Walkthrough: Setting Up Google WiFi and First Impressions

This week, I took to the task of hooking up Google WiFi throughout my home. It’s quite possible that someone reading this is also going through the same process, or is possibly thinking about trying out Google’s mesh network hardware. With this post, I’ll go over the basics of setting up Google WiFi, then provide my initial thoughts. 

To provide a basic overview of what Google WiFi is, something we have done previously on multiple occasions, here’s the rundown. Google WiFi is a “mesh” router system that helps blanket your entire house with WiFi. Instead of having a single wireless router in your office or kitchen that can’t stretch to your upstairs or wherever in your home, a system like this allows you to reach all the nooks and crannies with WiFi signal. It’s essentially modular in that you can add on more Google WiFi units as needed, depending on the size of your home.

As detailed by Google, one WiFi point is capable of blanketing an area of 500 to 1500 square feet, while a 3-pack of units can span across an area of 3,000 to 4,500 square feet. How many you choose to use is entirely up to you, though.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s get to hooking up Google WiFi.

Attack Plan

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Being like most other dudes, instruction manuals are my worst enemy. I mean, how hard can something possibly be, right? Well, allow me to spare you any potential frustration and boredom and just tell you that reading the instructions is a good idea when setting up your new WiFi network. Not only is it a good idea, but given that this is Google, it’s incredibly simple and nearly automatic with the user needing only to plug in a couple power cables and pressing the “Next” button a few times during start-up. Seriously, setting up Google WiFi is extremely painless, so reading the instructions will at least give you something to do during the process.

To begin, you hook-up your first Google WiFi router (aka WiFi point) directly to your modem with a provided Cat 5e (Category 5) cable. Then, plug in the WiFi point to wall power. From here, open up the Google WiFi application that you download from Google Play. The first part of setting up Google WiFi is connecting your first WiFi point to your smartphone via Bluetooth. Making this step a breeze is a QR code on the backside of each WiFi point. During setup, the Google WiFi app will open up the camera via an API and you will snap a shot of that QR code. The connection is then made automatically.

Once you have your phone and first WiFi point talking to each other, the real fun begins.

With the first WiFi point powered on and connected to the Internet thanks to a successful link with your modem, you can begin naming your network and establishing a password.

IMPORTANT – For anyone not wanting to completely rename an existing WiFi network and reconnecting each device you have in a home to a new network with updated password, simply give the new Google WiFi network the same exact name and password as the previous network.

For example, my previous network was called SHIELD_24. In setup, I gave the same name, SHIELD_24, and then set the same password. At time of completion, I witnessed all of my devices automatically connect to the new Google WiFi network (Google Home, SHIELD TV, Ecobee, smartphone, Xbox, etc), saving me a ton of trouble. Of course, you can choose a new name and password anytime you want, but again, that comes with more work. On top of that, with my previous ASUS router, I elected to choose if a device was connecting to a 2.4GHz or 5GHz band myself. With Google WiFi, it selects all of that for me based on what’s best, so no longer do I see two options (one for 2.4GHz, one for 5GHz) under all of my devices’ WiFi settings. For me, this really makes Google WiFi a nice little investment.