops" I can't see this as a solution to anything other than "edge cases" where performance isn't really of any issue.

I do have mesh networking of sorts myself as I have a collection of five Sonos speakers in my apartment. And for something like Sonos it makes perfect sense as ease of use and ease of placement is king and audio doesn't really require much bandwidth. The Sonos system seems to feature a rather huge caching capability as well making it even less reliant on bandwidth.

But for computer use? Not so much. What happens when someone is streaming high bandwidth Netflix, YouTube, downloading when connect at the far end of you mesh network?

 

[thiggins]

Mesh is just another tool in the box and has its strengths and weaknesses, as do other approaches.

It can be effective at improving coverage is bandwidth requirements are modest. It's certainly more effective than trading up to a higher class router and hoping for some minor RF performance improvement.

Broadcom is missing the boat by not releasing firmware enabling per-radio bridging on its tri-radio platform. They could give Orbi some competition pretty quickly.

 

[pete y testing]

Broadcom is missing the boat by not releasing firmware enabling per-radio bridging on its tri-radio platform. They could give Orbi some competition pretty quickly.

3rd party fw coders might see a new reason to exist in accomplishing that very thing if it where possible

 

[System Error Message]

lol the title change. Still it is nice that some companies are actually trying to tell people the best way to set up a wifi network.

 

[thiggins]

3rd party fw coders might see a new reason to exist in accomplishing that very thing if it where possible

RMerlin has already looked at this. Broadcom doesn't support it and the code is pretty locked down.

 

[RMerlin]

RMerlin has already looked at this. Broadcom doesn't support it and the code is pretty locked down.

One thing I haven't tried yet is recompiling the firmware enabling some of the disabled options and see what happens with those supposedly "unsupported" features. For instance, there's a setting called "concurrent repeater mode" that Asus enables only on their line of repeater products. It's possible that Broadcom might have fixed/enabled some of the incompatible features at the SDK level over the past updates, but Asus never re-enabled them at the firmware level. It's happened before (like the missing BCM4360 support that BCM eventually added to SDK7).

But I'm fairly sure that, in the end, there's no reason preventing Broadcom from making it work. It's indeed a golden opportunity for them to leverage the existing products, and greatly increase the usefulness of their XStream platform.

 

[sfx2000]

Broadcom is missing the boat by not releasing firmware enabling per-radio bridging on its tri-radio platform. They could give Orbi some competition pretty quickly.

Reasonably certain that won't happen with current chipsets - at least not for ones already deployed in the field based on how Broadcom works within the WiFi chipset firmware (which is hidden from the drivers and router SoC)...

Perhaps if business needs require it - but at the moment, their BHR business seems to be the right place for them - and they've got issues to solve there in any event... (mostly wrapped around MU)