Fast internet. It's the thing that everybody wants. But if you've watched
any of the short circuits here with me, your boy Jake, sometimes it's not the
easiest thing ever, getting fast Wi-Fi. And today, thanks to ASUS, who sponsored
this video for us to check out their ASUS Zen Wi-Fi BT10 mesh Wi-Fi system.
We're going to see just how easy it can be to set up a super fast Wi-Fi 7 mesh
network in, well, not a house. It kind
of looks like a house, but this is a warehouse, I promise you. And they also have a whole lineup of other products if
this particular one doesn't suit your fancy. But let's open the box and check
it out. So, looking at the front of this thing, I can definitely tell already that there's there's two in here. But
you can also buy these things in a pack of one, a pack of three. We've got our
two box doohickey things in there. Power
brick. Cool. And one Ethernet cable. Nice. Now,
for the uninitiated, if you're not familiar with Wi-Fi meshing, the idea is
well, a lot of houses don't have hardwired internet, and uh even if they
do, it's not always in the place that you need good Wi-Fi. So, the way that
this setup is supposed to work, you take your main box, you plug it in at your
ISP's fiber box or cable modem, or maybe
into your ISP's existing router if you want. And then the second unit or third
unit or maybe even more units go elsewhere in your house, your apartment,
your small business, whatever. And then these two connect to each other
wirelessly. And then this is rebroadcasted. So, they'll make a really
high-speed connection between each other as a fast kind of back haul highway
between each unit wirelessly. And then this is retransmitting to your other
devices in the other place where you might not have signal. And this allows you to set up your house or other in a
way where you have excellent coverage everywhere without having to run wires
or having to have wires. It's um it's not a new concept, but it is a very
powerful one uh if you don't have that existing infrastructure. Now, let's take
a look at the individual unit here. They look to be exactly the same. I've seen
some of these mesh Wi-Fi setups before where they have different pieces. So,
they'll have like a main unit that's like beefier and has all of the ports on
it and then they have the kind of substation mesh units that don't have
anything other than power. But, these ones are virtually identical. Let's just
take a look at one. We've got a USB 3.0 0 typeA port which you can use for say
network storage if you want to connect to an external hard drive or for USB
tethering if you have an internet outage. You can connect your phone and then rebroadcast your phone cellular
connection to all of your devices as like a backup link. We've got a 1 gig
RJ45 and then two 10 gig RJ45s which is
a nice touch. That means you could if you have like a 2.5 gig internet
connection, a 5 gig internet connection, a 10 gig internet connection, you can
hook it up here and then you still get a full speed output. And the other nice
thing is the other unit also has those same ports. So if you're bridging
wirelessly and you've got, you know, a 2 gig wireless link or something between
these two connections, you can still take advantage of it on the other remote
meshed side. Then we've got a power input and then a little power
switchy. We've got a reset button in case you screw up. And it's nice. Look
at that. It's not like one of those stupid recessed holes you have to like
hold a pin in and then if you don't have a pin, you're screwed. No, it's just a
recessed button that you have to hold. So, you don't need any special tools to
screw around with that, which is very nice. And then there's a WPS Wi-Fi
protected setup button. I would not recommend using that for security reasons, but if you really want to, it's
there. Speaking of power brick, what kind of power brick is this? It's a 12vt
3 amp. So, max of 36 watts. Now, there's
a sticker on one of these. Does that mean I need to use that one? Hi, I'm the
main unit. Start with me. Okay, cool. Hey, this little light is green. Let's
give it um
internet. Now, it's strobing. Okay, I
guess I need the app. Got the ASUS router Wi-Fi app downloaded here. Let's
check it out. Asus Gen Wi-Fi series. Make sure you've connected the modem to
your router's WAN port, which I have done. Set up local password. admin. I
like that it makes you set up an admin account for your router locally because
a lot of them just default to like whatever thing is printed on the bottom.
Some of them I've even seen still to this day default to password as the
password, which is so bad. Oh, it even makes an IoT network. That's so smart.
See, one of the things with new Wi-Fi technology is that it's not always
compatible with older stuff. And actually, what the router just did is
made an IoT network at the same time, which is a completely separate thing.
will show up in your list. Speedy Boy IoT that you can use for devices that
don't work on the main network because their Wi-Fi chipset or drivers or
whatever might be so old that they don't support it. Uh well, you shouldn't have
a problem with that. All right, we've got both of our things connected. Didn't
even have to do anything to get this one connected. It just connected on its own. They're all firmware updated and now we
can try it. Wow, look at that. We can check our connection quality, what
interface we're on for a given device, which is cool. We can bind it to one of
the specific access points, which is a nice touch. If you have like some
security cameras that aren't very good about deciding what Wi-Fi thing they
connect to, you can force it to connect with that. There's family settings, so
you can block specific content for specific people. I made a thing for
Belle that says he's a preschooler to block all of these various things for
him. And you can even schedule the usage. And if you're outside of your
scheduled your allowed internet, you could even go and say reward with 60
minutes of additional internet access if you
want. It's not something that I would use, but if if that's a use case for
you, that's it's there. You can you can do it. The quick internet setup is
probably just a redo of what we did in the initial setup where you just type in
the Wi-Fi network names. But if we go into network here, we can be a little
bit more choosy about our options. Yeah.
Okay. Wi-Fi 7 mode is on. That's right. This is a Wi-Fi 7 access point. It
supports 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, and 6 GHz
Wi-Fi. And also has MLO, which in theory means you can have an individual device
connect to multiple bands at the same time. So, you can take advantage of 5
GHz and 6 GHz, assuming your device supports it to increase your speeds and
in some cases just increase um the handling of clients, like the amount of
clients you can handle. We can hide our SSID. We can isolate it to a given AP
and we can even see the clients that are connected to that individual network. I
can add a guest network. Huh. VPN network. Let's add a multi-link
operation network. Okay. I've enabled MLO, which uh has more than one benefit.
Actually, it allows not only our phone to connect over multiple bands. More
importantly, for this specific use case, it allows both of these to talk to each
other over more than one or different bands at the same time. So, say if you
have a device that's like ripping on the 5 GHz because Wi-Fi, it's a bit of an
oversimplification, but let's say you can only really have one device talking
at a given time. Well, if you have one device using the 5 GHz band, then your
two devices instead can go, "Ah, that band is really busy. Let me talk over 6
GHz or 2.4 so that it doesn't interrupt the downstream devices as much, which is
cool. But it also means we can get faster Wi-Fi. Um, I'm not going to start
with that. Let's just start with normal nonMLO. Let's try speed test. Just
normal Wi-Fi. Nor me Wi-Fi. Yo, 1300s.
That's fast Wi-Fi, brother. That's like 1.1 GB without MLO. 1.2 even almost. And
the upload. Yo,
1,500. 6 GHz Wi-Fi kicks ass. It
definitely kicks ass. Let's try MLO. To be clear, some devices don't make very
good use of MLO, and sometimes you can even get results that are worse. But
this OnePlus 13, from my understanding, does usually do MLO pretty good. So,
let's see if we can go a little faster making use of both. Look at that. 2.2.
So, it's broadcasting and transmitting over both 5 GHz and 6 GHz at the same
time. Holy balls. That's That's three
3.2 GB upload. Now, I say, why don't we
walk away from our little access point here? Let's walk over to the other set
over there. We'll go pretty far away and see how it tests and then we'll take our
second access point, put it over there, and then try it with the mesh. So, this
is probably about 30 or so feet away. Oh, yeah.
We're still on MLO. 2 GB that far away.
Now, we're probably more like 60 70 ft away through a wall. Still using MLO.
Honestly, better than I was expecting. 1300 down, 860 up. Let's go
even further. It's bad over here. is bad. We're far away. Let's go grab the
other access point and see if it works more better. All right, we're back in
the build corner. I've taken our second BT10 and plugged it in here and got it
all meshed up. Now, let's go back over to where we were only getting like 90 90
down 90 up and see if our speed is any better. So, instead of over here getting
90 down and 90 up, now we're getting 800
down. Damn, boy. So, clearly the Wi-Fi,
but I want to see what else they got in here. I did notice they have a VPN feature so you can connect to your
different VPN providers if you want to route devices through a VPN like say if
you have private internet access or something like that. But they also have something called VPN Fusion. So you can
add like up to 16 different VPN profiles
if you have different protocols or you use multiple providers. And then you can
like pick devices to use specific ones
or even use multiple at the same time which is kind of cool. They have their
AI protection powered by Trend Micro. Allows real-time network monitoring to
detect malware, which I guess is kind of like an IPS kind of thing. Oh, yeah. Two
AIPS. That's enabled by default, assuming you agree to the privacy
policy. They've got parental controls, security scans. They've got basically
everything. Like, the setup was pretty easy. All we had to do was type in our Wi-Fi name and password and an admin
name and password and and we were off to the races. You can make changes to all
the advanced settings if you're a bit of a nerd, but if you also just wanted to
set it up and have good Wi-Fi out of the box, it seems to do that with the eight
internal antennas and 10 high power frontend modules. You should be able to
handle up to a 6,000 square ft space, but if you need more, you can add even
more than they also sell a three-ack of these things if you need or just one if
that's all you need as well. So, if you're interested in the ASUS Zen Wi-Fi
BT10, you can pick up a single unit for 360 bucks, a two pack for 690, although
I saw it on sale right there, or a three-pack for 1,000, and then you can
have Ballin Wi-Fi 7 4K Quam MLO fast
speeds all over your house, and you don't even need wiring. But if you do
have wiring, you can use that, too. So, if
you're interested in the BT10 one pack, two pack, three-pack, or any of the
other ASUS Zen Wi-Fi products, check out the link in the description. Uh, we'll
have links to all of them down there. So, thanks for watching, guys. If you like this video, maybe hit the like
button. And, um, thanks to ASUS for sponsoring and let me know, do you have
mesh Wi-Fi? Do you wish you had mesh Wi-Fi? Do you want better