I have put a lot of effort into my network. It is not because this is my desire, but more out of what others want out of it. I did a lot of work in the fall to try and include the apartment into the Wi-Fi mesh and to try and get all of the cameras and things connected so that the batteries were not constantly drained trying to connect. Both of those I feel like I have generally solved.

The one thing that I have generally ignored is in the attempt to connect all of these ‘things’ is the user factor in all of this. My wife complains about it, my son has complained about it, my exchange student has complained about it and even my tenant has said that there are times it does not work well. Time to do something about it.

Against my knowledge, my wife hired an internet consultant. I am not complaining, I was just surprised that there was anyone out there locally doing that kind of work. So, I listened to what he had to say. He was angling to do the work as well, but I just paid the consulting fee. I am pretty sure that I am more than capable of implementing everything since I made it this far.

One area that I am really risk adverse is gambling. To me, spending $200 on something the might work seems like gambling. When the consultant recommended adding three more units of our existing T-P Link Deco network, that certainly seemed easy. I had the same thought but I didn’t want to spend the money to see if it was an improvement. For this reason, I bought a $20 range extender when I was trying to solve my doorbell connection.

The range extender worked, I should have guessed that adding more wifi mesh capability was the solution. Let me just say that I am a wired guy. In my day to day work, all of the items in my office are wired. I never see any issues related to bandwidth that a network reset doesn’t resolve. I think more of that has to do with whatever the Internet Service Provider is doing rather than my network.

I suspect that my wife and my tenant are experiencing the same problem because they are both in the same geo proximity to the network. But regardless, I talked with the consultant about this as well. It was his recommendation to move from trying to get that unit within the mesh to adding a wireless bridge. A wireless bridge is a device that sends a signal point to point.

The plan is to swap out my outside mesh device with this wireless bridge. Part of the reason is that I already have Power over Ethernet run to it. But, now I will have a spare unit to put somewhere else. That location is TBD at the moment. I haven’t had it installed long enough to enjoy Wi-Fi in the yard yet anyway.

I will have to do some antenna work on the apartment. Another recommendation is to retire my ten year old, gateway router. This means I will have to do some cable rework. What all this means is that this is a process. But it has been one that I have been wanting to do every since I started this mesh experiment.

I am finally going to retire old passwords and general network access in favor of a more secure and segregated network. Guests will get access to the guest network. IOT devices will be on the IOT network and neither will have access to my main network. Careless security or old hardware vulnerability will not have a tunnel into the more sensitive parts of my home network.

End Your Programming Routine: This is all recent developments as I just started last weekend. This means that not all of the work is complete and the user feedback is incomplete. It is funny how something like internet grows from a novelty to a necessity. I am moving units at a time so as not to take everything down for an extended period of time. Despite the fact that I really didn’t want to pay $175 for a consultant, I would not have known about the wireless bridge and I am happy to have a reassuring opinion on what I have already done.