In the computer networking world, the three most ubiquitous pieces of equipment are modems, routers, and switches. These are used everywhere from the datacenter hosting Google to the internet connection in your own home. However, despite how important these three pieces of equipment are, many people are completely oblivious as to what each piece of equipment does, so in this article, we’ll attempt to clarify the difference between the modem, router and switch, and how it all fits in your home network.

 

What is a Modem?

A modem is the short way of saying “modulator, demodulator”. The primary purpose of a modem when used in a [...]

Over the past few days, Amazon has been running multiple pre-sales leading up to their big Prime Day sales event, but starting at 9PM EST today, July 11, and ending exactly 30 hours later at 3AM EST tomorrow, July 12, Amazon will be hosting their largest sale for the year with deals coming up every five minutes.

We’ve went through the first round of deals and here’s a list of some of the deals to watch out for:

PCs:

SkyTech Omega Gaming PC /w Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 1080, 240GB SSD + 2TB HDD – $1,499.99 CyberPowerPC Gaming PC /w Intel Core i7-7700K, 16GB DDR4, GeForce GTX 1070, 128GB PCIe SSD + 2TB HDD – [...]

Qualcomm’s latest midrange SoCs are finally here! The Snapdragon 660 and 630 SoCs are slated to replace the highly successful Snapdragon 653 and the Snapdragon 625 SoCs.

The Qualcomm 660 switches from the big.LITTLE architecture to a unified octa-core architecture. The new processor replaces the ARM Cortex A72 and A53 CPUs in favor of eight Kryo 260 CPUs. The GPU has also been updated to the Adreno 512. Qualcomm states that users would see a 20% improvement in compute performance and 30% improvement in graphics over its predecessor.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 630 leverages eight ARM Cortex A53 Cores similar to the Snapdragon 625. Maximum configurable [...]

In one of its most high profile moves this year, T-Mobile recently announced that they’ve won big at the 600MHz low band wireless spectrum auction, winning 1,525 licenses, or 45% of all 600MHz spectrum. The newly acquired spectrum covers every inch of the US including US territories such as Puerto Rico and quadruples T-Mobile’s low band spectrum holdings. According to documents from the FCC, T-Mobile was the biggest purchaser of spectrum in this auction, spending nearly $8 billion.

The auction, which began last year, was a special auction which would re-purpose spectrum currently used for broadcast TV into spectrum for wireless services. Low [...]

The Fastest Home Mesh WiFi System

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.

Specifications Manufacturer Netgear Model Orbi Home WiFi System (2-Pack) Wi-Fi Bands IEEE 802.11 b/g/n/ac Radios 3 [...]

Best Bang for the Buck

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 [...]

In a recent announcement, ARRIS took the wraps off the fastest cable modem they’ve ever built, the SurfBoard SB8200.

According to the release, the ARRIS SurfBoard SB8200 is a DOCSIS 3.1 ready modem featuring 32 download and 8 upload SC-QAM channels along with 2 download OFDM and 2 Upload OFDMA channels. It’s capable of theoretical speeds up to 10Gbps, a whopping 10x faster than DOCSIS 3.0 however, as the device only features two Gigabit Ethernet ports, maximum bandwidth is actually capped at a paltry 2Gbps. For those who need it, the SB8200 also supports both IPv4 as well as IPv6 technologies.

Carrying a MSRP of $199.99, the ARRIS SurfBoard [...]

Samsugn Exynos 9 | Source: Samsung

In a recent announcement, Samsung announced their latest 10nm based Exynos 9 8895 SoC. Manufactured on Samsung’s latest 10nm FinFET with an improved 3D structure, the Samsung Exynos 9 8895 features 27% higher performance at a 40% decreased power consumption compared to previous generation 14nm SoCs.

Compute in the Samsung Exynos 9 8895 is powered by eight cores with four 2nd Generation custom Samsung designed cores paired along with four Cortex-A53 high performance cores. Graphics is powered by ARM’s latest Mali G71 GPU. This allows the Exynos 9 8895 to drive [...]

What is a Dual WAN Router?

As its name implies, a dual WAN router is a router which supports two WAN (Wide Area Network) connections rather than just one which is typical of most consumer routers. Some router manufacturers also make multi WAN routers which will support more than two WAN connections.

 

Why Do You Need One?

For many homeowners and businesses, having 100% internet uptime is more of a necessity than a luxury. As more and more services are running on the internet, everything from voice communications, credit card transactions, and security systems now require the internet to function, which means even a minute of downtime could cost [...]