Orbi Wifi - As important as having electricity at home
When it comes to furnishing or renovating our homes, we often first think of furniture like sofas, tables, lights, lamps, a new fridge, wall or floor tiling, and smaller fixtures.
On another level, we are ready to buy that new Smart TV, fridge, smartwatch, upgrade our smartphones nearly every year or so, desktop computers, and other similar accessories we carry on our person. It’s common knowledge that we want to upgrade these things at home so that we can take advantage of the latest advancements, get faster speeds and feel more productive day-to-day.
If you think about it, wifi is as important in your home as electricity.
Think back to the last gadget or piece of tech you purchased - Apart from the promotion or attractive price, what was the reason you purchased it?
Most people will say that they were upgrading from a slower or older generation of the same device to a newer one, or that they purchased the product to improve their productivity, improve the quality of life, or add to their Smarthome.
Nearly all of these devices connect to your Home wifi to send and receive data like calendar events, instant messaging, streaming of audio and video, signing in to your account with the company, aside from performing firmware updates and background updating and refreshing of data (depending on the main function of the device). Your TVs and gaming consoles connect to the internet at high loads to load content, let you play online with friends, or stream audio and video in 1080p HD or in 4K. Or maybe you have installed a network attached server with storage for the family, or a wifi camera in your parent’s home for security and monitoring.
In the modern home, nearly every electronic device is reliant on your home network connection.
If you’ve heard about the newest iteration of wifi communication, you may be aware of Wifi-6 – a revolutionary new leap in wifi communication which boasts 4x Speed, 4x Capacity, and 40% increase in data throughput, as compared to previous generations of wifi (AC routers).
(Click here to shop Orbi AX - Premium WiFi)
So what? My wifi is working normally, why should I upgrade my current wifi setup?
Well, the answer to this will actually make sense once you consider how our homes and our usage of tech and gadgets has changed over the last few years.
Through a basic internet search, we can see that the latest and most popular tech releases in the consumer market have been:
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Gaming Consoles (Nintendo Switch, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X etc)
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Smartphones (Google Pixel 3A, iPhone 12, Samsung galaxy Z Fold 2, etc)
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Smart Displays (TCL Roku Smart TV, Netgear’s Meural Digital Canvas, LG’s OLEDTV RX etc)
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Smart Watches (Galaxy Watch Active2, Fitbit, Garmin, Fossil etc)
And these are just a few items above the regular releases of laptops, desktops, smart washing machines and refrigerators, IoT devices like the Phillips Hue lights, SONOS Beam sound bars, Apple TVs, Sensibo AC controller, Google nest, Arlo Doorbell, to name a few.
All these devices need to communicate with you, and with each other- whether you are using Apple’s Homekit, Google’s Alexa assistant, or any other similar platform to control and manage your smarthome devices.
The stock router your ISP may have provided, or unit you bought nearly a decade ago simply wasn’t built to handle the data traffic of today’s average home network or internet usage.
When you use a router designed and built in the early 2010’s, chances are it’s rated anywhere between AC700-AC1200, and if your wifi slows down on you or seems laggy, you are most definitely going in circles rebooting your router, or cursing your ISP or anyone else you suspect is hogging the wifi’s bandwidth.
About a decade or two ago, most households had simply 1-2 desktop computers, and maybe 1 laptop. You can equate this to a person pulling a cart/rikshaw with a few boxes (each box representing one wifi device’s data), loading your email, Skype calls, Youtube videos at 480p or 720p.
Fast-forward to today, and each member of the household has a minimum of 2-4 wifi devices:
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1x laptop
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1x smartphone
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1x tablet
In addition to this, we have 1-2 smart TVs, and IoT devices which control your air-conditioning, lighting, etc. On top of the exponential growth of devices in our homes, with the current working environment, we are conducting video calls with HD webcams, or on video calls, streaming Netflix, Amazon Prime or Disney shows and movies at 1080p, 2K, or 4K resolutions, downloading files and assets for work, and gaming with our friends to stay connected.
Considering the shift to work-from-home (WFH) and Home-based learning (HBL) becoming the norm, in our earlier analogy, these small boxes being pulled by a rickshaw have turned into the size of freight, cars purely by the massive increase in data traffic demanded by modern devices streaming and loading better and higher quality content.
The HD and 2K or 4K videos our computer and TV’s pull through the internet are proportionally larger files. Games loading high-resolution assets have newer processors that churn more data than before, computer applications are faster, newer, and more detailed, but we’re running a household of the 21st century through a gateway that is fit for the 19th century at best.
(Click here to shop Orbi AX - Premium WiFi)
Okay, this makes sense so far. Where does Orbi Mesh Wifi-6 fit in all this?
Imagine your devices are sending and receiving packets of data like vehicles on the North-South expressway. When the lanes are limited, the traffic and vehicles get jammed and slow down to a near-standstill. This is your current router trying to handle all the Wifi demands from your multitude of devices, translating to lag and buffering on your devices.
With the advanced technology of Wifi-6 Mesh system, this data highway expands into an 8-12 lane highway, so that all your data traffic is able to travel smoothly from and to your devices, and added wifi connections with streams, downloads, and wifi calls do not affect other devices also on the same network.
(Click here to shop Orbi AX - Premium WiFi)
In addition to the increased bandwidth that Orbi provides, and the 4x Speed and 4x Capacity guaranteed by the advancement that is WiFi-6, Orbi wifi mesh systems are built with strategically placed antennas that line the body to ensure the strong wifi connections supported by the powerful internal processors and hardware are able to reach your wifi devices in all the corners of your home.