hi i'm scott newnam ceo of audio advice if you're watching this video you likely are thinking about
the importance of a great home network for years audio advice has installed high performance networks
into our customers homes however as more people are working from home the demand for higher
performance networks has grown enormously into a whole new level if you think about the amount
of time you spend online now whether doing a zoom call remote schooling or streaming netflix
it really makes the investment decision on your network way more meaningful than in the days of
just emailing from home in this video i'm going to walk you through the key parts of your home
network and cover the main things you should think about when investing in your network let's start
with what the internet service providers like spectrum comcast att and others provide
most of these internet providers rent you a very entry-level all-in-one device which
serves four roles simultaneously the modem the router the switch and wireless access point
as you might expect by combining all these functions into one inexpensive box the service
providers make it simple and easy for them to connect your house to the internet for most of
these devices the valuable piece of the box is the modem which transmits the ones and zeros
from your house to the rest of the world however to keep the cost down and make it all work in
one box the rest of the pieces including the router the switch and the wireless access point
are all relatively cheap this is why when your internet is installed the technician can plug
directly into the all-in-one box and show you blazingly fast speeds but then the next day
your children get lower resolution netflix and your zoom call just does not seem to be as clear
the modem is doing its job super well but as soon as numerous streams are hitting the wireless
chipset from different distances and different spots the system seems subpar let's frame this
in an example i have in my own home a one gigabit connection from google fiber
when the technician installed the all-in-one box he readily showed me a full one gigabit
when he was plugged into the box however once i plugged my devices into all the ethernet ports
in the back of the all-in-one box the box was no longer able to provide a gigabit to
every single port simultaneously what happens is that the modem has to talk to the router which
tells all the packets coming to and from your house which device to go to however all routers
are not made equally routers have different level firewalls and effectively different speed
differences i won't bore you with the details beyond this other than to say that once you
connect multiple devices running various types of traffic the all-in-one box performs well below
what the technician shows you and also well below a properly set up high performance network
this is also true of the wireless communication in the all-in-one box
a single wireless access point in general talks to only one device at a time let me pause here
so you can follow what i'm saying even though there might be four of you all in your house
working on the internet at the same time a normal wireless access point literally has to communicate
to and from each of your devices in order now this happens very fast as it passes data from your
device quickly and then to your child's device and then your streaming speaker rapidly back and
forth further the farther away you get from the device the slower and worse the connection gets
so the end result is that the all-in-one boxes do a reasonable job in a small home or apartment
but are generally terrible in large homes so what are the solutions for large homes there
are basically two major options the best by far and the most installed in larger homes by audio advice
and professionals like us across the country is identical to an enterprise-grade network what we
do is to turn off the router and the wireless access point in your all-in-one box and then
connect a very fast and highly secure router that is then connected to a super fast enterprise-grade
switch and then we wire multiple access points throughout your home a few things are going on
here first we're stepping up the quality level of every single piece in the system as the network is
only as good as the weakest link the second thing that is going on is that we directly wire the
access points back to the switch and router this means that all of the different wireless devices
you have in your home and you have way more devices connecting all day long than you may think
now are spread over multiple access points which dramatically improves performance
if you're looking at options for improving your network you have likely also come across
some consumer-grade do-it-yourself kits that have relatively entry level routers with multiple
entry level wireless access points that you can just plug in around your home you can buy these
little entry level kits at best buy or amazon for several hundred dollars frankly this solution is
better than relying on the all-in-one from your provider but it is nowhere near the performance
of an enterprise grade network with the access points directly wired to your router to make this
point clear let's review that a wireless access point antenna is only talking to one device at
a time and then quickly rotating through all the devices connected to it so for simplicity's
sake think about what happens when you put multiple wireless access points hopping from
each other from your iphone to your router for each wireless hop there is a 50% degradation as
the device communicates with your phone and then back to another wireless device there's a lot more
detail this as some access points have multiple antennas and communicate on different frequencies
but you get the point that using wireless mesh access points that they themselves are talking
wirelessly is nowhere near as good as using access points that are wired back to the main
router or switch it is clearly more expensive to wire all performance level equipment into a home
than use the all-in-one box but what i can tell you after having installed thousands of
high-performance pieces is that no customer has ever come back to us and asked us to go backwards
what most people don't realize is how many devices and streams are running in your home at once
every iphone ipad roku apple tv computer and a myriad of other devices are running in the
background connected 24 hours a day so having these spread out across multiple access points
all with true fast connectivity is a completely different experience
than the alternatives the last point i want to cover is about network health and monitoring
really good systems like the ones that audio advice installs will constantly evaluate the health of
your network if your system sees that you've lost internet connectivity or a piece may have not come
back correctly from a loss of power to your home it will automatically reboot itself and it will
reboot the pieces needed in the correct order so no more calling your internet provider while they
tell you to pull power to each device and wait five minutes etc the system does this for you
further we provide a customer phone app where you can reboot your system remotely if you're
out of town or you can simply call our 24/7 on-call number and our team will gladly
check your system for you we can even see if homes around your house have lost internet
and let you know if there's an internet outage in your area if not we can remotely troubleshoot for
you but frankly these enterprise grade systems are so good that we hardly ever get calls
there's a lot more i could talk about related to networks but i don't want to get too technical
in this video instead just know that you largely get what you pay for in networking also
if you're outside of north carolina and are trying to find a good home electronics installer
who can provide the level of networking that we do for our north carolina customers
you can go to home technology specialists of america which has a dealer locator for expert home
technology companies like audio advice for each major metro area in the u.s if you're building or
upgrading your home and trying to learn more about home automation lighting shading or other smart
home capabilities check out our full buying guide videos on the smart home tab at audioadvice.com
if you're in north carolina give us a call or come into one of our super showrooms in raleigh
or charlotte and we'll be glad to help you out thanks for watching