When your Wi-Fi isn't working as well as you'd like, your options for getting a better wireless signal used to be limited to running wires or adding Wi-Fi extenders. That was before mesh routers entered the market. Mesh routers are fully-fledged mini-routers that better control the spread of information across the Wi-Fi spectrum in your home. They're often suggested as the easiest way to improve your Wi-Fi signal because, with a little bit of adjusting their locations, any wireless dead zones you used to have will be a thing of the past. But it's not just the wickedly widespread Wi-Fi signal they bring, so let's go over the other reasons why you'd want a mesh Wi-Fi network at home.

6 Improved Wi-Fi coverage

Get whole-home coverage with mesh

The most obvious reason someone should build a mesh network is for whole-home Wi-Fi coverage. Whole-home Wi-Fi with a mesh system not only gives you an internet connection throughout your house, but also makes it more consistent with stronger average speeds, even if you’re a few rooms away from your router. Even if you see a full signal displayed on your device from a standard router, your speed and connection quality will start to fall off more sharply than it would with a mesh.

Wi-Fi connections need to travel from the router to the device, as well as from the device back to the router. On a standard router, upload speeds can suffer more than download speeds for this reason, and if you’re a streamer or are uploading large files, this speed discrepancy could be very noticeable. With a mesh system, your device is able to connect to a mesh node while allowing the hardware in the mesh node to handle the connection back to the main router.

5 Improved network performance

Let the mesh do the heavy lifting

As you get further from a router, the performance will start to fall off, but since you’re connecting to a much nearer mesh node when you’ve got a properly set-up mesh, you should see an increase in speed. Plus, if you’re near enough to the primary mesh router, your device will connect to that, so it’s not even going to be impacted by the overhead of the mesh in that case.

While adding an extra new hop for your connection on its way to the internet will result in some added latency, it should be minimal enough not to be noticed in everyday browsing and streaming, and gaming could benefit a lot from the more consistent connection provided. Gaming servers compensate for latency by predicting where the player will move, and inconsistent connections can lead to spikes in latency that have a bigger impact on gaming than a marginal overall increase in latency with a mesh.

4 Reliable coverage for smart home devices

Smarter smart homes

If you’re upgrading your home with smart home tech, like the best smart locks or smart plugs, those devices generally need an internet connection to work properly. While some smart home tech can use a hub or connect to your other smart home devices using something like thread, a lot of them rely on your Wi-Fi connection. These devices are also small and placed in suboptimal locations, like right against the wall or outside your insulated walls, so having a mesh network can improve their connection, too.

Some of the best mesh systems, like TP-Link Deco kits and Eero kits, support smart home protocols as well, like Matter and Zigbee. With this integration, you can get a great connection for your smart home tech without needing expensive hubs or dealing with laggy smart home tech.

3 Easy setup and software

It's all in the app

Mesh Wi-Fi systems, for the most part, are designed to be easy to set up and friendly to less tech-savvy users. While setting up a custom mesh with a standard router is more involved, if you stick with a complete kit, setting up your mesh network is as easy as following a few instructions in an app. These apps can use Bluetooth, for example, to make setup easier, so you don’t need to track down and enter default passwords to get into your settings.

This software can also be used to set up things like guest networks and parental controls right from your phone. They often come with robust security features as well, which keeps your network safer while you use it. While more experienced users will find the training wheels to be a bit annoying and tedious, if you’ve never set up a Wi-Fi network before, these apps make it a lot more accessible.

2 No wires to run

Running Ethernet through your walls is a pain

I don't know anyone who actually likes pulling cables through their walls, which is what you'd need to do for a properly installed whole-house wired network. Unless you're getting the builders to pull it through conduits before they put the drywall on, of course, as that's much easier to handle. For everyone else, the easiest way to get enough wireless APs around your home for awesome coverage is by placing mesh nodes around your rooms. If you already have some Ethernet running through the walls, you can even use it as backhaul, so your devices are the only things using up your wireless bandwidth. It's significantly easier than planning out multiple drops, and might surprise you with how well it works.

1 Scalable

If your Wi-Fi needs change, you can easily expand the network

One of the strongest arguments for installing a mesh Wi-Fi network is that it's easily expandable (or even shrinkable) if your home Wi-Fi needs change. No two homes are exactly alike, and what works for one space might not work in another. But that's fine because you can add another mesh node to expand your network or move them around to spread Wi-Fi more equitably or to a specific space in a room, so you can hardwire devices to the node. The key here is how flexible a mesh node setup can be, when you only need one of the nodes plugged into the incoming internet jack to serve as the main router. The rest are ever-adjusting expanders of the Wi-Fi from that one device, and that means your home network is scalable to your needs.

It's easy to set up a mesh Wi-Fi network in your home

If you’re stuck deciding between a mesh and one of the best Wi-Fi routers, it is possible to get the best of both worlds. When it comes down to it, the main difference between a mesh router and a standard router is the software. Some router manufacturers, like TP-Link, Asus, and Linksys, have added mesh functionality to their routers.

That said, part of the attraction of dedicated mesh nodes is their stylish exteriors and size, which makes them easier to hide among your decor. That's not going to happen if you're cobbling together a mesh with Wi-Fi routers, and some of those routers are more expensive than individual mesh nodes. It's a decent idea not to create e-waste out of your existing router, but keeping it as a spare would do the same thing. Whatever method you choose, there's no denying that a mesh Wi-Fi network is the easiest way to blanket your home in wireless signal.