There have been recently a lot of announcements around improving the residential Wi-Fi play. These innovations are happening on two fronts. The first is better coverage through mesh networks or easier-to-add access nodes. The second is by offering network based services such as security or parental controls through Wi-Fi routers.
Mesh Networks in the home
Mesh networks aims at solving the problem of coverage, largely within the home. The concept of mesh networks is all but new. IEEE 802.11s is an IEEE 802.11 amendment for mesh networking, defining how wireless devices can interconnect to create a WLAN mesh network. Wireless mesh network device (Mesh STAs) form mesh links with one another, over which mesh paths can be established using an ad hoc mobile routing protocol. A key aspect of this architecture is the presence of multi-hop wireless links and routing of packets through other nodes towards the destination nodes.
In the traditional approach to mesh, hops introduce latency, and reduce throughput. Several vendors are trying to provide their own secret sauce to solving the coverage/capacity trade-off. Read More