There are many advantages to having a professionally wired or wireless gigabit network installed in your Northern Colorado home, versus a Wifi mesh or consumer-installed router.

“When designing a network, it’s critical to understand the needs of today’s home office, audio, and video from a networking standpoint,” says Jason Parmley, owner of Next Step Communications, Northern Colorado’s leading provider of in-home wired and wireless networking solutions. “The user-installed mesh systems readily available today have considerable limitations in the modern home.”

A mesh system, in which you plug one small router the size of a hockey puck into your modem, and place a series of similar devices around your home to create a web network, have limited range and customers that own one of these systems soon find that they have to keep buying more units to try to get even coverage throughout the home. “They speak wirelessly to each other, but are limited to between 20 and 30 feet and have to be sitting on a table or piece of furniture so they tend to clutter the home,” Parmley explains. “This results in the loss of speed and continuity between each device, as they aren’t individually wired together in most cases. So the further away you move from the router, the slower your Internet speeds will be and the more pucks you will need to buy.”

Compare this to professionally installed wired or wireless networks, and you can clearly see the benefits of the latter. “At Next Step Communications, our professional network installers hardwire from the modem location with Cat-6 cable, which is Gig network capable, to individual access points that can be ceiling- or wall-mounted,” Parmley describes. “Those wireless access points are fed the needed power and Internet over the same Cat6 cable from a POE switch so close to the same speed that the modem is giving out the wireless access points are broadcasting it throughout the home is the speed delivered to your laptop, phone, television, and more. This results in very low latency from the actual internet device that is giving the entire network internet access to the device that is broadcasting the wireless.”

Another thing we typically like to do for our customers’ network is to install all of their network equipment in a central location in a small wall-mounted open frame rack system. This is a low cost way to organize the wiring and leave room for switches, battery backups/surge protection modems, and home automation hubs to keep everything nice and neat, labeled, and easy for the customer or us to work on or add to in the future.

In addition to providing faster speeds to clients using Internet from Comcast, Century Link, Next Light, Fort Collins new Fiber network, or TDS in the Northern Colorado region, Next Step Communications’ networking services offer more security than web or mesh networks. “Our networks feature a standalone commercial-grade VPN firewall router, which is much more secure,” says Parmley.

Lastly, Next Step supports its network installs 100%. So if you suddenly run into a problem with your Internet access, you can bypass phone support from your Internet provider and go directly to Next Step as your first stop for help. “If our customers have an internet issue, Next Step’s team can log into the router remotely and quickly assess if it’s an equipment issue or an issue with the Internet provider,” says Parmley. “Having our team there to diagnose issues on the spot saves our customers a lot of time and headaches.”

If you are a homeowner on Colorado’s Front Range looking to outfit your home with a professional wired or wireless networking system, contact Next Step Communications today for a free estimate.