With the explosion of mobile and IoT, Wi-Fi demands in the home have increased exponentially in the past few years causing many people to realize just how bad home Wi-Fi is. As a solution to home Wi-Fi issues, mesh Wi-Fi has exploded in popularity over the past year prompting almost every networking company to scramble to release some sort of mesh Wi-Fi offering.
Coming a bit late into the game is TP-Link, which recently launched the Deco M5 that we’ll be reviewing today. Like many of the mesh Wi-Fi systems on the market, the TP-Link Deco M5 is designed with performance, range and ease of use in mind however, what TP-Link has also done [...]
Netgear’s Nighthawk series of routers have always been advertised as Netgear’s flagship consumer router products, designed primarily for those looking for networking equipment well suited for gaming and media streaming.
In Netgear’s Nighthawk routers, Netgear has done quite a bit to cater to this market with an aggressive design backed by some of the latest and greatest technologies including radios based on the latest wireless standards, tons of antennas, built-in QoS functionality, and more.
Capitalizing on the Netgear Nighthawk routers’ success, Netgear recently introduced their first Nighthawk switch, the Netgear [...]
Over the past few weeks, we’ve reviewed several home mesh Wi-Fi systems including the Ubiquiti AmpliFi HD, the Linksys Velop, and the Eero and found that while each one had its own unique benefits, none of them were perfect.
Today we’ll be reviewing the Netgear Orbi which is Netgear’s home mesh Wi-Fi solution. Like the Linksys Velop, the Netgear Orbi features three radios in each unit, allowing one of the radios to serve as a dedicated backhaul for better performance between the Orbi nodes.
SpecificationsManufacturer NetgearModel Orbi Home WiFi System (2-Pack)Wi-Fi Bands IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/acRadios 3 (2.4GHz [...]When I switched to Time Warner Cable (now Spectrum) several years ago, one of the first things I did was purchase a new cable modem. At the time, Time Warner Cable was charging customers $6 per month to rent a modem which means if I purchased a modem, used it for just shy of two years, I would be saving $6 a month for the rest of the useful life of the modem.
At the time, the best modem on the market was the ARRIS SurfBoard SB6141. It was the standalone modem of choice for Time Warner Cable, so I picked one up. For the next few years, the modem worked well, but when Time Warner Cable began rolling out their new speed tiers up to 300Mbps, an upgrade was [...]
Several weeks ago, we had the opportunity to review the Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO which we found to be an excellent Wi-Fi access point solution for anyone looking for an easy way to significantly improve their Wi-Fi coverage, performance, and reliability in the home, office, or commercial deployment.
Of course, the Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO isn’t the fastest access point Ubiquiti makes and for those who want the absolute maximum performance, Ubiquiti also offers the UniFi AP AC HD, Ubiquiti’s flagship UniFi access point sporting an even faster, newer, beefier wireless chipset paired with an even more powerful antenna array.
Given [...]
The new Apple MacBook Pro (Touchbar, 2016) is quite the mixed bag. On one hand the thinner and lighter design, the beautiful Retina display, and the cool new TouchBar makes it one of the best MacBook Pros ever, but on the other hand, lackluster hardware, USB-C exclusivity, and the extremely high pricetag makes it a lot less appealing than its predecessor.
While internal components such as the CPU, graphics, battery size, etc. may be a bit uninspired, one component that Apple hasn’t skimped on for this generation is the internal Wi-Fi. Rather than stick with the usual 802.11AC with a 2×2 MIMO antenna setup typically seen on [...]
Around this time last year, I stumbled upon the Eero Mesh Wi-Fi System. At the time, the concept of mesh Wi-Fi was really limited to just high end enterprise systems that typically used it to blanket places like stadiums, shopping malls, and hotels. Using it in the home however, was pretty much unheard of even though homes are a perfect use case for mesh Wi-Fi. Unless of course you were some sort of network engineer or you had some serious money to invest in a real Wi-Fi system along with an IT team to manage it.
Noticing the market opportunity for mesh Wi-Fi in the home, the team at Eero unveiled their cloud based mesh Wi-Fi system focusing on performance, [...]
Several days ago, we got our first glimpse into Ubiquiti’s enterprise networking gear lineup when we reviewed the Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO, an impressive Wi-Fi access point which delivered enterprise class performance and enterprise class features at a reasonable price.
Today we’ll be reviewing a significantly different product in the Ubiquiti UniFi lineup, the Ubiquiti UniFi Security Gateway (USG), which despite its name implying that it’s purely a firewall appliance, is actually a combination of an enterprise class router along with firewall [...]
One of the rising stars in the enterprise networking world is Ubiquiti Networks, a company which has become very well known for producing competitive enterprise grade networking equipment for less than half the cost when compared to similar products from more well known brands such as Cisco, Aruba, HP, Aerohive, Xirrus, etc.
Among their most popular products is the Ubiquiti UniFi APs (Access Points), which has become very popular for not only businesses, but also home users who have become tired of overpaying for top end consumer Wi-Fi routers that seem to never work.
One of the most popular access points is the Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO [...]
Back at CES earlier this year, one of Linksys’s biggest announcements was their new Velop Mesh Wi-Fi System which is Linksys’s first entry into the Mesh Wi-Fi market.
As we recently got our hands on a test unit, today we’ll be reviewing Linksys Velop to see if it’s actually lives up to its claims.
For our review, Linksys provided us with the Velop 3-Node Mesh Wi-Fi System. The Linksys Velop will also come in a one node or two node pack, but additional single nodes can always be added to the system to improve Wi-Fi coverage in the home.
SpecificationsManufacturer LinksysModel VelopWi-Fi Bands IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac wave 2 [...]
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