Unlike most routers and wireless systems, there’s no way to administer Google Wifi via a browser instead, you have to do that using the app. Whenever I moved from one area to another where there was a big difference in signal strength between nodes, Google Wifi would always connect me to the closest node. Normally, devices tend to want to hold onto a signal until it gets so weak it disconnects – or the user forces this by switching Wi-Fi off and on again – so this is a really important feature, and it’s one that seems to work well. In effect, client steering allows Google Wifi to “gently” disconnect a device from one node to encourage it to reconnect to another with a stronger signal.
This is used to ensure each device is connected to the node with the strongest signal. Perhaps the most important feature, though, is what Google calls “client steering”. For starters, there’s band steering, a feature many 802.11ac wave 2 routers use to switch client devices between 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks seamlessly, depending on signal strength. That’s pretty clever, but Google Wifi is also a mesh networking system, and it uses a host of other clever tricks within the home to ensure your devices maintain a strong network signal.
In this way, Google Wifi is able to proactively switch channels based on the time of day and the day of the week. By sending secure and hashed information to Google’s servers about the various wireless signals, congestion and interference in your local area, a schedule is calculated and sent back down the line to your system. Google Wifi also employs machine learning in the cloud to improve this over time. It does this by using a dedicated “sensing radio” to scan the surrounding wireless environment, work out which channels are least congested, and hop from one to the other to maintain a consistently strong signal. And there’s also no need to keep checking up on the surrounding network environment, since Google Wifi is designed to adapt to that automatically. Google Wifi will download firmware updates and install them automatically, so there’s no need for you to keep on top of this. You might need to disable Wi-Fi on your existing router to keep interference to a minimum, or restart it to complete setup, but otherwise you can leave the system to its own devices.
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