Paper Circuit

It's 4 pm and you hear that dreaded cry from your kid's bedroom. "Daaaaaad... the WiFi is not working...".

For any parent these are now the most feared words, as we hunker down together through this period of being grounded by an infinitesimally small virus.

In happier times (any date before March 13, 2020 😂) we would have ignored the cry or asked our kids to "Come out here in the study where the router has a better signal..".

Saying that now, will only cause you parental shame.

But there is a better solution. It's called "mesh networking" and has been around for a few years now. Mesh networking allows you to blanket your house with strong wifi signals using wifi transceivers at targeted areas around the house.

These are not "WiFi Extenders" or "WiFi Access Points". The new mesh network devices are a sophisticated version of these extenders where they offer various key benefits like transparently handing over connection to the nearest mesh network device and beam-forming to individual devices as well.

This results in a strong WiFi connection between your phone, tablet or laptop to the mesh device nearest you as you move from room to room in your house.

The pioneer in this field has been a company called "Eero". They were founded in 2015 and launched the first user friendly mesh network router set. The entire product experience was like an Apple product, including the pristine white color of the devices.

Being an exceptionally early adopter (to my wife’s eternal chagrin), I immediately bought them and have been using them for almost 4 years now. Never again have we had any wifi coverage issues in our house or even in our backyard/frontyard.

My first generation Eero next to my AirPods Pro and Magic Mouse for comparison.

Eero were very successful and soon were scooped up by Amazon in 2019.

They are now in their third version of their hardware and now offer consumer and small business configurations.

I would highly recommend their beautiful 3 piece consumer set.

You plug one into your cable or DSL modem and then set it up with their really cool mobile app. You can then setup the other two devices at strategic locations throughout your house. The app will guide you to where the signal strength is best. If you have a large area to cover you can buy more of these devices.

Once these are setup they provide strong wifi coverage through out your house. But wait, there's more.

The Eero app also provides simple features to monitor and restrict access to the internet for all devices that connect to the wifi. That means you can target your kid's devices, set them up in a profile and then collectively turn them on or off with a single tap from anywhere in the world.

So for instance if your kid, Katie, has a phone and tablet, you can link those two devices to a profile, say "Katie". Then you can set access times for Katie. So she gets to user the internet from 8 am - 10 pm every weekday and 7 am - 11 am on weekends. Or if she is not doing their chores then you can "ground" them from the internet with a single tap.

In addition, Eero also has a monthly subscription called "Eero Secure" to monitor and block ads and harmful sites from your entire network !

So everyone in the house connected to the WiFi running on Eero with Eero Secure turned on will not see most ads on websites or apps. This alone is worth the price of admission..

So what are you waiting for ? Get a Eero mesh network and stop those dreaded cries bemoaning the poor wifi signal and be the cool parent who forever solved the wifi problem…

Great article by Craig Timberg at the Washington Post on the Border Gateway Protocol:

“By the time a pair of engineers sat down for lunch together in Austin, the Internet’s growing pains had become dire. Once a novelty for computer scientists, the network was now exploding in size, lurching ever closer to a hard mathematical wall built into one of the Internet’s most basic protocols.
As the prospect of system meltdown loomed, the men began scribbling ideas for a solution onto the back of a ketchup-stained napkin. Then a second. Then a third. The “three-napkins protocol,” as its inventors jokingly dubbed it, would soon revolutionize the Internet. And though there were lingering issues, the engineers saw their creation as a “hack” or “kludge,” slang for a short-term fix to be replaced as soon as a better alternative arrived.
That was 1989.”

I was soon to encounter BGP in 1991, my third year of studying Computer Engineering. This turned out to be important in 1997 when my brother and I launched India's first private ISP - WMINet - and we worked with VSNL, the state-owned ISP, educating them about BGP.

Those were early wild west days of the Internet in India and built on personal relationships with admins at each ISP. So personal, that I had root access on giaspn01 - the first commercial public email server in India operated by VSNL. That story for another day.

But within a couple of years the Internet exploded in India and that, was the end of the innocence.