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Today, the problem of poor Wi-Fi coverage no longer only occurs in public places, but increasingly we experience this phenomenon in our houses or apartments. Our home router has its limitations and cannot guarantee the coverage of each of our rooms or floors, which creates a so-called "dead zone". If we want to cover our whole house with a network, it is worth to pay attention to the Mesh system. At the very beginning this technology was used by the army, hospitals or simply for large-scale commercial applications, today's technological progress makes it possible to use Mesh technology in our homes. Today we will briefly start with what the MESH network is and how it works, and in the next part of the article we will focus on the testing the Extralink Dynamite.
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A Mesh system most often consists of three devices, a main router and two auxiliary satellites (called points), which are scattered around different rooms of our house to fill existing gaps in the signal and eliminate dead points. All elements of the system are connected to each other wirelessly, using the main WI-FI point (main router), which should be connected to the network with an Ethernet cable, and then each subsequent device should be placed at a sufficient distance from the main point so that the devices can successfully communicate with each other. With this solution, the user moving around the apartment is still using one network.
For more information what the Mesh system is and how it works I refer here, and we'll finally go to the test the Extralink Dynamite
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Extralink Dynamite is a set containing the main router and two peripherals, the whole together looks really good visually. You can see that the manufacturer paid a lot of attention to make the whole thing very well designed, we will not find cheap plastic here, on the contrary, well-fitted and good quality plastic. Unfortunately, the device is not suitable for wall or ceiling mounting, but we only have the possibility to place the device on a desk.
The technical performance is also quite good, Extralink Dynamite has been equipped with four antennas supporting the 5 GHz band and two antennas adapted to the 2.4 GHz band. With 802.11ac standard and 4x4 MU-MIMO MU-MIMO transmission, the wireless network gains significant performance, which allows you to cover an area of up to 1000m2. The chipset on which Dynamite works is Mediatek with 128 MB of FLASH memory, and 1 GB of SDRAM, it is worth mentioning that the device uses as many as three such chipsets, which significantly affects the computing power. The device itself is also designed for people who do not have a lot of experience with such devices, the configuration and installation is smooth thanks to the Plug-and-Play standard.
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The process of first start-up is extremely simple, installation and configuration of the device itself is smooth and intuitive. Extralink Dynamite uses Touchlink, which allows for quick automatic configuration of auxillary devices - you only need to touch the housing of the device at the place of activation and the installation process will be carried out independently without our help.
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The standard device can only work in router mode, but there is a possibility of bypassing this problem. For this purpose we set the WAN connection to DHCP, connect the cable from WAN to the free port next to it and in DHCP Setting we set what IP should our device have and turn off the functionality as below. This is not a perfect solution, but it allows to use the device in Bridge mode.
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The purpose of our tests is to verify the range of the Mesh topology network, both in terms of signal coverage and real speeds available in the building.
The test device has been configured as follows:
For 2.4GHz connections, we've adopted a maximum channel width of 40Mhz, and for 5 GHz, we've adopted 80MHz. The testing device was a Macbook Pro A1502 equipped with a built-in AirPort Extreme wireless card (Broadcom BCM4360 3x3, 1.3 Gbps PHY) working in 802.11a/b/g/n/ac standards.
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Before the speed tests we verified the maximum performance of the LAN and iperf 3 server. The aforementioned laptop was connected with a 10/100/1000Mbps network card to the swtich, we obtained the following maximum speeds for a single TCP stream:
The AP-1 and AP-2 interfaces have been connected to each other in mesh mode only, i.e. only wirelessly.
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We used the AirSurvey software to create the signal map, to read the signal level correctly pay attention to the color legend at the bottom of the picture. Access-point locations are marked with appropriate icons, device on the ground floor was connected to the switch via Ethernet port 1Gbps.
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The WiFiPerf software was used for speed tests, and the speed test server was running iperf3.
When taking the measurements we encountered a problem of switching the device between the Dynamite transmitters, the computer stubbornly clung to one transmitter until the communication with it was broken. In practice, we stood one meter from the nearest transmitter for 15 minutes, and the laptop still did not switch to the best transmitter. It was necessary to disconnect and reconnect the laptop to the best transmitter.
This problem will certainly be a nuisance when using Extralink Dynamite in business setting, where there is a lot of end device mobility. However, this isn't a big inconvenience when using it at home. This is due to the lack of the roaming protocol, the lack of data exchange between satellite stations and the main station and connection profiles. I hope that future software versions will solve this problem.
At measurement point no. 5, the connection was set up with the device marked AP-2 (in the diagram above), which operated in MESH mode, i.e. the signal from AP-1 was retransmitted by the AP-2. The measurement in all rooms on the first floor through the AP-2 was limited by the low efficiency of Mesh connection between AP-1 and AP-2. Despite the close distance between the installation of AP-1 and AP-2 of about 5m, they are separated by a thick load-bearing wall and thick ceiling of about 25cm and additionally placed at a sharp angle, which in practice increases the thickness of the obstacle.
In the case of Extralink Dynamite devices we can see the measurement in point no. 5 showed low speed of receiving data from the AP-2 transmitter, it is most likely due to the characteristics of the antenna, which has worse reception parameters from the bottom of the device. The results of measurement in point no. 6 also indicate this.
The measurement of the spectrum analyzer of the transmitter's operating characteristics showed low noise generation outside the transmission channel, therefore Extralink Dynamite should not affect other devices operating in the wireless network.
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If you're looking for a way to spread Wi-Fi throughout your home without spending a lot of money, it's really worth taking a look at Extralink Dynamite. The manufacturer's use of 4x4 MU-MIMO definitely improves data transmission, and the tests carried out prove that the device definately has good network speed and bandwidth. The device can easily cope with even very large houses, offering wireless speed similar to that achieved with wired connections. The configuration and installation itself is easy, and the use of Touchlink makes the device definitely dedicated to people who do not have experience with such devices on a daily basis.
