So, I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I say that we tend to misplace our phones from time to time... I'm no stranger to the madcap hunt for the missing mobile.... Pretty sure it's somewhere in the house, but not 100% certain... Turning everything upside down, looking in every room twice...
Recently, I've started using the mesh network in our house to help me. You see, our house is split over three floors, and the walls are really thick. We're not allowed to run cables (and probably couldn't bury them in the walls if we tried), so we need to have a mesh network to get the internet upstairs.
For my sins, I settled for a Netgear Orbi RK50 system. Pricey, with massive satellites, it was one of the best available at the time when I got it. since then, I've really got a lot of buyer's remorse with the damn thing.
You see, Netgear never really polished the firmware in the devices, and they left some things bafflingly broken. For example, when the mesh turns on, it can take up to TEN MINUTES for a satellite to connect to the router. TEN MINUTES. A normal device will connect to a router in under 100 milliseconds. What the hell can it be doing for ten whole minutes? Secondly, and again, bafflingly, when you set it up in "tree" mode, so you can daisy-chain the routers around to get even further coverage, the mesh can occasionally "reconfigure" due to changes in the environment... A satellite that used to connect to a satellite between it and the router can suddenly connect directly to the router, or may shift to another satellite. This is precisely how meshes are supposed to work... except Netgear's devices will completely stop passing traffic for between 4 and 8 minutes while the network is "settling". Absolute gash. So, you have to notch every device down to 50% power to make absolutely certain that they can only connect to one other satellite, completely defeating the purpose of having a reconfigurable mesh.
Finally, and most annoyingly, the routing tables in the devices don't always work properly. So you can be sitting in range of one satellite, able to print to the printer on another satellite, but as soon as you move to being in range of a third satellite (or the router), the printer is no longer contactable, despite them all being on the same network?! Baffling, and really really annoying. If I hadn't spent so much on this system, I'd have ripped it out and replaced it years ago.
Anyway, the system does actually have one saving grace: The UI. The Web UI on the router node contains a really nice depiction of the network. The App is alright, but a bit prone to suddenly being unable to "see" the very mesh it's connected to. And one of the best things about it is that it will give the particular connectivity that it's using (2G / 5G).
So, let's say I lose my phone.
Step 1. Ping it. I have a Raspberry PI with dnsmasq running as a dhcp server with reverse lookups enabled. So I can ping my phone from my laptop. Step 2. Assuming the ping works (it's in the house), note the latency. Normal latency is about 3-6 milliseconds. If the latency is high, it can indicate that the device is a long way from the access point. Step 3. Log into the Netgear Orbi Router UI and find the entry for the phone.... It'll be attached to the router or one of the satellites. Step 4. Note which one, and note the technology (2G/5G).
Now, if it's 2G, that means it's probably in a different room. If it's 5G with poor latency, that also means it's in a different room.
so now, I just have to create a mental map of roughly where it might be. So, tonight, my phone claimed to be next to the router which is on the ground floor right in the middle of the house, but against the South wall. So that's the centre of the sphere to search... The next router is in the lounge, and if the phone was "east" of the router, it would have connected there. So it had to be West, North or Up. It couldn't be south, because the router is against the south wall, which is 2 feet of stone, and even 2G can't get through that. So, I looked at the band and strength: 5G, with a ping of about 200-300 milliseconds. So, it's clearly not IN the room with the router, and not in the room immediately west, because that's just thin ply wall.. So, that leaves north and up. North is the stairs up, so I checked that I hadn't left it on the stairs: nope. Directly above the router is the bathroom to the main bedroom.... And lo and behold, behind the door, there was my phone.
It's a crazy way to go about finding my phone, but it beats a naive house search for time by about 90% :) So, if you are thinking of getting a mesh system, you can have some fun... Get the kids to hide your phone and see if you can find it by using Mesh Sonar ;-)