What is Whole Home Wi-Fi?

A significant way to improve your entire internet experience is to opt for some sort of Whole Home Wi-Fi set-up. In this article we’ll explain what that entails, and how you’ll benefit greatly from it. We’ll look at one or two of the leading products on the market, too.

There’s every chance that, in the past, while on your computer at home, gaming online, streaming videos or music and, in fact, any other sort of PC activity which has required consistent net access across your home network, you’ve experienced some sort of truly annoying ‘drop-out’ in your Wi-Fi coverage.

Browse Whole Home Wi-Fi products at Ebuyer

This can be down to a number of fairly obvious factors.

In almost every modern household there are likely to be several people, and perhaps each of them is accessing the home’s Wi-Fi coverage for their own individual device. For instance, in a family of four you may have a home server, four mobile phones, a couple of tablets, a desktop PC, a couple of laptops, a smart TV and all of the various other smart home devices.

Hadrian/Shutterstock

All of these bits of tech require decent access to the internet. If all of them are connected at the same time, then there’s going to be a sort of ‘traffic jam’ and there are likely to be significant difficulties in everyone achieving perfect uninterrupted Wi-Fi coverage. Things will buffer and stutter or take so much longer to load. This is, of course, always annoying – but it can be significantly troublesome and disruptive if one or more of the people needing good internet access are working from home during a lockdown.

There are also natural ‘dead spots’ around your home where the Wi-Fi is not very well-covered. Perhaps in that cupboard under the stairs that you like to go sit in to get away from it all? Perhaps in that back bedroom, which is the furthest room away from your router.

So, how do you go about making sure that any problems with your Wi-Fi coverage just don’t happen? It’s pretty simple, really. The advances in modern internet technology mean that your entire home can be party to brilliant Wi-Fi coverage, and there are a couple of excellent methods of ensuring that’s the case.

Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi

In simple terms, a Whole Home Wi-Fi Mesh system is a way of ensuring that there is a strong Wi-Fi connection throughout all of the rooms in your house, and all under one network. A Whole Home Wi-Fi Mesh system can enable up to one hundred devices to be connected at any point. Although this initially seems like a spectacular thought, in theory in a good set-up it’s not unrealistic.

The way it works is simple. There is a main unit, which connects on your ISP broadband via an ethernet cable (much like your traditional router) and then there are other units strategically placed in-and-around your home, and at the edge of that main unit’s range. In effect, your ‘signal’ is ‘spread’ around your home, distributed in much stronger fashion by the addition of the satellite units. There are several Whole Home Wi-Fi Mesh systems available at Ebuyer, and amongst them are the following, which have proved exceptionally popular.

tech questuons answered ebuyer knowledge hub

TP-Link DECO system

Very easy to install and configure, the TP-Link Deco system is user-friendly and versatile, with a whole host of great features which make it a smart choice for those looking to extend and maximise the reach of their Wi-Fi signal.

The TP-Link Deco app allows you to place the Deco units around the house, and they then auto-connect to each other, without the need for any manual intervention. If you ever decide to extend your house, or you need better Wi-Fi in the garden room, you can increase the size of your home network simply by adding another Deco unit.

You can create individual profiles on the TP-Link Deco system, which has a range of benefits for family life. The system features a Parental Control facility, and it is also possible to monitor visited websites, time specific devices for the length of internet use, turn access on and off for specific devices, and even block content from certain devices. This, of course, offers the ultimate peace of mind to parents.

Netgear Orbi system

Orbi TM is a tri-band Wi-Fi system which, like Deco, is easy to set up in your home. You simply connect to your existing modem and place ‘satellites’ around the home and Orbi sets up and customizes itself in minutes through a dedicated app. Using this app you can also easily manage your Wi-Fi settings, test your internet speed, view history and monitor data usage. Some packages include advanced ‘cyber-threat’ protection by providing network-wide anti-virus, anti-malware, fraud / phishing and ransomware security on an unlimited number of devices across your home network. There are also ethernet ports in Orbi’s satellites, so theoretically you could ‘wire in’ your (for instance) games console in a different room to your main router, by connecting it to one of the satellites.

Google Nest

Nest is a system which gives whole-home coverage and a consistently strong signal. One Nest Wi-Fi router with one Wi-Fi point is strong enough to handle up to two hundred connected devices and has fast enough speed to be able to stream several 4K videos at a time. One of the best things about Nest (other than the whole ‘better Wi-Fi coverage and connection’ thing) is that each satellite is also a smart speaker with Google Assistant. Now that really is living in the future!

There are, of course, other brands available but these three, from Netgear, TP-Link and Google, have proved very popular.

Hadrian/Shutterstock

Browse Whole Home Wi-Fi products at Ebuyer

Powerline Adapters for Whole Home Wi-Fi

Although not strictly speaking a ‘mesh’ system, another brilliant way to increase the coverage of your home’s Wi-Fi is to install Powerline Adapters. These are extremely affordable and discreet additions to your home set up, which will vastly improve Wi-Fi coverage by literally using your home’s electrical wiring.

They’re very easy to install. You simply connect one of the adapters to your router with an Ethernet cable and plug it into a power outlet. When you plug a second adapter into a different outlet elsewhere in your home you instantly create a network connection.

So, of course, this means that Powerline Adapters are an excellent solution for connecting Internet-ready devices – such as computers, smart TVs, games consoles – and achieving really strong connectivity. You can use several adapters throughout your home for impressive network expansion.

As we said at the beginning of this article, there’s nothing quite as irritating as ‘drop-out’ in your Wi-Fi coverage, or constant buffering and stuttering. It can really become an issue. But as we hope to have shown, it doesn’t have to be a long-lasting problem!

Check out Ebuyer’s ranges of Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi systems, and Powerline Adapters. You’re sure to find something perfect for your home.

return to ebuyer knowledge hub
To Top