WiFi Mesh: Preventing dead spots

As WiFi becomes evermore ubiquitous throughout all of our day-to-day lives, so too does it become more important for this WiFi connection to be strong, reliable and convenient to use. However, one of the most common and constant complaints about WiFi is how weak and unreliable it can be in large environments and when the WiFi source is located multiple rooms away or behind obstructions, especially when these obstructions are materials such as brick and metal (common in domestic and industrial environments alike).

WiFi meshes are becoming one of the most popular solutions for getting around this issue, and for good reason. A WiFi mesh works by having multiple devices all broadcasting WiFi, and all connecting to each other via this same wireless signal. The ease in which this allows a WiFi signal to be rebroadcasted remotely from the WiFi source point without any special equipment or having to run Ethernet cables makes it an extremely attractive option for a wide variety of networks operators, from domestic houses to industrial sites to public facing hospitality institutions.

A side benefit of a WiFi mesh is that, unlike in a typical unmanaged wired LAN where each WiFi AP will be broadcasting a separate SSID, every separate 'node' in a mesh network broadcasts a shared SSID and password, allowing for seamless roaming as a client device moves from one location to another and enters the range of another node in the network. This is hugely convenient for domestic scenarios and is starting to become essential in many public network environments due to expectations from the public, who do not anticipate having to connect to multiple different WiFi SSIDs at one institution.

All WiFi-supporting Teltonika routers now support a wireless meshing mode, where one device will act as the gateway (being connected directly to a WAN input and hosting a DHCP server) while the other routers in the mesh act as simple AP nodes. A particular advantage of using Teltonika routers in this way is that there is not one single point-of-failure - if the gateway router in a Teltonika mesh network happens to go down for whatever reason, any other Teltonika router can immediately act as the new gateway node in its place and keep the network operating smoothly.

For further information have a read of Teltonika's article: "How to fix WiFi dead spots with WiFi Mesh technology"

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Author: Daniel Coombs