ASUS routers are designed to give you the best possible WiFi coverage, and in most cases a single ASUS router will deliver smooth, reliable WiFi to every part of your home. But WiFi coverage can be affected by many factors: room layout, construction materials, and even furnishings! If your home has dead spots or unreliable signals, ASUS AiMesh is the answer! AiMesh is an innovative new router feature that connects multiple ASUS routers to create a whole-home WiFi network. It’s a powerful and flexible way to solve your WiFi problems that also makes the most of your existing hardware: you can mix different ASUS router models, so when you upgrade there’s no need to throw away your old router — you can use it to expand your AiMesh network! AiMesh gives you time-saving central control over all the routers, and seamless roaming capability means you never need to switch networks. AiMesh is WiFi you can rely on — for all your devices, all the time!
Source: AiMesh | ASUS Global
In the wake of the Ubiquiti hack, I was reading a HN discussion on their gear — since I use it extensively at my church — which got me thinking about mesh networking again.
Asus is the brand I really favor for home stuff, over Linksys (Cisco) and Netgear. Over the years, I’ve used a lot of different routers and access points. Asus products have consistently worked better, had better software, and respected the privacy of the end user. My $600 Netgear Orbi mesh system was so bad, needing a reboot almost every day, that, one day, I got so frustrated that I literally chucked it into the trash, and immediately went and bought a $400 Linksys Velop. I’ve come close to chucking it as well, based on problems I’ve had. It seems that almost every time I check the system, one of the nodes is offline, and needs to be rebooted. My plan C was to try the Ubiquiti Amplifi system next.
So I checked into where Asus was with mesh networking these days, and I see they now have a mesh system called Lyra. It’s $273 for a 3-unit set, and reportedly has the best wifi of anything in the space. The reason I’m bothering to write this, though, is that Asus has come up with a way to use their regular routers to establish a mesh network with just new firmware, called AiMesh. So you can have different models of Asus wifi routers, and mesh them all together. I see they also have a Zen line of wifi routers, and, at least according to the first and only article I read about it, it seems all of these units work together with their AiMesh firmware. This is such a cool idea, I almost want to buy some new routers to try it.
Now I need to go reboot my basement Velop unit…