Changing Technologies
The networks in our house keep evolving. In 2003 when the house was being built, I had the builder run CAT 5 cabling from six locations back to the electrical box, which was also where the cable TV line came in. Back then the cable company provided just a modem, we added a router. Everyone used wired Ethernet to connect computers to the outside world, and life was good.
Almost imperceptibly, Wi-Fi crept into our world. Our first adjustment was adding a router which had a Wi-Fi access point in my ground floor study, which allowed me to network a second computer, and provided Wi-Fi to the ground floor and slightly flaky Wi-Fi upstairs, which we mostly used to connect our phones.
At some point, the cable company replaced the modem-only device with a modem/router/Wi-Fi access point, but the Wi-Fi scarcely reached the room just above it, let alone the rest of the house. However, the Wi-Fi in my study still served. I was using the second router with DHCP disabled so only the main router in the basement assigned IP addresses in our network.
Paradise Lost
Sometime later, a Wi-Fi printer 10’ from the study router began acting up and the manufacturer could not find the cause, despite sending three replacements. Eventually I discovered it was a network problem – the printer was not dealing with network issues very well and spent so much time worrying about network errors nothing else got done. I replaced the router in the study, the printer seemed better, but then acted up again. I got the cable company to send a replacement cable modem, and that worked. As the study modem now seemed OK, I put it upstairs in our bedroom where there was a CAT5 cable outlet. That provided great Wi-Fi coverage on the back deck.
Meanwhile, we had increased Wi-Fi demands to three phones, two tablets, the thermostat, two printers, some streaming devices and two video cameras. Probably more. Then the printer (which seems to act like a canary in a coal mine) started acting up in a different way, and the cameras sometimes refused to stay connected reliably. I started losing the text of longer Facebook posts and having to retype them. (Which I originally blamed on FB, but I later realized the wi-Fi had dropped, causing the loss.) It was time to do something about Wi-Fi in our house.
Google Nest WiFi
With exquisitely bad timing (because a few months later Google came out with a new generation) I chose to install Google Mesh routers. The primary Google router gets wired to the cable modem and then all the Ethernet cables connect to the Google router via a switch. This lets a single router control the whole network. The other two mesh routers only deal with Wi-Fi and connect to the primary router by Wi-Fi. They cannot connect by Ethernet and they don’t provide an Ethernet port for wired devices to use.
Can’t get there from here
The problem was that you will recall that all the network bits terminate at the electrical panel. In the most remote corner at the front of the house. Most of the Wi-Fi needs are at the back of the house. Some experimentation quickly determined that the next router would need to be in the living room or the dining room – not the most inhabited parts of the house. That wouldn’t matter too much from a network point of view, but the devices also function as a smart speakers, so that would not be very functional there if it wasn’t within hearing distance of the living areas.
The main google router needed to be wired to both the cable modem and to a switch with the wired Ethernet cables. They can’t really be moved from the electrical panel. And yet the google main router needed to be much closer to the front of the house. After much head scratching, I had an epiphany and solved the problem with two 50’ Ethernet cables to replace the 3’ cables I was using before. Now I could move the main router almost to the back of the house. That was in easy reach of the second mesh router and the third went upstairs.
Problems gone
This may be tempting fate, but we now have very few Wi-Fi problems. The front camera could probably use a stronger signal, but everything else (including the “canary”) is working well. File and device sharing between computers is working again as well!
I have come to the conclusion that my previous solution, using three separate “dumb” Wi-Fi access points led to each one trying to optimise the way it worked independently, which as often as not would create signal contention with another one. The mesh protocol lets each point “talk” to the others so that the best channels can be allocated on each router to meet the current demands without impacting the others.
Bottom line, if you are having issues in your smart home and nothing seems to “just work” the way other people claim to experience, look to your Wi-Fi setup. I thought mine was pretty advanced, but it’s what you don’t know that will get you.
Advanced Tech
For the real techies in the audience, it seems that I could get an incremental improvement by asking the cable company to turn off Wi-Fi on their router and to put it in bridge mode. So far, I have seen no need to do this, and I like the backup of just connecting the cable modem/router to my switch to get at least the wired portion back up if the google router fails. Or maybe I just haven’t got around to doing it and that is just a rationalization.
The next generation of Google routers CAN each be wired, so any place that we have a cable end, we could put a router, regardless of whether it was getting a good wi-fi signal from another router. So today the install could be simpler for me. For the majority of homes which do not have Ethernet cable runs, that doesn’t make any difference.
Thanks to the author of this post, which answered most of my questions.
Low Tech
Meanwhile, I have two relatively new routers with no home to go to and no takers on Kijiji. And if anyone wants to think I was very smart to pre-wire the house with CAT5 in 2003, I also had telephone wires put in everywhere. Anyone remember wired telephones?