|
Bear in mind that all Wi-Fi devcies (including phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) are both radio transmitters and receivers. It's two way radio like walkie-talkies (or a conversation) not one way radio like television (or a lecture.) The AP's are the "point" at which you "access" the rest of the (wired) network, hence the name - engineers are not terribly imaginative about naming things - we leave it to Apple to invent cool names for stuff (Apple call their AP's "airport" which of course is much cooler and therefore worth paying three times as much for.)
When designing a Wi-Fi infrastructure, we often aim to get data off the airwaves and onto the wires as soon as possible thereby freeing up as much of the radio air time as we can for where it's most useful - ie all the portable devices. (Wi-Fi is rather inefficient compared to wired ethernet.) Hence, on anything but the most trivial small deployment, we put up multiple AP's, locate them as close as we can to where we expect most people to spend most time with their Wi-Fi devices and connect the AP's to "the rest" of the network with cables. We often call the cabling infrastructure the "backhaul" though I'm not sure that is terminology cited in any standards. Apart from the fact that there's an AP on the end, cabled Ethernet backhaul links are nothing special - it's just an Ethernet lobe like any other.
Multiple AP's creating a "cellular" coverage pattern connected to a wired backhaul is by far the best way to provide Wi-Fi in environments with either many clients, large (or challenging) geographical spread or a combination of both. Enterprise scale deployments have always been done this way. It's now percolating down to SOHO use case where people are finding one AP in the middle of the house cannot cut it.
In enterprise systems, it's also often possible to create a backhaul link between AP's using Wi-Fi for scenarios where it's just not possible to get a cable in. Some vendors used to call these "mesh" (or "bridge") links and it seems this is now percolating down to the SOHO market and the term "mesh" has become the latest advertising buzzword that vendors are using to sell the idea as if is some shiny new thing.
"Mesh" also seems to be a phrase to sell the idea of "integrated" systems that do things like automate channel planning, assist the hand off of clients between AP's more smoothly and provide a management platform - these days probably a phone app. Again, this is nothing new, enterprise scale systems have always done this, it's just now filtering down to the SOHO market.
So, in terms of physical infrastructure, multilple AP's near your clients connected to a common cabled "backhaul" infrastructure is by far the best way to go. If one cannot, or isn't willing to, get the drill out and install the cables, then these newer "mesh" systems that can do backhaul over Wi-Fi instead (or as well) as cabled backhaul seem like a good option, but you may pay a performance penalty depending on your use case (some systems have a few "tricks" to mitigate this such as "tri band" AP's that use different radio channels for client access and backhaul.) And if you buy a system where the AP's integrate (ie talk) with each other to offer other features, then great if it's offering something useful such as automated setup and configuration, easier roaming handoffs, automated channel planning, automated decisions on whether to use Wired/Wi-Fi backhaul, automated decisions about which AP "meshes" with which AP, etc.
I've not tested any of these SOHO "mesh" (and "whole home" etc) systems as I've never had need to use them, (readers might guess I've mostly built larger enterprise scale systems,) but IIRC there are some of these SOHO "mesh" and "whole home" systems that can only provide the backhaul links over Wi-Fi ("mesh") links, so I would be careful to check that any prospective purchase can use wired Ethernet as well as Wi-Fi backhauls (and better still, if the system is smart enough to figure out which to use automatically) if I were planning for wired backhauls. |
|