Gadgetory

now you might assume that everyone who works at Linus Media Group is super tech savvy but you'd assume wrong so let's take a look at Colton's game streaming setup so this is it this is the room where quite literally dozens of people tuned in to watch Colton game stream and ignore his wife every week oh what's this I see that's a factory router that this thing so this is it Colton this is how you ended up with the free router upgrade from Meg here so Nick here wanted to sponsor a video where we took the LMG employee with the worst networking setup and got them up to speed and I think we have chosen wisely in some ways Colton's Wi-Fi woes are a bit of a first-world problem now a lot of people live in apartments where all the different competing access points make it so that it's hard to get a decent amount of airtime so you can get adequate latency for gaming or enough bandwidth for things like Netflix streaming but Colton has a bit of a different problem he lives so far out in the sticks that it's a non-issue but the thing is you've got to have pretty decent range or you're gonna drop your signal so let's run around and take a look at what some of the problems aren't here okay so problem number one is that on Colton or should I say Cal Taine's stream it's become a bit of a running gag that his internet connection just drops out outright but the thing is you're actually plugged in via a wire so is this thing just that bad that you just lose you stream even though the so it's the internet working like other devices still work most of the time yes but the real issue from a like household harmony standpoint it's not Colton's gaming rig let's face it his wife doesn't care if his game streaming setup is working it's Netflix so especially when Colton's streaming there are issues with Netflix not just not defaulting to the utmost of quality we actually unfortunately missed an opportunity where we were really watching this punch in and out of high and low resolution here but that's the thing about Wi-Fi for some reason why is your TV hooked up via Wi-Fi okay it doesn't it doesn't matter doesn't matter anyway the point is that especially while Colton's streaming Steph has issues with Netflix and that's when it matters the most when she's being ignored when all she has his Netflix so if Netflix doesn't work now what so just to get a baseline for what our Wi-Fi signal looks like around the house we're using a tool called Wi-Fi analyzer here to have a look at both the 2.4 G and 5g bands so overall signal strength from within the house actually not too bad and actually that's bizarre even out in the yard the same strength is pretty darn good cold nothing must just really suck if you're dropping your connection maybe we just need to get on with this I was actually going to connect to their Wi-Fi and do some speed testing but the the piece of paper with the password has apparently fallen down next to the fridge because the magnet came off and they never changed the password on their access point you could for Shane Colton wow this is actually a really significant upgrade you're going from like zero to basically top-of-the-line for an AC router so this is the XR 500 from Netgear and what makes it special aside from just having powerful hardware in it is that it's running Douma OS which is made by a company called net duma and their goal was to create a network appliance operating system that has advanced functionality some of which that you wouldn't normally find in like a home router but more importantly make all those functions accessible even to people who don't know a ton about networking and overall it's getting rave reviews even just from the net duma routers and i'm really excited to see what a company like Netgear who's already well known for their powerful home access points is able to do with it oh my god the stock password for this thing is rustic road 168 it's like they knew who it was for this is great so you know what I think the real test is here we are in the duma last dashboard can colton do it well first you need to set your Wi-Fi to something that is not rustic road 168 here so uh here okay yeah you drive you so I did the funniest thing for a while I live in a cul-de-sac and so I called the SSID at the corner house so that people be like which one is the corner house that's good it's not that funny that's great I'm gonna do what I did like hate my neighbors Wow not bad I'm gonna do it well I don't care okay that won't nobody uses Wi-Fi okay do it let me do it you did it all right that really wasn't the point of today's video though anyway that's that's fine that's just so that now we can actually get on your Wi-Fi oh hey not bad hey Colton good news you're like eight percent faster than you're supposed to be on the download anyway dang also your Wi-Fi is as fast as your wired now now we're outside though and I mean it's acceptable like we're still getting over 100 megabit down there so that's not bad but hey Netgear was like yeah we want this place to have like amazing Wi-Fi everywhere and we were like okay so we're gonna put a range extender in yeah this is like perfectly fine for whatever you're doing right now planning LTX presumably yes in a perfect world you would actually hook up a range extender via wired Ethernet because that way you're not using up precious spectrum communicating from the range extender back to your router but this particular one this is the X 6s is actually a tri-band Wi-Fi range extender so since most devices cannot actually use three bands at once you can have a dedicated band as like a back channel and then you've got dedicated bands for out there in your yard for whatever devices you're using so you use one five gigahertz for your backhaul and then another five gigahertz out there and you're tuned a half gigahertz out there so we can actually put this anywhere we want as long as it's close enough to your game streaming room and it has a power outlet thank ya so you want it in that corner because it also happens to have an Ethernet switch on it so this looks like a place where people sit and use their computer and then they could use it with a wire this works I just used WPS because I was lazy so I'm gonna put that there and I'm gonna go back outside happy I don't know what I was expecting but looks like double the speed hey oh he got me i high-fived colton I congratulated him good job Colton thanks you rock man and now your internet rocks just as much as you do okay so now that everything's working we can actually poke around in the software a little bit starting with the device manager which is this cool map of your entire network so you've got your router here at its heart and then you've got your wired devices so Philips hue and desktop gd9 whatever that's this guy and then you've got your two point four and five gigahertz Wi-Fi from inside here you can see any details about the device so in the case of my phone it managed to grab my MAC address the name of the device the type of the device it knew it was a phone and if you know that's not your phone you can go ahead and quickly block if it's like your neighbor piggybacking off your Wi-Fi or something along those lines then once you got your map of devices you can actually play around with them a fair bit in the QoS tab so they've got a feature called anti buffer bloat which basically will detect well you can actually excited to go all the time but I'd recommend leaving it on detecting it'll detect high-priority traffic which would be game traffic and then when it detects that you can set a certain amount of your overall bandwidth to leave alone to reserved for that high-priority traffic and then another amount let's say you know 70% for everything else on the network so that way you're still going to be able to use Netflix but your gaming packets are gonna be able to jump the queue another cool thing here is this little graphical bandwidth allocation now QoS is not a new concept it's present on everything from entry-level up to enterprise grade routers but having it laid out graphically like this is pretty cool so we can say ok Philips hue you get 1% of the bandwidth you are like super not important versus let's just go ahead and update that desktop gd9 whatever you get like I don't know 75% of the upload because that's really where most of the uploading in this house happens then we could also take you know my 1 plus 7 you could say ok you get you know 2% so now you can see that our download speed is significantly less than the 300 megabit we had before and we're only getting about half of the upload allocated to us the other cool gaming centric feature is called geo filter and what this basically does is in the old days you used to just refresh a list and you could see all the servers for a given game and connect to the one that has really low ping but nowadays it's all matchmaking base so you don't really get to do that what this does is on your routers level it will actually block any game servers that are too far away such that they're going to result in a less than satisfactory gaming experience so you just set whatever radius you want so I could say I don't want to connect to anything that's less than a thousand kilometers so basically I'm only gonna be playing on like West Coast North America servers and then we go ahead and add a device this guy right here and what games okay so this is cross-platform actually most of these by the way Call of Duty's PC battlefield cross platform will go ahead and say yeah Call of Duty auto I'll play on a server that is more than a thousand kilometers away pretty cool right so there you have it guys that was how Colton managed to scan his work into giving him a free network upgrade yeah you can I guess you can you can hold on to this so I never really understood that upgrading your router really mattered until this project some of the doom OS features are really cool like they're geofilter I use it when I'm playing Rainbow six siege early on like a Saturday morning when I'm you know I'm on the West Coast servers and I'm getting paired up with people from the EU so using that feature actually manages to get me in servers that are actually on the west coast which is really good and if you use a VPN you can actually set up on the router instead of having it on each device that you won't that way you use doom OS to specify which program should go through the VPN and which don't so it doesn't slow down your game so some other cool points is that Netflix is a lot more stable now we have much better coverage in our backyard plus Steph can have a wired internet connection which uses our laptop in our kitchen because the extender has two Gigabit Ethernet ports on it plus there's four more on the router itself back in my office other extenders often create a separate network so you have to connect to a different network in each part of the house which is super annoying but this router and extender automatically forms a single mesh network so there's just seamless roaming between them so thanks to Netgear for sponsoring colton streams not cutting out all the time very valuable Cal tain on Twitch ok go check it out subscribe to PewDiePie excuse me that's it that's dead dead me oh guys so thanks for watching if you just liked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you can totally go