HWM Singapore — May 2017

Q&A

PHOTOGRAPHY

ZAPHS ZHANG

ART DIRECTION

KEN KOH

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Mesh networking is essentially a
wireless distributed system. It gives
you the ability to have multiple
access points in your home, and
each of these access points provides
additional Wi-Fi coverage, but it
feels like one network. You have one
SSID, one password, and seamless
roaming. You don’t have to add
multiple network names for the
2.4GHz or 5GHz network.

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  O
There are a lot of challenges to range
extension and the biggest one is
performance. When you add a range
extender to your network, you’re
actually reducing your bandwidth by
50% because the range extender has
to talk back to your network. Linksys
Velop, our whole home Wi-Fi mesh
networking system, is a tri-band
solution so it has three radios, one of
the radios is dedicated for backhaul

and the other two radios are

available for client communication.

The other challenge with range

extension is that for most of them

you have to setup a different

network name. And then as you

move to your router network to

your range extender network, you

have to switch manually from one

to the other. With mesh networking,

and particularly Velop, you have

one network name with seamless

roaming and band-steering so you

move freely through your home

without ever having to change

network.

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After 802.11ac, the next major

protocol is 802.11ax. That’s coming

in 2018, so we are working very

closely with our technology suppliers

and we’re excited to see how the

market will evolve. 802.11ax is an

extremely robust platform and it

provides great capacity management

for dense environments, it provides

faster speeds, which is great, and

also by leveraging 10MHz and 5MHz

channels, it provides better range

than 802.11ac as well.

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    O

Think about the future. A lot of

people think about what they have

in their homes today or what they

are doing today. If you’re planning

on buying more devices in the future

or if you have a couple of small kids

at home, in a couple of years those

kids are going to be consuming

the Internet as well. There are

some pretty good technologies out

there to future-proof. One of the

beneï ts of mesh networking is

that you can always add on. That

kind of ð exibility from a hardware

perspective is deï nitely something

to think about as well.

40 +:0 | MAY 2017