Mesh Wi-Fi might start working like Wi-Fi soon
If you’re old enough to remember when Wi-Fi became a thing, then you should also recall how all the different kit didn’t really play nice together. If you wanted to get a Cisco AP, you pretty much needed to outfit all your clients with Cisco wireless cards. Obviously this complexity has sorted itself out over time, or well, to be more precise having real standards and certifications has made it so [for the most part] all the Wi-Fi products can interact with each other. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case for mesh systems that exist right now. They currently have the same sorts of vendor restrictions that existed back in the “dark ages”. Now, this could be changing with a recently announced “EasyMesh” program from the Wi-Fi Alliance. I for one, hope it does, but there are some hurdles to widespread adoption – mostly in the form of vendor lock-in.
EasyMesh is purely about bringing together disparate devices, and manufacturers can still add unique features and improve specs to help their routers stand out from the pack, the WiFi Alliance’s Kevin Robinson told PC World. So, if you have an existing mesh network and one company develops vastly superior security measures, you might replace only the router connected to your modem instead of your entire network. Robinson also noted that EasyMesh is a software standard, so manufacturers can update firmware on existing routers to meet the certification.