Linksys Latest Company To Unveil a Wi-Fi Mesh System (engadget.com)

From an Engadget report: Mesh networking has become trendy for folks looking to fill every nook and cranny of their homes with Wi-Fi. So it should be no surprise that the makers of the most iconic router ever is unveiling its own system. The Linksys tri-band Velop setup is a modular system that the company says is made to expand as your needs do. Each Velop Tri-Band 2x2 802.11ac Wave 2 MU-MIMO node pulls quadruple duty as a router, range extender, access point and bridge. According to Linksys, each Velop is capable of a combined speed of 2,200 Mbps. It's like having a bunch of little routers in your home all working together to make sure you can stream The OA regardless of which room you're in.Linksys' Velop will set you back by at least $200 for an individual modular, with the pack of two and three priced at $350 and $500, respectively. This makes it costlier than Google's Wi-Fi router, which starts at $129.

Comments

Google is in the game

[WarJolt]

Game over guys

Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[skids]

Seriously, one afternoon, a power drill and a crimp tool. How hard can it be?

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[SQLGuru]

I wired my previous house, but it was a one-story and I could route the wires up the wall to the attic and back down to the router......but I don't have any clue how to do the same in my 2-story house. Otherwise, I'd wire it.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't buy any Linksys crap.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[WarJolt]

Honestly most people give me a blank stare when I say crimp tool. Those who know what that is has no idea how to configure router properly. Just face it, the vast majority of people don't want to be bothered with managing their WiFi. I found google wifi care very useful with helping out with propblems (even though my problem is probably qwests messed up PPP implementation).

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

First, consider underneath your house. Slab? Ok, forget it. Finished basement? Meh. Maybe you do it, maybe not. Unfinished? Do it. Elevated? Do it.

Attic is second.

Outside wallsis third.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[dgatwood]

How hard can it be?

Before or after you suddenly get packet loss eight years later because one of the punch-downs didn't hold the wire quite well enough inside the wall, and suddenly you're having to take a panel off the wall behind a bunch of equipment? :-)

But seriously, yes, wires are good, and for the most part, fairly easy to set up and maintain. With that said, what the heck are people building their walls and floors out of that they need a mesh network in a house!?!

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Highdude702]

Very good, i live in las vegas. So we dont have cellars/basements but when people ask i tell them in that exact order with exterior walls last cause its the most damage also im a Electrician/Low Voltage tech. So i get asked alot. and in a 2 story house you can almost guarantee holes in drywall. Thats not hard to fix though. we just did my brothers house which is 2 story his wife hated walking into her house for the second time ever and having holes everywhere. but with a little skill of a mud knife. i made the holes disappear. Works way better if you have textured walls and ceiling. other than that its not hard at all. hardest part is getting good crimps/punches if you dont do it for a living or often.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Just Some Guy]

I'm not finding the RJ45 on my phone.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[SubtleGuest]

But why do that? If you buy a decent or even mediocre router, wi-fi works great. I get the same speed a floor away from the router so why would I run wires in my walls?

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Luthair]

If your basement is finished I'm not sure I would bother as you'd need to do a lot of fishing (or installing access ports.

Firstly, don't retrofit it in the external walls. If you go into the attic make sure once you run the cable use a can of spray foam to fill in the gaps. You don't want to allow outside air into your walls, it will cause heat loss / gain.

Otherwise you buy flexible drill bits that are ~4 feet long, this lets you hit the right angle to drill between floors, if you don't hit the right angle you will need patch drywall. Obviously don't be a dumbass, you need to know exactly where wiring, and gas lines are before you do any of this. Then its basically the same as with one floor, cut a hole in the drywall and install one of the low voltage boxes.

You can buy cabling rated for air ducts, I'm not sure what the limitations are (return only?)

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

I like to wire my stuff where its practical.

For that stuff I cant run wires to, I installed one decent wifi AP (Netgear R6400 in AP mode) in a high central location in the house. At the corners of my 1/4 acre, I get 50mbps with an iPhone 6. Two to three houses down the street I'm still on my wifi, if anything I made it too good. All over my tri-level house, always max wifi bars. Speedtest inside the house, 100 to 200mbps on 802.11n 5GHz, or AC if the device supports it - generally it maxes out my cable which is 200mbps at present.

I think this mesh stuff is just an excuse to a) make shitty wifi access points with shitty range, so b) consumer goes and buys more and more of them to mesh with.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[TechyImmigrant]

My 3 story house, built in 2000, came wired! 1 or two wall sockets with coax, phone and ethernet in every room, all going back to a closet under the staircase, where the FiOS come in as an ethernet wire. It was my problem to put the router and 32 port switch in the closet.

I may never move. The thought of dealing with an unwired house does not appeal to me.
Maybe if I had a 'back to the studs' fixer upper, I would consider it because I could put my own comms wiring in with more ethernet and less coax.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[TechyImmigrant]

How hard can it be?

Before or after you suddenly get packet loss eight years later because one of the punch-downs didn't hold the wire quite well enough inside the wall, and suddenly you're having to take a panel off the wall behind a bunch of equipment? :-)

But seriously, yes, wires are good, and for the most part, fairly easy to set up and maintain. With that said, what the heck are people building their walls and floors out of that they need a mesh network in a house!?!

Why do you have punchdowns behind the wall? Stick in a wall box.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[dgatwood]

By "panel", I meant the front cover plate on the wall box.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[geekmux]

Seriously, one afternoon, a power drill and a crimp tool. How hard can it be?

My last "mesh" network (ironically enough a group of WRT54GS models running DD-WRT using WDS) covered about 3 acres across four structures.

While I agree with you that running the damn wire is the easier way to go, it's not always the ideal option for every scenario.

Oh, and that network was about a decade ago. It's about damn time Linksys.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[geekmux]

How hard can it be?

Before or after you suddenly get packet loss eight years later because one of the punch-downs didn't hold the wire quite well enough inside the wall, and suddenly you're having to take a panel off the wall behind a bunch of equipment? :-)

Thank you for confirming why I would always run two network runs to every location instead of just one. You never know. :-)

And to be honest, you're probably wanting to upgrade the entire damn run with Cat6 or better after almost a decade of use, so taking a panel off the wall becomes a rather moot point.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[unixisc]

Why do you need that? Just use your cellphone, download Vonage or 8x8 or iPlum, sign on to their service and you're off to the races

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it has telephone lines use it to feed the wires through, tie the phhone line to an "anker" tape off the Cat6 with enough phone line tail to go through the wall twice... anker off the Eather, feed the phone line back and forth for each new cable.
place at least two lines per face plate.

Long ass drill bit with a hole in the bit so that you can use that as a snake. Snake through some tubing even if it's nylon mesh.

Worst case scenario: use your vents with plenum cable. Last case dig a trench or a moat outside.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Jeremi]

Another good option is to re-use the existing wires in the wall to carry data. Ethernet-over-power-lines is cheap and works well (as long as your two endpoints are on the same circuit, and your appliances aren't too electrically noisy). Ethernet-over-phone-lines rather pricey but also works well (I'm able to get broadband data traffic up to the third story of my building from the garage using 1970's-era phone wiring with this device).

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

Works way better if you have textured walls and ceiling.

Oh god no, unless by "way better" you mean you can show off the work you did in making your patch almost but not quite match the rest of the texture.

Source: replaced a couple of water damaged sheetrock sheets on a ceiling with that blow on "popcorn" texture crap. In the end, we scraped off ALL that crap from the entire house just so that one room wouldn't look like shit.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[fluffernutter]

Our utility box is in the basement. We bought the house with 95% of the basement ceiling drywalled. Our bedroom juts out mostly over the garage and the heat only gets upstairs through a maze of joists and ducts. Very difficult to cable. It's not impossible, we were doing renovations once and had a key part of the wall open that exposed the difficult part of the path upstairs but I thought screw it.. wireless routers work well enough. It has been a long time since I had the free hours for such endeavors. Roughly since before my kids were born.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[sexconker]

In my apartment it would take cutting an extra hole in the drywall to route the cable around the fireblock, if it's even possible. If it's not possible, I'd have to drill through the fireblock or sacrifice some other cable (coax, in use, electrical, not legal) to complete the run. Then I've got to patch the drywall back up.

I used to run wireless from the second floor to the first floor but it was ass. So I got me some Zyxel powerline networking adapters. These things were ok but didn't get great speed. After a few months they started to instantly overheat. After buying the necessary screwdrivers to open one up, I found it had leaky capacitors. They were the cheapest, jankiest eloctrolytics money could buy. On both sides of the board. The board itself was permanently fixed to the back half of the casing. It seems like the casing was formed with the power prongs in place, and those were welded to the board with about 2 mountains of shit my cheapo soldering iron couldn't get through. So I couldn't remove the board to get to the caps on the back side (or make doing the ones on the front easy by removing the board and putting it on a work surface). I couldn't repair it, and they were out of warranty (and I already replaced one due to overheating and coil whine only for it to do the same damned thing).

So fuck it, into the trash they went, and I ran a long cat 5e cable tacked to the wall. It's ugly, but it works and it would have saved me about a decade of hassle with shitty connections had I just done it on day one.

Fuck wireless. Fuck Zyxel.

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not the houses. It's the interference from so many devices.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[FatdogHaiku]

Another good option is to re-use the existing wires in the wall to carry data. Ethernet-over-power-lines is cheap and works well (as long as your two endpoints are on the same circuit, and your appliances aren't too electrically noisy)...

I'm just afraid my appliances will know the network is talking about them...

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[pixelpusher220]

HVAC stack. Bonus is closets and bathrooms tend to be grouped around it for less than public visibility of any access panels you might need

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[dgatwood]

I run four, but if I'm using all four, I still have to dig into the wall. :-)

As for upgrading the cables... yes, in theory, I could upgrade my 15-year-old Cat 5e wiring with something more modern, but I don't see myself upgrading my managed switch to 10-gigabit any time soon, as the existing gigabit network is still more than an order of magnitude faster than my upstream provider's download speeds and two orders of magnitude faster than my upstream provider's upload speeds, which would mean that the only speed advantages would be within my in-home network.

The only part of my in-home network where I could usefully take advantage of any extra speed beyond gigabit is the link from my backup server to the switch, but that hardware supports channel bonding, so I have two ports bonded together (and could go up to four by moving some equipment around, but in practice, two ports are fast enough to basically saturate the drives, making any further bandwidth increases largely moot).

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[dgatwood]

Seriously? In my house, not counting old, powered-down hardware, I have six wireless-capable computers, three iPhones, an iPad Mini, an iPod Touch, two Nook tablets, two Bluetooth trackpads, two Bluetooth keyboards, an unused Airport Base Station acting as a wired print spooler (but spewing Wi-Fi beacon packets nonetheless), plus an extra (unused) Wi-Fi hotspot on my old DSL router and maybe one on my cable router as well, plus a five-station cordless phone setup spewing noise on one of those bands (16 Wi-Fi devices, 4 Bluetooth devices, and six "other" devices including the cordless phone base), and I'm still not having trouble getting decent service out of a single 802.11ac Airport Extreme.

Are there really normal people (read "not software engineers") who are using more than twenty or thirty wireless devices in their homes? How? Why?

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[TechyImmigrant]

By "panel", I meant the front cover plate on the wall box.

OK. I have a low rack in front of my wall box so I can reach it.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot of houses are built with bricks. And there is a chance they are made of some clay which is hard to be penetrated by wifi signal.

Lots of houses in europe is like that.

Also this applies to wifi networks which should be available on separate floors. In europe floors are made with rebar concrete. Wifi has problems with working in that conditions.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[adolf]

Some people (most people?) don't build.

I lived in a ancient (by US standards) 2-story rental with plaster interior walls with metal lathe, and concrete block exterior. With an unfinished basement , a detached garage, and a huge yard.

Primary router/AP was in the middle of the basement, attached to the ceiling, because it was easy and invisible. It didn't adequately cover the house, and as the modulation rate ratcheted down to cover the slower/farther-away clients the nearby fast clients suffered as well.

So I fixed it: Another AP (-ish, I'm a Tomato and OpenWRT fan) went upstairs on the 2nd floor, and I was fortunate to find an easy path from the basement for cabling. This also let a heavy user upstairs plug in directly instead of using Wifi, saving wireless bandwidth.

And then, the garage and back yard. I tinker with and work on stuff, so the garage was important for lots of reasons. And we had a great garden way out back, where we found Pandora to be important. An old WRT54G and some kind of freebie (to me) forgettable router-box that would run OpenWRT formed a client/AP solution, which covered both handily without cabling to the main house (which can mean death to gear when lightning happens, unless fiber or other electrical isolation).

I could've done all of this with WDS, and done it badly. Instead, I had a system with decent frequency allocations that simply worked. (This was all 2.4GHz.)

With newer ideas about self-configuring dual-band mesh (to which WDS barely applies), I would have been able to accomplish something functionally identical using one box in the basement, one box upstairs, and one or two well-placed boxes in the garage.

And zero wires.

Absolute performance would've been worse than my complicated scheme, but most folks' don't care about that: They just want Netflix, Youtube, Facebook and gaming to work, and do so reliably and properly, whereby ensuring that the pipe to the ISP remains the bottleneck instead of the local WLAN is the first step toward victory.

(Now, of course, cabled is true victory: I pre-ordered the Ethernet adapter for Chromecast the moment I saw the announcement, just to keep that fucker off of my WLAN -- even though it was twenty unobstructed feet from the AP. But it's not always practical to cable everything, especially if you don't own the place.)

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[antdude]

Some people really hate the cables, crimps, etc. like my parents. :(

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[skids]

Keep the Cat5e. There are good odds it will run 10G just fine, and if not, there are adaptive-speed standards coming onto the pro market now that can shave off a couple GB of bandwidth to make older wire work.

Re: Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[skids]

It's usually interference from neighbors, or in some cases, due to mistakenly firing up more "APs" which you are not using (like the new comcast cable box.)

There's a limit to the number of beaconing SSIDs on a channel before things start to go to crap, and it's about 4, because the beacons have to transmit at the lowest common rate, and in the case of home networking, you often are stuck on 2.4GHz with some ancient 11b devices like that "classic" Wii.

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[Anonymous Coward]

To plug in the wire, of course. Do Vonage or 8x8 or iPlum somehow add an ethernet port to your phone?

Re:Just. Run. The. Damn. Wire.

[unixisc]

No. You use the app to configure the phone - from the number that Vonage gives you - and then use it to accept calls either through your WiFi or cellular data connection. Whenever you call, it connects to the Vonage servers, then routes it to your ultimate destination, and appears as a cell call to the person you're calling.

Reason I mention it - when I signed up for Vonage, I received 3 Motorola cordless phones, one connected to the RJ45 and the other 2 wirelessly to the primary. But I almost never use it if I have cellphone in hand, since the app allows you to configure your cellphone to ring every time your Vonage number is called. I have 2 cellphones - one personal, one official, and I've set them both to ring when the Vonage number rings. So for people like my clinics and other things, I give them my Vonage number, so that I get their calls regardless of which phone I happen to have w/ me.

I know you were referring to plugging the wire to your phone. That's not how you have to do it. You can use the mesh to connect to your access point, but from the access point, you can access it using your laptop, cellphone or tablet. Or if you have a wireless router, you can use connect it wired to a laptop so that you can configure the thing when needed.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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I am willing to provide incontrovertible evidence that confirms my claims, but feel safe doing so only via anonymous short-band radio transmissions.

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Mesh Solves Little

[Luthair]

Lets be honest here, the problem most people have is radio congestion in dense areas and the problem everyone else has is that consumer routers are buggy pieces of shit.

• Back-channel between routers -> more congestion
• More complicated system -> more bugs

I can see how this solves our problems.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[WarJolt]

I can't speak for linksys, but the google solution auto updates. Buggy routers don't get fixed because no one updates them anyway. Force updates and now vendors have incentives to fix their bugs.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[Anonymous Coward]

The obvious question you failed to answer: how will the team that failed to understand basic network and OS concepts be able to do better given more time and no more money?

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[__aaclcg7560]

I live in a 300-unit apartment complex. Just about every one has a wireless router for cable or DSL service. Congestion during the day when everyone is at work isn't an issue. Between 7PM to 2AM, it's really bad.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[hawguy]

I live in a 300-unit apartment complex. Just about every one has a wireless router for cable or DSL service. Congestion during the day when everyone is at work isn't an issue. Between 7PM to 2AM, it's really bad.

I live in a 30 unit complex right behind a 200 unit complex, and while the 2.4Ghz band is crowded and littered with AT&T and Xfinity SSID's, there's not much interference on 5Ghz, the DFS bands are nearly empty.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[Luthair]

I'm not convinced really - once the manufacturer has sold you the device the only incentive they really have is to get you to buy another one.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[Anonymous Coward]

The mesh means that you can have a more powerful signal between you and your three routers than the neighbor has with just a single router. Thus you get better performance. The price point just means that Eero was too successful to ignore. I find it amazing how few routers allow for better (larger or directionally shaped) antennas. WiFi generally has a problems with multi-story buildings. A townhouse with a basement, first floor, and second floor means that a router in the middle of the first floor would poorly serve the basement and 2nd floor. You must also contend with the issue of radiant barrier insulation being used commonly in homes. Despite industry claims, many people find that it causes attenuation of WiFi signals.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[guacamole]

If you're building a mesh wi-fi network, you're probably not doing it in a dense apartment complex. You're doing it in a suburban, possibly two story, home and there is probably some distance to the next home. Moreover, the 5GHz signal dies out pretty fast. I can probably still see the SSID of the neighbors 5GHz wi-fi, but not the one from a house next to your neighbor.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[Anonymous Coward]

not much interference on 5Ghz, the DFS bands are nearly empty

Don't worry, this new wave of "mesh networks" will fix that for you!

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[known_coward_69]

5GHz barely penetrates paper

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[hawguy]

not much interference on 5Ghz, the DFS bands are nearly empty

Don't worry, this new wave of "mesh networks" will fix that for you!

There's a limit to how much 5Ghz signal is going to leak from the building next door to my building, I'm online going to see significant signal from people with only one wall between their AP and me. 5Ghz doesn't penetrate as well as 2.4Ghz.

When 60Ghz Wifi comes out, then I won't see the neighbor's signals at all. Of course, I'll need an AP in every room since 60Ghz won't penetrate my own walls either, even air will attenuate the signal.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[Aighearach]

This is why I agree with RMS somewhat. If it can't accept updates, I don't need access, but if it accepts updates, it has to be open so that I can manage my own updates including updating the software myself since I have incentive for the device to work.

And if the device can't be updated, they have to do a lot more testing at the dev stage. With forced network updates they have no minimum standard; anything can just be fixed later, so very little testing is needed. They're only really incentivised to avoid bugs that would make the evening news!

That's why for routers I actually just want a small low powered generic computing device with the correct network hardware, and I can run a regular server OS on it. But for a switched hub I just want a dumb device that can't be updated, and I want it to follow the standards correctly.

I might be the odd one here, but what I find missing from the market is often just the non-updateable appliance-style device! Of course I can always just use a general purpose OS and free software. The updates are perhaps the greatest evil of all! The original fact of being proprietary is fine, it is the proprietary alterations that bring in all the evils. You can't embrace and extend without updates, after all.

Re:Mesh Solves Little

[Anonymous Coward]

That's crap. The problem is 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio waves do no travel through walls very well. Lower frequencies are better, but that kills bandwidth. Mesh product fix this by having multiple communication points, durrr.

Obligatory off-topic snark

[Jeremi]

It's like having a bunch of little routers in your home all working together to make sure you can stream The OA regardless of which room you're in.

This is a good reason not to upgrade. The OA is neither as entertaining nor as plausible as the "buffering, please wait" progress bar it would supersede.

Ports on the bottom

[Anonymous Coward]

the power and Ethernet ports are on the bottom of the Velop so it maintains a clean profile from all angles.

This design garbage from the company that created the glorious WRT54G?

Re:Ports on the bottom

[Highdude702]

I feel like ports on the bottom are a nuisance as they cause kinked and shorted cables.. but thats just from my 16 years as a professional electrician/low voltage tech

Why?

[darkain]

Seriously, why? For a single home? I just picked up a bunch of 802.11n wireless routers for $10/ea brand new off of Amazon Prime. Disabled DHCP and all other routing services on each, so they all act as just access points and nothing more. *BAM*, great wireless coverage all throughout the house now, and was super freaggin cheap, too.

Re:Why?

[Just Some Guy]

Why? Because these have the potential to be infinitely better. I'm not going to detail my geek cred, but suffice it to say for these purposes that I usually build my own Linux-based routers. I'm not allergic to solder or compiling kernels. But I bought a 3-unit eero system over Thanksgiving and it's been a godsend.

These networks aren't so much hubs as layer 2 switches. Know how your phone jumps from one station to another as you move through the house? How it's automatic and quick, but sometimes totally breaks the connect and makes Netflix stutter or VOIP calls drop? eero at least totally ends that. Connections are rock solid even as they bounce from one router to another. And they do bounce. If my kid and I are sitting on the couch using our phones, and both of us start streaming videos, eero is smart enough to push one of us off onto a different router so we're not interfering with each other's connection.

I would not willingly go back to a handbuilt network now. I've only had a mesh network for a month and a half, but it's so much better than anything I'd pieced together myself that I'm retiring from the practice. Laugh if you want to or dismiss it as "I could do that myself for a fourth the price!", but keep an open mind. I think this is the way of the future.

Re:Why?

[swb]

I'm guessing these things are designed to do a couple of things:

1) Cooperative channel and power management -- make sure they don't step on each other any more than is necessary.

I wonder why they haven't built this into wifi devices forever, too. Input a "coordination key" on each device and then let them learn about each other and manage power and channel assignments.

2) Wireless backhaul -- place one where it can get signal from another unit and use that as uplink to distribute signal to areas that drop off badly. Seems marginally useful unless you have an extra radio and the backhaul is handled as a separate stream from client traffic and the backhaul signal is AC.

For some reason it seems like what would end up happening is the place you can't get 5 Ghz N or AC from where you already have a router you probably can get 2.4 Ghz. So in your remote nook you're connecting clients at AC speeds with a backhaul speed a fraction of that.

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why? For a single home? I just picked up a bunch of 802.11n wireless routers for $10/ea brand new off of Amazon Prime. Disabled DHCP and all other routing services on each, so they all act as just access points and nothing more. *BAM*, great wireless coverage all throughout the house now, and was super freaggin cheap, too.

At $10/ea, I can only imagine the corporate investment to make a secure product.

I mean, it's only a device that provides wireless LAN-side access to your entire electronic world. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Why?

[Aighearach]

You can totally do mesh networks yourself, it is just software. You brag about your geek cred being so awesome you're embarrassed to admit it, but want to trade on it anyways, and then you go full-marketing and claim that Brandybrand(TM) software can do stuff that software a sysadmin might install can't possibly do. Not impressed.

Re:Why?

[Just Some Guy]

I can do lots of stuff myself. I can hunt for my food, or plant it. I can build furniture. I could make papyrus if I had to. And I don't do any of that because there are other things I'd rather be doing with my time. Networking was fun for the first 15 years or so, and I still enjoy it but it's no longer on the short list of my favorite hobbies. It's been demoted to something I have to get done so I can get started with my more favorite stuff.

Yeah, I like eero. I read up on it, I bought it, and I'm glad I did. There are alternatives from Google and Netgear that I also considered and I probably would have also liked quite a bit, but I can't give you a firsthand account of them because I don't have one. Why don't you give them a shot and report back?

Re:Why?

[Aighearach]

Right, in your response you get to the real issue you're talking about, and it isn't whatever Brandybrand(TM) of device that you used.

Your actual whole story is just, "I used to like doing my own networking as a hobby even though I didn't need any special capabilities, and now I switched to just buying networking appliances and I like it better; I'm happy to give up that hobby."

Has nothing to do with mesh networking. Those of us who still enjoy doing our own networking can do it exactly the same with mesh networks as with other networking topologies. I'm not going to read up on any of the Brandybrands(TM) that you mentioned, but I can tell you that most people who like to do this stuff themselves are going to prefer using embedded devices running normal server operating systems. Obviously, buying a bunch of different Brandybrands(TM) and trying to bailing-wire them into a mesh network is going to give inferior results to buying the Brandybrand(TM) that is actually designed with those features.

Same as, if you used to enjoy picking wild blueberries in the forest, and then you learn about wild blackberries, but at the same time you decide you don't like foraging for berries anymore, it doesn't mean that picking blackberries is too hard.

BTW, I've very impressed that you can make papyrus. I've made a few different types of homemade paper using easily accessible fibers like laundry lint or mushrooms, but growing a special type of sedge shows an unusual level of sophistication not normally present in homemade paper.

Re:Why?

[unk98]

Eero manages your equipment from their remote servers (i.e. the cloud) and therefore your network is no longer secure nor private. A 3rd party, remote managed device is too high of a risk for me to accept the convenience of mesh network.

FAQs for Eero states that it collects "[O]ther data such as MAC addresses, IP addresses, and types of connected devices", which in my opinion is a lot of information to know about a customer.

As examples, cloud managed means the 3rd party company has unrestricted access to:

• - Complete inventory of all devices connected via wired or wireless connection.
• - Uptime and downtime of all devices in the home.
• - Travelling of devices/customers amongst any Eero enabled residences.
• - Position of all devices within the home.
• - SSID and access credentials.

Plume is another vendor that manages devices in the same insecure way.

Mine is G

[AndyKron]

My router is G. My router is old. My router works just fine everywhere in my house.

Re:Mine is G

[Rufty]

My router was G. My router was old. My router worked fine just everywhere in my house. And garage. And shed.
Then there was a thunderstorm and the the ADSL port went deaf.
So I go a new, high power N router.
Now I can get a great, full bars signal from anywhere in the house, but can no longer transfer any data
at all from three rooms away, never mind the garage, even though I've got a full bars signal. WTF?
Netgear POS.

Re:Mine is G

[guacamole]

If by fine you mean having at best a 20-25Mbit connection to the internet, or 10Mbit connection peer-to-peer within your home network, then I guess wireless-g fine.

I have a 802.11ac router installed in the middle of a home, and I am able to transfer files between two computers in the far corners of the house at something like 150Mbps. Which is twice as fast as what I have seen with Wireless N.

They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[Aqualung812]

...I do not think that word means what they think it means.

2.45 GHz is one ISM band.
5.8 GHz is another ISM band.

I keep looking for 900 MHz or 24.125 GHz ISM bands on these "tri-band" access points, yet I find none.

Re:They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[b0bby]

From https://www.smallnetbuilder.co...:

The AC2200 classification (400 MHz @ 2.4 GHz + 2 x 867 Mbps @ 5 GHz) and "tri-band" description mean Velop has a dedicated 5 GHz backhaul radio.

Re:They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[Aqualung812]

That's "tri-radio", not "tri-band".
Words matter, and they matter even more when using them in technology.

Re:They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[DavidLevin]

The Linksys Tri-Band is made of up 3 radios, 1 using the 2.5 band, 1 using the lower half of the 5 band, then 1 using the upper half of the 5 band. How 1 + 1/2 + 1/2 = 3 is "marketing". What you really get is two radio with half the band funtionality disabled. Not something I would ever consider buying.

Re:They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[Anonymous Coward]

Your sig is currently striking me as quite appropriate.

Re:They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[Aighearach]

You missed the words "on-topic" in his sig. If it uses 2 bands or 3 bands while claiming to be "tri-band" is indeed on-topic.

Re:They keep saying "Tri-Band"

[Agripa]

If one 5 GHz radio can receive without degradation while the other 5 GHz radio is transmitting, then I might consider it "tri-band". Otherwise it is just Linksys marketing lies which is nothing new for Linksys. Why would I ever buy anything from them again?

$500 should cover cable and installation

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you can DIY, that is. Then it's $450 saved AND a better result.

Re:Google is in the game and failing e.g. IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

they can't do modern things like IPv6 or hairpin NAT correctly...google access points look nice but...

wireless sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I just hope I can get FTTH before you whippersnappers convince too many people that nobody needs wires anymore and everybody should just use mobile.

Why would you buy linksys?

[tpjunkie]

I've sworn off buying their crap after going 3/3 on their routers developing hardware failures. Bought a ubiquity wireless access point 3 years ago and haven't looked back

Re:Why would you buy linksys?

[WorBlux]

Also have an Ubiquity AC. Loaded Open-WRT on it (scary to do because there are no physical bottoms with which to initiate recovery mode). Works great.

Re:Why would you buy linksys?

[tpjunkie]

I just used the firmware that came on it, which is...fine. More impressed with the hardware than many more expensive pieces I've owned. I think I have had to hard reboot it 3 times in the time I've owned it. Not sure why they're not more popular.

Re:Why would you buy linksys?

[WorBlux]

I know they're pretty popular among professional installers, but popularity is low because the setup is a bit technical (and required running a wire through the wall of ceiling)l, and because they aren't carried at mainstream box stores.

No bs, here's SOME proofs... apk

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject & proof of a sad truth on routers - 100's of them https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9995967&cid=53488785/ . That's FAR from a "complete list" too...

APK

P.S.=> I avoid a LOT of inefficiency, security bugs galore (remote DNS, antivirus, addons sold out to NOT work, & yes router issues etc,) doing MORE for FAR LESS vs. their issues via APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-5 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&biw=&bih=&q=%22APK+Hosts+File+Engine%22+and+%22start64%22&btnG=Google+Search&gbv=1/ (NEW version released today)... apk

What ever happened to network over power line?

[mmell]

After all, the wires are all there, right? All that's required is to inject a signal into 'em at one end and take it off at the other - and I happen to know that the technology can handle gigabit network speed, certainly up to most home user needs.

Re:What ever happened to network over power line?

[Anonymous Coward]

You usually only get 5 to 10% of the rated speed for poweline networking. Of course, it's still better than wireless due to lower packet loss and lower latency, but it's nowhere near the rated speed. For example, my Netgear PLP1200-100PAS only gets a little over 100 Mbps despite the rated "up to 1,200 Mbps" even though it literally only has to travel through about six feet of wiring. I have an outlet two feet from my breaker box in my garage and the other side is behind a concrete wall (which is why I didn't run cable) and the other outlet is about four feet down from the breaker box on the inside. Both outlets are on the same circuit. They wouldn't connect when they were on different circuits and the devices on two different ends of my house despite the fact that wireless connects easily.

Re:What ever happened to network over power line?

[Aighearach]

Noise on the power line is actually bad for a lot of devices, and that's what it does; it injects noise into the power line, then filters it back out to recover the signal. But all your electrical equipment sees extra noise.

And maybe you don't care, you figure, power supplies never go bad so it won't hurt. Still, your bandwidth goes down whenever an electrically noisy device turns on. Your bandwidth goes down if you go into the kitchen and turn on a blender. Using the microwave? Less bandwidth. Somebody doing some welding in the garage? You get the idea. Lots of things introduce noise onto the mains, and encoding your data signal as mains noise puts you at the mercy of whatever other noise is there.

Another factor is that the available bandwidth varies per house, and there is no easy way to measure it or predict what it will be unless you put the wiring in yourself. And you're unlikely to get the advertised speeds from wiring that was purchased to meet the minimum standards in most areas. Most wiring only meets the minimum standards. If you have 15A breakers, you probably have wires only rated for 15A. If you did the wiring yourself and bought wiring for 20A circuits but still used 15A breakers, then you would know that you have lots of available bandwidth for noise. But every kink in a wire reduces that bandwidth, and very few of those wires are accessible for inspection.

There are real reasons why this technology hasn't taken off. You can't just buy it and assume it will work to the published specs the way you can with ethernet. You have to try it out in a particular building, and you have to be prepared that it might not work well. That makes it a very poor thing to recommend to the public, because you haven't tested all those homes. Having big "up to" numbers doesn't help any of that; nobody cares what their network's personal record speed is, they care about what speed they can reliably expect.

You also need to be prepared for weird audible artifacts on old audio equipment, etc. For example, some 70s solid state audio circuits used multiple half-bridge rectifiers powering separate DC-DC converters for the different voltages they need. This causes them to introduce a bit of ground noise that is out of phase. That's going to totally thrash your network speeds, and also magnifies the noise that the device sees from your network!

Also, computer geeks don't know what directional cables are, they think it is snake oil, so they already have lots of ground loops and won't be physically capable of trouble-shooting the problems. They'll end up blaming the wires even when there is a fixable problem.

Re: Google is in the game and failing e.g. IPv6

[WarJolt]

Ipv6 will likely be in the next update. I heard folks on the beta channel already have it.

Unless I do some port forwarding, I don't see any reason to care about NAT hairpinning.

Re: Google is in the game and failing e.g. IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

Hairpinning is unnecessarily stupid. Just use private addresses to communicate on the private LAN.

Re: Google is in the game and failing e.g. IPv6

[Coren22]

Except when it is a video game you are running a dedicated server for and the programmers never considered that in their server search algorithm?

not an icon

[peawormsworth]

"the most iconic router ever"? That comes as a surprise to me. Please let me know the specific model you are talking about and where it was determined to be iconic.