Google declares victory for its Wifi router before it's even shipped Google hasn't yet released its Wi-Fi mesh router, but the company is already claiming to have bested the competition. Google paid testing services company Allion USA to evaluate how its forthcoming "Wifi" compares to mesh routers from Eero and Luma. Eero and Luma have both received significant venture funding this year, based …
Google paid testing services company Allion USA to evaluate how its forthcoming Wifi compares to mesh routers from Eero and Luma.
Isn't the job of any "Paid for" comparison to make the company paying for it look good. When was the last time you saw a report commissioned by a company about their product come back making the product look bad? Until there is an independent comparison I'll withhold judgement.
I also wonder if I am the only one to pronounce it "Whiffy"
@Anon
"Indeed, Microsoft are the kings of paid for reviews, their whole operation survives on it. If you can't beat them, join them."
Congratulations, you have managed to work some MS bashing into an article which has nothing to do with them.
Maybe you could enlighten us all, where exactly did the big bad microsoft touch you that has left you so emotionally scarred?
also wonder if I am the only one to pronounce it "Whiffy"
No, probably not.
Some years ago I was due to visit the Paris office of my then employers when I had a phone call from a French colleague.
"Can you bring me woteefee please?"
After some digging I found he meant "What Hi-Fi"! I duly took a copy over for him.
and it's "wee fee" in Spain
Indeed it is. Spanish speakers tend to pronounce everything completely phonetically.
Lengthy digression: I got laughed at some years ago for pronouncing the name of the late Chilean dictator Pinochet as "Pinotchett" in the the company of English speakers. I had just come back from visiting family in Spain, and that's how they say his name there. I pointed out that the "English" pronunciation "Pinoshay" is actually more French than English. Now, as it turns out, the Pinochet family name is actually French. I then checked with some actual Chileans, and found that they pronounce it "Pinotché" (and usually spit after doing so). This may be because either they know his name is French but, since there's no "sh" sound in Spanish the "ch" comes out as "tch", or else they are just pronouncing it phonetically, but the Latin American final "t" is very soft (compared to Castillian Spanish) and I just wasn't hearing it.
The Spanish are, however, slightly pissed off if you call their spicy sausage "choritso" (English and Germans tend to do that - the Germans have an excuse, the English do not). Then again, Spanish speakers call the composer "Mothart" (or "Mossart" if they're Latin American. We're all a bit crap, then.
First - Please stop calling it a router, it's an access point.
Second - Since they haven't announced any date of when it will be available in the UK - I shall have to hope someone (give them a nudge ElReg - ask them nicely) gets a chance to test the BT offering which does exactly what Google WiFi does, mobile app and all - it's called "BT Whole Home WiFi" and uses the proper Mesh networking standards including fast roaming. But it's BT.... and they aren't stellar at performance, reliability and stability when it comes to ANY of the Home Hubs - so - these are definitely a need-to-be-thoroughly-reviewed-before-purchase type of purchase. But they cost the same as Google WiFi (£299 for 3) so..... pretty please El Reg......
https://www.shop.bt.com/learnmore/bt-branded-products-and-services/bt-whole-home-wi-fi/
"First - Please stop calling it a router, it's an access point."
That is indeed extremely irritating. I suspect that practice is going to end up burying the whole concept of routers and routing deeply in the world of the networking expert and be completely removed from popular dialogue. Also, especially for a tech publication, it is extremely confusing to be seemingly talking about the speed of routing when in fact the subject is the speed of wireless transmission. Can we not do better here?
Router's already a confusing mess between woodworking power tools and network infrastructure.
In any case - this is apparently a mesh router, not an AP. Do they all have to be wired up or do they do the routing themselves ?
Is 'WiFi' supposed to be a trademarkable name ? Does anyone still hyphenate it ?
Third, it's made by Google so prepare for losing half your egress bandwidth while it ships details about your life to that oh-so-benign Su adjunct to their spy agencies.
It's clever, though, instead of having to drive around with Streetview cars snooping from the outside they can now do it straight from your home at no extra effort - heck, you even pay THEM for the privilege. Add Google Home and Google Homeview has arrived in a more thorough fashion than even we dared to predict. Next: Google Home will get a camera, all the better to see you with...
Fourth - though linked to first - why call it "mesh" technology when all you do is connect a laptop to a router?
I don't call my home Wi-Fi a "mesh", but it is considerably more sophisticated than that. But then I don't call my router an "access point", or my PC a "distributed-network client node".
"It's clever, though, instead of having to drive around with Streetview cars snooping from the outside"
They haven't needed cars for years. They have billions of android devices geo-locating wifi access points without explicit permission and geo-locating the IP address assigned to them with no permission.
New T&C component:
"Traffic prioritisation. In order to ensure a smooth and uninterrupted transfer of all your personal data, life secrets and any salacious information we can use to prevent you suing us, traffic to Google is prioritised. If, by any chance, any bandwidth is left, you agree that we may use it for downloading personalised ads. Your privacy is very important to us, which is why it's best you don't have any".
Car manufactures coming up with names that don't mean donkey shit or something somewhere in the world bring us the likes of VW toerag and Nissan squishsquash etc.
While Google think it is OK to call their router smelly in a large part of the world.
> Google hasn't yet released its Wifi mesh router, but the company is already claiming to have bested the competition.
Clearly that is the best time to tell people how excellent your product is: before anyone has seen it and could possibly disprove your claim with all that annoying "experience"?
This post has been deleted by its author
^^^^ What he said
We're about to complete on a new house and during my last visit I started thinking about router placements, NAS drive etc, and where to run the cabling.
"You don't need to" he said, "we've got wi-fi!"
"That's great" I said, "but I prefer cabling"
"Why? Wi-fi signal is strong enough"
"Security and speed!" I reply
"Well I've never been hacked" he puffs as he shuffles out the door, his Sky router proudly transmitting out the default SSID.
I don't have much choice on a phone, but I sure won't assist Google steal my privacy by using Chrome, Chromebook or a WiFi point. They are an advertising company anyway. Android and many other products bought in.
My WiFi is a mini-PCI card in my router running OpenWRT.
Mesh is slow. I prefer to cable airpoints together, Minimum of twice the performance with two airpoints and even better with more.
"I don't have much choice on a phone"
Yeah you do - depends what you want from a phone. For example, my contract is about to expire, so I'm looking to "upgrade" to something not too dissimilar to the trusty old 1100 I had prior to the iPhone I have currently (which I got solely because I needed an iOS test device at the time).
Even if I had to have a smartphone, I'd sooner go Apple or Microsoft than Android - lesser of evils and all that.
And as for this new router or whatever it is - over my cold, dead, rotted corpse.
"Wifi reached speeds of 228 Mbps, compared to 205 for Luma and 186 Mbps for Eero"
Meanwhile, the UK government has the target of getting everyone to have 24 Mbps at some point in the future. Those of us with pretty decent, for this country, broadband can generally expect speeds somewhere between 60-130 Mbps. For the average person, who is not running a LAN with lots of local devices and storage and is simply looking at Facebook and Netflix over the internet, there is exactly zero benefit in the increased speed. It reminds of when all the browsers liked to boast about how few milliseconds they could take to render a page, apparently forgetting that time differences far smaller than any possibility of human perception were not actually the main selling points of their products.
and the less expensive Ubiquiti Unifi series is the level of technical knowledge required?
My home is very similar to their test setup (two story, 3000sq.ft.) and I get along quite well with ONE Ubiquiti Unifi AP. If I could be arsed to run the wire for a second one, I'd have blistering speed everywhere. As it is, with one AP centrally located upstairs, I get strong signal and very respectable speeds in the most commonly used sections (kitchen, den, master bedroom). To be completely fair, the level of knowledge required to truly get the most out of it is well beyond the grasp of the average user but that's not an issue for those of us here. Even my half-arsed attempt was setup in about ten minutes. The only reason it took THAT long was because I changed the default IP range and actually bothered to setup the restricted "guest" network.
Same. I have an AC-PRO on the ceiling above the stairs. Works a treat with excellent performance, even downstairs and in the garden are way more than acceptable. If I wanted to get an additional LITE version for half the price of the Pro and put it downstairs, there'd be superb coverage with zero hand-off and lots of management and monitoring features.
I'd like to run Google's equivalent to my setup and see how they compare, especially with one eye on pflog.
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