Water, electricity and wifi: basic needs in every home

If you are used to working in such a professional environment and you suddenly have to work at home, where you have to share the wifi with a few family members, the network often turns out to be a source of irritation. In some parts of the house the signal is too weak, the internet regularly drops out and sometimes you can’t even get a connection.

Now that we work from home and are online much more often, there is also more attention for the way wifi works. Because wifi in the home has become just as important as water and electricity. Experts are working hard to develop techniques that allow us to use the internet at home without problems.

In this blog Dalosy shares a handy stay-at-home tip for you.

The do-it-yourselfer installs Wi-Fi at home

In the Netherlands, we have good facilities. In most parts of the country, the internet is well taken care of with a fast copper or glass fibre connection up to the meter box. Data, films, games and video connections can effortlessly reach most homes. But after that, things often go wrong. The installation from the meter box remains stuck in the hobby sphere: the installer or the resident himself connects one access point to an easy spot and that’s it. In many households wifi is currently like a shot in the arm. The resident thinks that the access point has been placed at a favourable location, while it is literally hidden. Good coverage at all times and everywhere in the house requires some expertise.

The difference between 70 and 100%

We have certainly noticed this in the past few months. In many homes, the Wi-Fi works for 70 to 80 per cent. For that last bit, action needs to be taken, preferably by a professional. You need to get as close to that 100% as possible to be able to video call with the whole family, play games, hold meetings through Teams and do homework. Especially between 6pm and 10pm, when almost the whole country is streaming Netflix or TV programmes, the internet connection is heavily used. That’s when the Wi-Fi has to perform at its best. How do we bridge the gap between 70 and 100%? How do we ensure that the ‘new normal’ works well for everyone?

WiFi and new construction

In new buildings, the Internet is already fully integrated into the construction plans. It is as much a matter of course as water and electricity. For example, Wi-Fi cells are built into wall sockets at strategic locations. Including a connection so that you can also work wired. In this way, Wi-Fi is installed in the whole house in a well thought-out way and with a good bandwidth. The technology that makes this possible is called POF (Polymer Optical Fiber) and has actually been around for 20 years, but was mainly used in the car industry.

Now that it is known to be much cheaper to build a wifi network, its use could well take off. POF cables are only 1 mm thick and light as a feather.

Good coverage in older homes

In new buildings, it is therefore relatively easy to organise the Wi-Fi in a professional manner. But what do you do with a house built in the 70s?

75% of the houses in the Netherlands and Belgium are older than 30 years. They are equipped with UTP copper and coax cables, which are unsuitable for optical high-speed data communication. Of course, you can completely replace the cabling with glass fibre, but that can be done much more cheaply with POF.

Indeed, you can leave all the cabling in place and easily lay a wafer-thin POF cable next to it. With POF you also have no more trouble with electromagnetic interference (EMI). Even in an old house you can have wifi cells placed in the wall sockets. This also applies to more modern homes: just use the existing sockets. Polymer Optical Fibre is not a current carrier, so it is safe, and it is also copper-free. It even passes environmentalists’ tests!