Wireless networks are the bane of many households. There are dead spots where there is no connectivity and even when you are sitting in a room with an access point you can still have no connection. So why is this?
When your phone or iPad connects to your wireless system, it will look for the strongest signal. However, if you walk from one area of the house to another, your device will hold onto its connection as long as it can - even if there is a much stronger signal near by. Only when the signal drops off completely will it reconnect.
With a mesh system you have a mesh root, which can be your router (if it supports this) and then mesh nodes. Ideally these nodes would be spread around the house and wired back to the router. However, you can also use wireless mesh nodes, so you just require pow
er to them. With wireless nodes each hop between nodes, halves the total available band width. This mean if you have a system capable of 800Mbps, after the first hop it will drop to 400Mbps, the next will be 200Mbps. If you wifi is only 50Mbps, this is not a problem because it is still beyond this.
The other big advantage of mesh networks is redundancy. You would typically configure a mesh network to have multiple access points overlapping. This means that if one access point were to fail, the others would reconfigure themselves to cover the gaps.
In the example above, the solid lines represent the wired connections, the dotted ones represent the wireless ones.