Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

If you're tech-savvy and building your own router, you can add those advanced aspects in if you want them.

I'd be willing to bet, though, that the overwhelming majority of people who use consumer routers aren't doing anything remotely advanced. A how-to that covers the majority of use cases is valuable even when it excludes advanced use cases.

View on HN

There are a whole lot of normal people using mesh networking Wi-Fi routers. Honestly, most of the least technical people that I know are all using mesh networks because their houses require it.

Certainly. But it's still a minority use case.

Perhaps someone else will (or did) write up a how-to for support mesh networking in your homebrew router.

Home mesh is mostly about having wireless backhaul, and you can certainly do that if you have (preferably) two radios, you just set up one radio as a client to your main AP.

Even if you aren't doing wireless backhaul you just rely on regular client behaviour to transition between APs, can enable 802.11r to improve this.

Enterprise "mesh" typically uses wired backhaul for performance and can help clients roam quicker with a controller (auth, not deciding to roam). Controller can also adjusts radio power so APs aren't talking over each other if they're too close.

Mesh isn't any magic, just regular wifi.

There are some difference in client wifi interfaces (STA) and access point wifi interfaces (APs, like you'd find on a good router). For example, some wifi interfaces don't have promiscuous mode, or can't scan while maintaining an active connection, etc.

It's like the difference between softmodems (aka winmodems) and full hardware modems. I know there are some projects that use Raspberry Pis as an AP, and it could do like 10 devices stock and 20 devices with firmware changes. Even a low-end router could handle more clients than that.

Where do you live to consider mesh networking a minority use case? I live in a small city apartment so I don't need one, but everyone I know outside of the city needs at least two nodes to cover their houses.

I was looking at various stats and surveys, not going by my personal experience. But if you're asking about my personal experience, I haven't seen any consumer use of it at all, only enterprise and institutional use. That's part of why I wasn't going by by my own experience, because I know that the use isn't zero.

I don't live in a densely populated city.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com