This might be common knowledge for folks who know their networking/ LAN/ routers but came as news to me. So thought I'll share it here. We moved to a new place last month and got a new Airlink cable internet connection.

Since the concrete walls are very thick and the work tables are quite far from each other, it was recommended that we get different routers. Since each of us is online a lot, and we also watch only OTT and EPL on Hotstar, we decided to get five routers.

Now I had read about mesh and wanted to have a seamless connection all over the house and decided to give the same SSID on each router. For five days we struggled with very bad network.

Devices would show as connected and the speed would be ~250 kbps (Our connection is 100 MBPS, unlimited and the first day when I checked, I was getting 75+ MBPS). We struggled with video calls for work.

Surprisingly, kids didn't have much of a problem with watching Netflix on the same connection. I was not very keen on calling the person who had set up the cable because he would take off his mask every 2 minutes, despite three of us telling him very firmly to mask up.

As a last attempt on Wednesday, I changed the SSID of each of the router to a different name and voila! Now I get ~80 MBPS in each room. Even if I move the device to a different room, the speed goes down but is still ~30 MBPS.

Of course, if I check in the extreme opposite end from where a router is located, I get disconnected. Those 5 days were quite frustrating but now things are back to normal. (Yes, I know this is a first world problem and I'm talking about a privilege.

The point of this thread is to help a noob like me who might try something with half-baked knowledge :-) )