so wi-fi pretty much sucks the big one especially if you're
trying to get coverage in a large house with a traditional single router slash
access point setup and that is exactly why we are here at james's in-laws house
today because james stays here in the guest room from time to time and it's
upstairs where the wi-fi reception just
plain bites so ASUS sponsored this video
where we're gonna show you their ai mesh system where you can take
any one of a bunch of different routers
in ASUS lineup and create your own wi-fi
mesh for excellent coverage across a very large domicile
i've just been looking for an excuse to use the word domicile
glad it presented itself
so one of the biggest problems with the network setup here is that when james's
in-laws got internet service 17 years ago the assumption was that
only the kids were going to use it and they would never give a rat spatula
about that their newfangled internet there and
of course we all know how that worked out everybody uses the internet now so
the only place in the house that has coax and the Ethernet cables that they
actually ran themselves using the same technique that i did like up the side of
the house to the study and then to one of the upstairs bedrooms is here in the
basement where the kids were living all those years ago
so as you can imagine this here
combo modem router switch access point
thing provided by the isp just
isn't gonna cut it okay so to show one of the most problematic locations i'm just gonna
jump into bed with uh james here
this is a pretty realistic scenario we're both gonna fire up a video to
watch on our computers and or phones
okay so on james's phone he's actually getting 1080p video
but that's on 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi then on your laptop what do you got
nada and on my laptop i'm watching this strange parts video on five gigahertz at
a magnificent 360p resolution
now that seems like it's kind of working well enough you can have two devices
running up here and 2.4 gigahertz does have better range but consider this
there are many many neighbors out this
window here all of whom are not at home right now because it's
whatever time it is i don't have my watch on today if they were 2.4
gigahertz would have too much interference and they've experienced
this in order to work reliably up here and 5 gigahertz total mess from this
distance okay so here at location number two the
hot tub um my laptop is connected to five gigahertz and can stream netflix
if you can call this pixelated mass guardians of the galaxy 2 i'm not sure
that i would uh but james's laptop also on 5g
either can't see it at all or when it can see it can't connect to it now you
might go okay well why don't you guys just connect to 2.4 g and that's sort of
an option but if both of us were connected to it at the same time
and heaven forbid the living room tv for example
was also running netflix we would quickly run out of bandwidth because you
got to remember 2.4 gigahertz does offer better range
but it doesn't support nearly the speeds of five gigahertz so if you want to be
streaming especially 4k content you want that 5g network working
so hot tub is another fail for us
now before we go any further i do want to make it clear that in an optimal
world you just use a single access point to cover everything because then you
don't have any issues when you're roaming between access points and the
less complexity you can have in a home network generally speaking the better
but if for whatever reason that's not possible like where we are today a mesh
network can help you out now ai mesh
which is what we're showing here is far from the only mesh wi-fi solution in
fact it's not even the only one that ASUS has but what's really cool about it
is that what ASUS has done is on their newest models they're really high-end
stuff like the rog rapture all the way back to a premium model from 2013
they're providing this firmware update that lets you upgrade your network while
also breathing new life into your older gear and make a mesh network out of
hardware that was just already available out on the market so they've got 16
different models that are supported and these are just three random ones that
they sent us to set things up here so we're going to throw this baby in bridge
mode and we are going to turn off all of its
wireless functionality so it doesn't interfere with our
good wireless that we are adding
look at this thing it's like right my head grabbed it
no nothing not even a chuckle you want a laugh here
i want i wanted a chuckle or like uh
open a web browser you will be redirected to the ASUS setup wizard if
not navigate to router.ASUS.com
okay i mean james i'm thinking placement wise
this goes pretty well with the live love laugh candle right
like just kind of okay so now that we've reconfigured this
all that's left to do is check out this
ball and friggin rog router interface i've never actually seen that before
and make sure the internet is working
yes all right now we need to mesh it up
it's amazing how much of the tooling they reuse
all right then we're gonna stick with our theory
that staggering our routers is going to be good
and we're going to do the same thing upstairs so now we're back at the front
of the house and we're just going to oh
i would hate to obstruct this uh beautiful original stribe cree
james you suck uh and i'm gonna put this right here
okay so to get into ai mesh we go into the
network map and it says new feature available
cool now what we wanna do
is go to
here ai mesh combines more than one ASUS router to form an ai mesh system yep yep
got it got it um
search for available ai mesh nodes nearby to join your ai mesh system
hey there's one the ac68u
so i think that's the one upstairs and is it going to find the ad6u
let's find out
it does suggest putting them right next to each other during setup which we
clearly didn't do or read the instructions so we might have to go get
the ac86u but we'll see
all right here we go so we've got a successful ad and a bunch of
instructions that might have been good to look at before we positioned everything high in open space between
your ai mesh router and your existing dead zone tippity bloppity yup that
sounds good all right let's search again and see if we can pick up the other one
it's cool that you don't have i assumed we would have to like plug Ethernet into
those ones and like configure them as nodes but instead it just grabs their default
ssids and just finds them oh yeah yeah that's kind of smart
actually okay this one
is meshed so we are all the way up in the upstairs bedroom again
let's go ahead and
netflix it up hd youtube it up
how are you doing not bad not bad at all okay what
resolution are you running at though let's see 1080 on that one
sure hit it and this netflix stream looks not bad so this is interesting
james's father-in-law came home while we were working on this and said he's been
thinking of putting a tv out here by the hot tub so because we're going to have
amazing wi-fi signal strength let's go ahead and uh i'm just going to
skip to part of this that isn't buffered go ahead and play that just like that
bam all you'd have to do is run power to it
and he'd be able to get full quality 4k netflix
no problem and with something like that tcl tv that
you actually did the review of recently
that whole thing could be done pretty cheaply very cheaply
and that's still playing really well too
not bad so james is uh james has wi-fi on the
gram not great not something we should figure out how to test in future
notebook videos but uh as for mine i'm on i'm on five gigahertz and i'm
skipping around in these videos like nobody's business
crazy and we're at the furthest point on the property now behind this trailer so
this is between us and that access point in the window not bad ah
these rocks ow my soft youtuber feet
so that's it my work here is done all that remains is to throw away the
garbage that we produced and uh oh
tell you guys about the opportunity of a
lifetime you too can own an ai mesh compatible router from ASUS just by
checking out the link in the video description you've got to make a 15 to
30 second video talking about how bad
your internet solution is and three lucky winners that's three not six sorry
three lucky winners will get their very own ai mesh router the contest closes
seven days after this video airs so go
check it out and uh right like and dislike and buy
the stuff we featured in
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