Gadgetory

all right so this video is sponsored by a to special thanks to them for making this possible what we're talking about today is Wi-Fi specifically the Wi-Fi in my and Wi-Fi sauce is home I've been pretty happy with the Wi-Fi here for the most part I'd say about 80% of the time but that other 20% is largely in part because we have a growing number of internet or Wi-Fi connected devices in the household and we have a much larger house than we used to have at my grandparents place where we only really occupied half of the home really so just like a lot of other households I'm sure we have this increasing need to expand our wireless network to make it reach in further pockets of the home and for it to be faster as well as we have more and more devices at our disposal let me show you guys exactly what I mean so right now we're in the far northeast corner of the home and this is our current router the Asus blue K if we've actually had this a couple of years now and it's been great but now that we have a larger home and many more connected devices it's like I said cutting it about 80% of the time so let me just give you a quick tour I've kind of set things up for the purpose of this little demo that we're doing here so this is me in the wife's bedroom it's kind of messy she'll hate me for putting this in the video but you can see I've got some Amazon Prime streaming here at 1080p and it's it's looking pretty fresh the playback looks pretty smooth and doesn't look like there's really any issues here of course this out of all the devices in this little demo is the closest one to the router let's go ahead over here into the studio where you'll find hot line just chilling hey there baby she's streaming to 4k 60fps YouTube videos at the moment and it's also looking pretty good alright let's let's carry on let's just keep going down the house here now this is the family room by the entryway of the house this is we're about midway through the house at this point you can see I've got another 4k stream going here from Netflix no complaints very very smooth playback once again but then our final area of the house no real connected devices in the kitchen or dining room but in the living room in the back here yet again two more 4k 60fps streams on YouTube that are also looking very clean actually no issues there the only thing that's really being held up at this point is my phone you barely just missed it it wasn't actually playing for a second there you can see if there's a bit of buffering here if I just skip to a different point in the video that hasn't already been buffered you can see that it's just kind of chilling there because we just don't have the bandwidth and the efficiency needed to actually drive all the streams that are in this house right now so like I said most of time this is not a problem because it's just my wife and I and even though we have a lot of devices there's only two people however occasionally we do have guests come over and they all have their phones they'll connect to our Wi-Fi network and at some point it eventually caps and things slowed down someone's not getting video it's especially important for us because we live by a mountain where a lot of people just don't have good cell reception here regardless of the carrier that they're using so all these little issues kind of pile up to be a larger problem that we're gonna solve today hopefully so we're gonna actually try to remedy a problem today with a couple of these RTA x88 u routers from Asus Asus was the first to come to the market actually with an ax mesh solution so we're actually gonna be setting up a mesh network today with the ax standard 802 11 8 X now this is a vast improvement over AC for a number of reasons first of all we're getting much faster speeds the ceiling is much higher with a X because the channels are a lot wider there's more bandwidth available but I would say even more importantly than that especially for our needs today is that the efficiency has been much improved with how the data is transmitted between the access point and all the clients so for example we've got this handy little acronym Oh food OFDM a which is basically a way to take the channels and split them into a bunch of smaller channels so that can handle data transmission to a number of devices independently and simultaneously as opposed to dealing with them in a sequential order one at a time you've also got multi-user MIMO which I'm sure while you guys are familiar with but it's even more efficient on a X because now we can actually address multiple devices at the same time whether you're downloading or uploading and we also have some stuff on the back here more stuff about bandwidth security security this thing has some great security features like a eye protection Pro which automatically updates your security signatures on a regular basis just just to protect your data we also have gaming features of course QoS is an integrated technology that basically is packet prioritization so you never slow down you never get thrown off your game from other devices being connected in the home we also have wtfast which i think is a clever marketing term because you've got WTF if you cover up the eyes anyway I'm getting off-topic this basically seeks out the shortest route between your PC and a game server so that it reduces your ping and you're in your lag time very nice to have on board if you're a hardcore gamer and you just don't have the option to wire directly and then also speeds ax is fast is basically all that says no I'm not a networking geek by any stretch but I am super excited to get this network up and running especially since it's gonna be with the new ax standard so the way that the mesh network is actually gonna work is that one of the routers is going to be replacing the blue cave and that's gonna have to be connected directly to our modem but the other router we can just kind of put anywhere as sort of a wireless satellite I'm thinking in the polar opposite corner of the house or at least in just this this room in general that way we get full house coverage and we'll even have really good coverage in the backyard because it's a fairly large backyard as well I had to do a test I stood right right here trying to stream a Paul's hardware video and it worked okay work just fine but as soon as I stood like right there just a couple feet over the connection just died like it kicked us from the network and everything so I have very high hopes that this solution here will fix all of our Wi-Fi woes but I guess there's only one way to find out ready to do it boy you ready you ready boy is the Wi-Fi cats ready oh he is testing out the wares yes our kitty overlords have deemed this product worth stepping on all right let's hop to it all right we're in the office now and you can see we've got two routers powered up they're not connected to the internet just yet before you actually get started setting up a mesh network you have to ensure that both routers are running the latest firmware so I've already updated the firmware by simply connecting them to one of my PC's and then updating it through the ACS website then once that's good you can actually connect one of the routers via ethernet to your PC and let's do that and open up a browser and you should be greeted with this page we're gonna go into advanced settings and set up a mesh network so I says choose operation mode here I'm gonna click that and it says yai mesh right there so that's obviously what we want it says the ai mesh system is composed of Asus router as one router will become the a mesh router and you can add additional a mesh nodes to expand your network sounds good and then it asks if you want to make this device the primary router or the AMS note we're gonna go with the router first and we'll set up the other router as the node when we're ready so I'm gonna add my SSID and password really quick once that's all entered you can click apply here it just looks like they're asking if we want to enable 802 mm an ax a Qi frame support with a little note here that's some wireless adapters may have issues connecting to ax access points but we're gonna go ahead and say ok ok it looks like it wants us to add some credentials here ok now we're into the main control center here so looks like we've more or less set up our first device as the primary router in our mesh network successfully now I'm going to go ahead and connect the second router and assign this as the node and there should only be a couple steps left after that pull our broadband connection plug it into our node router and take another Ethernet cable from our PC and boom so now we can set up the second device as our node so choose operation mode we're still gonna want a imesh obviously and now we want to set it up as a node so now it's telling us to reset the node and then place it next to our primary router and then we can reconnect the router to our PC I'm gonna go ahead and click Next and now we can go ahead and connect our PC to the router as you can see I move both of our ethernet cables that were just plugged into the node back over to the primary router and notice that the node is still powered on both devices are powered on and all is done correctly we should be brought to this screen signing with your AC strata account which we created just a moment ago and we're back in the control panel with this pop-up that says do you want to add this a imesh node to your a imesh system why yes I do and then it looks like it's doing something here find a imesh node okay so it's searching for it I think the manual does say to keep the routers as close together as possible initially for this setup process and there it goes slowly but surely it'll detect our node and add it to the mesh network I'm gonna give it a moment here alright so after a couple minutes if all goes smoothly you should see this pop-up that says we've successfully added our node to the AI mesh system says it should take a while to show up as connected in the end I should add our list and it also suggests that you place your node between your a IMS router and your existing dead zone and try to place it somewhere high and open in your home it also says you can connect your router and your node together with an Ethernet cable if you wanted to for extra stability although that's a bit more complicated with the distance that we're trying to cross here so we're gonna ignore that for now alright it looks like we've got one active AI mesh node and there it is beautiful no it's also worth noting that the test you're about to see specifically the the Wi-Fi test on our livingroom PC is using an 802 1011 AC Wi-Fi adapter not a X because a X adapters are just not available at the time of filming this is shot before the Rison 3000 series launched before X 570 boards were available of course X 570 boards do support 802 to 11a x AKA Wi-Fi 6 but those are just not available right now so having said that let me know if you guys would be interested in a follow up video where I actually test our ax mesh network with an x5 70 board to see the full benefits of standard all right I'm gonna go ahead and place this guy on the other side of the house where the dead zone is and then we'll give it a whirl by the way I also have our same streaming setup that I showed at the beginning of the video two more streams on that PC one more there two more 4k 60s and my phone you can see here that we're actually getting perfectly smooth playback no choppiness no no buffering let's just skip to another yep it just kind of plays instantly this was not happening whatsoever for us with the blue cave yeah everything's working great and here's a look at where I put the other router issue says to put it in a high space if possible somewhere that's open I tried to elevate it a little bit so between these two routers we have whole house coverage and I'll actually do the the same test that I did earlier as well so we're gonna take this out outside got a fire up a Paul's Harbor video just to keep things consistent you know okay I'm actually at the far corner of the backyard down actually a bit further away than I even was previously and you can see where we're having no issues streaming in Paul let me skip ahead here instantly loads whoo Paul you've never looked so good I think the demo pretty much speaks for itself I mean I wasn't really able to stream much of anything on this phone while all the other streams in the house were going on but now it seems totally fine we have full coverage not just in the house but in the entire backyard as well I think the last thing I want to do is show you guys just a before-and-after Wi-Fi speed test we actually have speedtest.net pulled up I did run the numbers with the blue cave and we were getting around 66 67 down and about 25 up and I know that's not terrible for everyone a lot of households don't even get close to those speeds but for our specific needs we've definitely started to feel a need for more speed and throughput and everything so with that said why don't we go ahead and see what we're getting now oh okay okay I can I can work with that okay we went from oh dang I I was expecting it to be good but that's that's phenomenal we were from 66 to 250 megabits per second down holy moly and the up went from 25 to 91 so if you guys were just looking for some straight data there you go that's that's awesome so I guess in summary my first experience with 802 11 ax and mesh Wi-Fi was a huge success huge thanks to issues for sponsoring this video if you guys want to check out these routers I'll put some links in the description below but that's all for me guys I'm gonna get out of here thanks for watching toss a like on the video if you enjoyed it it helps a lot get subscribe for more tech stuff coming at you really soon and I will see you all in the next