Wireless mesh, then and now: from city-wide mesh dreams to whole-home Wi-Fi

In 2007, a lot of New Zealand still had slow internet. Dial-up was not yet a memory, ADSL speeds fell away the further you lived from the exchange, and rural connections could be painful. Into that gap came an appealing idea: wireless mesh networks. Instead of digging up every street, you could put small radio nodes on lamp posts and rooftops, each one talking to its neighbours, and let the network route data from node to node until it reached a wired connection.

The earlier site at this address followed a Christchurch effort to build that kind of network. Nearly twenty years later, it is worth looking at what happened to the mesh idea, and why most people now meet it in their living room rather than on their street.

What a mesh network is

In a conventional wireless network, every device talks to one central access point. In a mesh, the nodes talk to each other as well. Data can hop from node to node along whichever path is working best. If one node fails or is blocked, traffic routes around it.

That self-healing quality is the attraction. A mesh can grow by adding nodes, cover awkward ground, and keep going when parts of it break. The same ideas are used in military radio, disaster-response networks, sensor networks and the smart-home protocols that link lights and switches.

The city-wide mesh years

In the mid-2000s, many cities around the world announced plans for municipal wireless networks, often built as meshes. Some promised free or cheap access for everyone. A few small towns and campuses built working networks, and some are still running.

The grand city-wide versions mostly struggled. Every hop in a mesh shares the same radio spectrum, so capacity drops as traffic passes through more nodes. Signals that worked outdoors often failed to get through house walls. Nodes needed power, maintenance and sites. And the business models assumed revenue that never materialised. By the end of the decade, many of the most ambitious plans had been scaled back or abandoned.

What New Zealand did instead: fibre

New Zealand took the wired route. The Ultra-Fast Broadband programme, launched after the 2008 election and contracted from 2011, set out to bring fibre within reach of 75 per cent of the population, a target later expanded to 87 per cent. The first phase was completed at the end of 2019, and later phases extended fibre to more towns. Chorus built most of the network, with local fibre companies covering Christchurch, Whangārei and parts of the central North Island.

Uptake grew steadily as homes switched from copper to fibre. For areas fibre does not reach, government programmes have supported rural wireless and other technologies. MBIE's fast broadband pages describe the programmes and where they stand.

The outcome is the reverse of the 2007 vision. Fibre brought fast connections to most households, and wireless became the last few metres inside the house.

Mesh moves indoors

That last few metres is where mesh made its comeback. A single Wi-Fi router in the corner of a house often leaves dead spots, especially in larger homes, homes with brick or concrete walls, foil-backed insulation, or rooms spread across levels. Range extenders helped a little but often halved speeds.

Whole-home mesh Wi-Fi systems, which became mainstream consumer products in the second half of the 2010s, apply the old mesh ideas inside the house. Several small units are spread around the home, they talk to each other, and devices roam between them automatically. Many systems now support a common industry standard, so units from different makers can increasingly work together.

Getting good Wi-Fi in a New Zealand home

A few practical points:

• Put the fibre where you need it. The fibre connection point and modem are often installed wherever was convenient on the day, such as a garage wall. Moving the main router to a central spot can help more than any gadget.
• Use cable for backhaul where you can. Mesh units connected to each other by Ethernet cable perform far better than units relaying wirelessly. If you are renovating, running a few data cables while walls are open is cheap insurance.
• Mind the building materials. Concrete, brick, metal cladding, foil-backed insulation and some glazing films all block Wi-Fi. A unit in each zone may be needed.
• Smart-home devices. Many smart plugs, sensors and lights use their own low-power mesh protocols, separate from Wi-Fi. These work best with a hub or a compatible router placed centrally.
• Security basics. Change default passwords, keep firmware updated, and use a separate guest network for visitors and smart devices where your system allows.

What the mesh story teaches

The mesh enthusiasts of 2007 were right that radio networks could be cheap, flexible and self-healing. They underestimated how much capacity people would want, and how hard it is to push radio through walls. The technology found its niche where those limits matter least: short distances, many small devices and a fast wired connection behind it.

The communications section follows the rest of the story, from the end of copper phone lines to what comes next.