Thursday 17 September 2015

How is the Home Wifi Scene in 2018 ?

The ubiquity of wifi access continues. In India the impending launch of Reliance Jio FTTH services is further democratizing the broadband scene. In many places speed has jumped by 10x, data by 10x at the same price for end user. APRC is no exception. Its likely that 1 Gbps speed maybe available to consumers with 1 TB monthly data at less than Rs. 2000 by 2018 end from all providers or a further 10x improvement.

However Home Wifi can become a BOTTLENECK as wifi speed only increases about 3x per generation (5 years). people are commonly running into a  situation where their connection speed is 100 mbps or more (10x-30x speed improvement in last 6 months), but they are not able to get this speed all around their homes using wifi. So the question that naturally arises is how to implement wifi inside home ?

As a rule of thumb this is what we need to cover our entire home (single floor) almost equivalently with Wifi speed matching your internet connection speed:


  1. 10 mbps or below  connection - Single Band (2.4G) 802.11n router and range extenders. AFAP centralize router position in home
  2. 10-40 mbps - Dual band  (2.4G, 5G) 802.11n router, and add on APs +  range extenders
  3. 40-100 mbps - Dual Band router AC router and range extenders, entry level mesh solutions from dlink, tp-link, tenda, netgear, asus, plume, Eero, etc
  4. 100-300 mbps - High end mesh solution (Netgear Orbi RBK50, Orbi Pro, etc) or multiple entry level 802.11ac APs (supporting handoff of clients) supported by wired LAN backhaul to router
  5. 300-500 mbps - High end mesh with one satellite solution per room, or multiple AC1750+ APs (supporting handoff of clients) per room supported by wired LAN backhaul to router
  6. 500 mbps+ - Ditch wifi and settle for gigabit ethernet LAN. 10G not practical for home networking for the time being

1-2 are extinct in APRC. 3 is common while 4-6 are emerging scenarios.  One more reason why the sub-committee recommended setting up of wired LAN infra inside each home.

- Suman Kumar Luthra @ APRC-P3 Telecom Sub-Committee

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