Most home WiFi routers use very low power, cannot be mounted outdoors, and are designed to provide good indoor WiFi. Multiple antennas (MIMO) allow them to maximize indoor range and throughput by making good use of the signal bouncing off of walls, ceilings, and floors.
There are good outdoor non-meshing WiFi access points, from companies like Engenius and Ubiquiti, although, even for a single access point, they are significantly more laborious to configure than the AyrMesh Hub.
Outdoor commercial meshing WiFi products are focused on providing the highest possible bandwidth (speed) to the largest number of people/devices in a relatively small area. Most of them also include sophisticated hospitality features for including or excluding specific clients, providing several SSIDs linked to different VLANs, and throttling bandwidth to prevent “hogging.” Examples include Cisco/Meraki, Aruba, Open-Mesh, Ubiquiti UniFi, and AeroHive – if you are trying to provide WiFi for guests or the public, we recommend these solutions.
The AyrMesh products, on the other hand, are designed to provide a good, usable WiFi signal and bandwidth to a relatively small number of trusted people/devices spread out over a very large area. The key differences are:
- High-power WiFi Access Points (the AyrMesh Hubs) – these use the maximum allowed power for their WiFi radios for maximum range
- Outdoor-centric -AyrMesh products are designed to be mounted outside in the weather.
- Range over Speed – unlike The WiFi parameters on the AyrMesh Hubs are tuned to provide maximum range, not maximum bandwidth/speed. This means that you may get lower speed than your home WiFi router when you’re close to home, but you’ll be able to access the signal on your Hub from up to half a mile away, where you won’t even see the signal from your WiFi router.
- Meshing – many commercial WiFi products can use meshing, but the combination of long range and outdoor capability in the AyrMesh Hubs allows them to be used to provide WiFi over a huge area.