BIZ TECH: Mesh may solve home office Wi-Fi woes

You know the challenge – Wi-fi works great in the lounge near the router, ok in your bedroom and barely in your daughters’ room, the home office is even worse. Welcome to the world of Wi-Fi. Until recently the only real options were to set up complicated repeaters or power over ethernet solutions, fine if you are a geek but not if you are “technically challenged”.

Enter stage left the Mesh Wi-Fi system, Mesh systems provide seamless connection between 2, 3 or more stations that you can spread around the house to eliminate or reduce blackspots. D-Link offered us their latest COVR-1103 AC1200 Mesh system to test. Given our house is large and over several levels it has some Wi-Fi black spots, so provided a good test site. The 3 in the COVR-1103 indicates that there are three mesh units (They also have COVR-1100 and COVR-1102 options). It is a dual band system, uses the industry standard Easymesh system and works with Google Assistant and Alexa. The three-unit system says it is for houses up to 464 square metres area, whilst the two unit is for up to 363 Square metres.

The COVR units are attractive almost square boxes, with designer lines rather than the usual industrial with multiple aerial designs of typical routers. Each unit has one WAN and one LAN port (Both Gigabit). The WAN connects to your fibre box for the main unit and can be used for a wired connection between units, the LAN ports allow you to connect a device to the unit such as a non Wi-fi printer.

Set up is a breeze even for non-geeks. Download the D-Link app to your phone, scan a QR code (we all know how to do that thanks to Covid) and follow the step by step instructions to configure the internet connection, network name and login and then connect the additional Mesh units. A geek can probably do it faster the old-fashioned manual set up way, but you really need no technical nous using the app. You can latter go into the admin settings to tweak things if you so desire, including turning on a guest Wi-Fi network if you need it.

We did find that we needed to  experiment a little with the placement of one of the remote units for optimum coverage due to the configuration of our house but the end result was a much stronger and more stable signal in both the back bedrooms (around 50% better in the back bedroom). The beauty of the Mesh system is the simplicity of setting it up but also that devices can freely roam between the units with the smart roaming capability as they are all one seamless mesh network.

The only real downside we found was that with only one LAN connection on the central unit (compared to the usual four on normal routers) we would need a network switch as we connect multiple devices (PC, Network to downstairs office where we have several non-Wi-Fi devices, NAS and an IP phone).

Pricing (RRP)

COVR-1100         $199.99

COVR-1102         $329.99

COVR-1103         $429.99