how does mesh wifi work and how is it different from old school extenders?
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Wi-Fi devices like phones have a sort of tunnel vision to them. When you connect to a network, what your device is really doing is connecting to one specific access point that’s emitting a Wi-Fi signal. Once your device has locked-on, it has a death grip on that signal. It WILL NOT let go of *that specific* access point until you either force it to disconnect, or the signal genuinely goes to zero and stays there for some time. While it’s locked-on like this, your device will flat-out ignore every other access point in the vicinity, even if there are other ones nearby with stronger signals that it could switch to.
When you put an old school extender on your network, what you’re really doing is putting a second access point on your network. That way, when your phone looks up and sees the Wi-Fi networks, it will see two separate signals–one from the original access point, and one from the extender. You pick whichever one has the best signal and now your phone is locked-on.
Let’s say you are in the extender’s range when you connect. Now your phone is locked onto the extender. But then you move about your house or office or whatever and now the signal to the extender is not so good. But the signal to the other one is great now! Your phone should switch over, right? WRONG. It’s *locked-on*. Absolutely dead set on maintaining that death grip on the bad signal, unless you command your phone to drop it and switch over to the other one.
What a mesh system does differently is it essentially makes all the extenders wear funny masks that make them look exactly like the original access point, in a way that your device can’t tell them apart. When you connect to one of them, they mutter amongst themselves and decide who is physically closest to you, and whichever one gets selected will reach out to your device and establish a connection. Then, as you roam about the area and go in and out of the ranges of all the mesh extenders, they silently and seamlessly hand over the job of talking you your device, as they can detect who is the closest to you at any given time.
Essentially, mesh systems work the way you probably *expected* extenders to work all along.
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