Standard Routers, and why your WiFi sucks.
This post was inspired as I was travelling through Thailand and witnessed the quality of network deployments along the way. (I know, I’m not normal). Along the way I figured out there was at least some semi-quality installs around, the gear was good, but the default administrator password probably wasn’t the best choice to leave in a publicly accessible, open-wireless network.. And let’s not go in to why I could get to the controller in the first place..
That aside, it solidified my belief that consumer/prosumer grade wireless products struggle with the most basic of tasks. Internet over here isn’t great, but some places yielded 100+ megabit via ethernet, yet struggled to report 1.1 megabit on WiFi, or worse still, not complete. They’re designed to be in densely populated areas, and service a small footprint so they don’t interfere with others. Great if you live in a studio apartment, or have a small office, not so much if you’re living in a 3-4 bedroom house, or have an office with multiple rooms/locations.
One deployment was basically a single consumer (I won’t name the Vendor) router per room, quick frequency analysis showed they were all on the same channel, all using WEP, and in some cases, broadcasting the same network. It’s these kind of false economies that people fall into the trap of. If you need to buy 4 “prosumer” devices to cover your house (and probably a couple of powerline extenders too, which are questionable at best), or 2 enterprise-grade devices that would provide service for many more years, allow far more control, and cover desired areas.
Most households & businesses run with the standard ISP supplied router, which does an okay job, but probably doesn’t reach where it needs to, and probably needs a reboot fairly regularly to keep it kicking along.
There’s solutions to these problems, and they’re relatively inexpensive. We can deploy a Threat Management Firewall/Router, and an Enterprise Grade wireless solution that can scale to meet your requirements. If you often host guests, you can segregate them on a separate network away from local infrastructure and confidential information.
In today’s online environment, it’s important that your business is protected by a well configured, secured, regularly updated firewall. There’s a host of added benefits too, including restrictions, dual/tri-network redundant links to ensure you stay online, two factor authentication for remote access and much more.
For those in rural areas, being connected is even more important. The many things that you can do to secure, protect and overview your rural location. I’ll delve into this in a later article at some point, but if you’re down the Far South Coast and don’t have working NBN with WiFi everywhere you need it, and you can’t see what’s going on when you’re away from home, we should chat.
If you’d like to hear a bit more, or receive a free consult to discuss further, get in touch.