This is Technology Bytes, episode 83 for October 6th, 2024.
Technology Bytes is a microcast where I share brief bytes on interesting technology.
Enjoy, and here we go.
So this week I am talking about mesh Wi-Fi, and so it really is a follow-on from last week.
I know last week I talked about what I’d like to do and what I was thinking about doing and what I might have the money to do.
And I get money, I spend money because I’m the Apple account holder for my entire family.
And so this money goes out of my credit card, and then my family pays me back, and that goes into my Apple Cash card.
Well, I rarely use that Apple Cash to pay my credit card.
I use the money that I make and the money that my wife makes to make those credit card payments.
And so we end up having cash in our Apple Cash account that looks like free money.
We know it isn’t.
We’ve spent that money, but it feels like it might be.
And so I had a little bit of money in there, and I thought maybe I can pull the trigger on getting a mesh system and see if that fixes my Wi-Fi issue.
And because I am that kind of compulsory, impulsive, whatever the word is, purchaser, buyer, I ended up with a mesh system.
And I bought the Deco unit.
It’s an AXE5300.
It’s a tri-band Wi-Fi 6E.
Wi-Fi 7 is a little bit out of my money range at the moment, and I really don’t have anything that uses it anyway.
And this particular setup comes with three units, which I thought was plenty big enough.
My house is not that big.
It does have an upstairs, which adds to some Wi-Fi challenges.
And my current Wi-Fi setup has my router in the far corner from my main bedroom in the house.
And so those are some of the things that I talked about last week.
So now with this mesh unit, I’ve got the house fairly well bathed in Wi-Fi, including the garage, which is out in front of my house, not really connected to it.
I have to go through two doors, my entry door and then a door going into the garage.
And so all of that being said, it seems like this Wi-Fi mesh has answered a few of the questions and created solutions to a couple of the problems.
And so I’ll talk about that in the next few minutes.
So, again, if you remember my conversation from last week, I often have connectivity problems in the main bedroom in our house.
And it’s funny because the signal on my iPhone, on my Apple TV, on my iPad seems to be pretty good.
But when I look at the signal of my smart outlets, they’re right outside my front door as well as my smart doorbell.
Occasionally, those signals are quite weak, like under 50 percent.
And so with this mesh unit, that has all gone away.
And the coverage out to my car, which is parked right in front of my house, into the garage where my wife parks.
And just outside of the garage has been very helpful.
So when I get in my car, I can actually say this is where I want to go to work.
And Apple Maps does its thing because just days before I got the mesh, I would have to wait till I got out to the street.
I don’t know why AT&T stopped working at my house.
It doesn’t make sense why that changed, but it has.
And now this Wi-Fi has really solved some of those problems for us.
So for the next few minutes, well, let’s suffice it to say that I’m happy.
I was planning on talking about how it worked at the end of my microcast, but apparently I got into that early.
So I’m super happy with it.
My wife is super happy with it.
It has great controls.
It has very good login notifications and gives you reports of who’s been on your Wi-Fi and for how long and which units are using the most data, all of those things.
And so it’s pretty cool, even though I’ve only had it for a little less than a week.
So let’s talk about setup.
One of the things that I talked about last week was my belief that if I use the same SSID and if I use the same password, that all of my devices would connect to my mesh without having to be reconnected.
I don’t know why I thought that.
I thought that some podcasts I listened to with network guys had said that.
I just, in my head, it felt right because if a unit in my house is looking for a Wi-Fi and both of them are named the same and the password is the same, I just felt like it would connect without too much issue.
And boy, was I wrong.
And so I don’t know if it’s because when I set up my mesh system, my DecoMesh and gave it the same SSID and gave it the same password, my Cox Wi-Fi was still on and maybe that was what’s causing confusion.
And then when I turned the Cox Wi-Fi off, everything just didn’t transfer to the new Wi-Fi setup.
And that was a pain, but it’s over now.
I got through it.
And then the one thing that I learned is I couldn’t figure out in my Cox router how to turn the Wi-Fi off.
I didn’t see anywhere in the settings in the Cox Wi-Fi app anywhere where I could just turn the Cox Wi-Fi off.
So what I ended up doing is giving it a separate SSID, hiding that Wi-Fi system from the public, and then changing my password.
So then the only way you can connect to that Wi-Fi is if you know what it’s called, and then if you know the new password, then you could do it.
But there’s no reason to do that because my new Wi-Fi mesh is way better, way stronger, and has the same setup that I had before.
So that was a little bit of a challenge.
And then the one thing in setting up, it was fairly simple because the instructions were fairly simple.
It’s so funny because the instructions were in a couple of different places, and it said, turn off your router.
So that’s basically your Internet router.
They didn’t know that that’s a combination router Wi-Fi system from Cox.
But they’re like, turn it off, plug in the first unit of the DECO system, and then turn them both on, and plug the DECO into the Ethernet port of the router from your service provider.
And so that all went very smoothly.
And in fact, I have a little switch that I had plugged into my Cox router before.
And so I plugged that into the DECO unit, and then plugged the DECO unit into the Cox Wi-Fi router, and then booted everything up.
It came up, it asked me what I wanted to create my new Wi-Fi.
I set it up exactly the same as I told you I was going to do, thinking that would help me with some of the things that might go haywire, which again, it didn’t.
And so that worked really well.
Then it tells me to plug in the other units that I have, and I had two, so I put one up in my bedroom.
I put one at the bottom of the stairs so that it could reach out into the garage area, and turned them both on, and the one in the bedroom was found almost immediately.
But the one at the bottom of my stairs was really problematic.
I ended up doing a firmware update because it was available, and then it would come on, and then it would go off, it would come on and go off.
And finally, after unplugging it for a minute, plugging it back in, everybody found each other, they were all happy, and it’s been solid ever since.
That one unit, even though it had initial trouble getting connected and forming that mesh, once it did, it has been rock solid.
No issues there whatsoever.
So the one thing that I have noticed is that it’s just Wi-Fi.
You don’t notice anything really different.
I just know that there’s never any connectivity issues, that I’ve got Wi-Fi places where I was having trouble before, and now I’m not.
I’m super happy with the unit.
It wasn’t all that expensive, but they are still expensive, and I think it’s a better solution than the single unit that I was thinking about getting, even though you can get those in a fairly strong signal type.
And I think that the ability to control the Wi-Fi is really paramount to what I need to do for my house.
So let’s talk about the smart things for a minute.
I had to reconnect every smart thing in my house, and that took all of Sunday afternoon.
Light switches, smart plugs, lights, you name it, garage door opener, smart locks.
That’s interesting there, because my smart locks actually did connect to the new Wi-Fi, and they didn’t give me any trouble at all.
I don’t know why they were the only ones that did that.
Although my Hue system worked because I have my Hue hub hardwired into my router, and it talks to all the Hue lights, and so that worked flawlessly as well.
So the one thing that I was struggling with a little bit is to get my Internet of Things connected to the new Wi-Fi.
And the reason is because many of them only use the 2.4 gigahertz, 2.4, 2.5, whatever, gigahertz radio, and sometimes they get confused by the 5 gigahertz.
And so I struggled with that a little bit, but the nice thing about this mesh system is I could go in, turn off the 5 gigahertz radio, and then set up all my smart home things on that 2.4 gigahertz.
And it really worked fairly well.
The Wi-Fi 6 does not come into play, except probably I’m hoping it’s the backhaul that’s being used, because I don’t have anything that’s Wi-Fi 6 connected except for my iPhone.
And the way that the Deco sets up their system is they don’t let anything really connect to the Wi-Fi 6 like they do for the 5 and the 2.4.
And it has worked quite well.
So a little bit of struggle with my Internet of Things, but once they were on, video doorbell, my switches and everything, it took, like I said, quite a number of hours to set that up.
But it’s been rock solid.
I’ve had no loss of connection.
We’ll see what happens over time, because every once in a while, my morass units just decide not to talk to the Internet.
And I haven’t quite figured that out, but I’m hoping that that stops with this Wi-Fi mesh, because there’s never a time when that signal shouldn’t be quite strong.
So to sum it up, did it work?
Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, it worked.
And as I mentioned at the end, it worked very well.
There was work involved in making that happen, but it wasn’t unbearable.
It might be for someone who has way more smart things than I do, but it works.
It’s been solid ever since, and I look forward to that remaining to be true over the coming months.
Well, that is all I have for you today.
If you have comments, questions, please reach out to me at technologybytesatmarriedfamily.com.
And I’ll be happy to entertain those.
As always, I want to thank you for listening to the Technology Bytes microcast, and I look forward to the next time we are together taking another bite of technology.
