New waves of WiFi

The ‘connected’ TV was the tipping point: suddenly lakhs of households in India saw sense in installing a home WiFi network: It provided economic Internet access for multiple mobile phones; it fuelled PC and laptop — and it ‘smartened’ the television set, enabling the family to enjoy at a time of its choosing, hundreds of new movies and serials from Net-based providers like Hotstar, Netflix,Amazon and the like. The purchase of a home WiFi router has passed that very Indian test of ‘paisa vasool’ — good value for money.

The router industry is gearing to satisfy this burgeoning demand, with better, faster, more reliable networks. I have been trying out two routers from a leading supplier — D-Link — that cater to two interesting use cases.