TP-Link sponsored this video checking out the Deco X20 and this is one of
those products that's designed for if you have a problem that's really nice to
have but admittedly hard to solve so the
nice problem that you have is you've got a gigantic house or you've got a small
business that is up to around the size of 5,500 to 6,000 square ft wow good for
you nice mansion the part that sucks about that is that there's a lot of
issues with extending ing the range of Wi-Fi Beyond I mean realistically a
house or or business around the 2,000 to
3,000 square ft size now back in the mid
2000s there were a handful of ways that you could increase the range of your
wireless access point you could uh just boost the gain uh many router firmwares
allowed you to go in and just turn the gain up on your antennas you could
reconfigure your antennas so adding uh
directional antennas or Canna to address
you know cold spots in your coverage was one way to go about it or you could just
add a second router and by router I of
course mean uh wireless access point switch router combo unit you could just
add another router but all of these approaches kind of came with their own
disadvantages turning up gain also turns
up noise so even though the signal might
travel farther it might end up being more distorted and therefore less useful
every time you add a directional antenna you are taking away from the
omnidirectional performance that typically every other part of your house
is going to need and adding a second router is just not a great user
experience because everyone has to know
you know oh should I connect to upstairs or downstairs but then what if you know
the upstairs one is at this end of the house and the downstairs one is right
under me and I'm here but which one should I connect to now you're expecting
a lot out of your users so that is where
mesh Wi-Fi comes in it has the benefits
of multiple access points but with the convenience of a single access point
meaning that you don't have to worry about which wi-fi to connect to now back
in the day obviously you could just configure your laptop or your phone or
whatever other device to connect to both of them but devices have this tendency
to kind of stick to whatever Wi-Fi
access point they connect to first so you might come home connect to the one
that's closest to your front door and then go into you know the back Den or
the games room or something like that where there's an access point that's
closer but your phone will still be grabbing on for dear life to that
original access point that you were connected to that's why we can't trust
them to manage it so Mash networks are pretty much the solution to handling a
much larger space until you get up into solutions that are really designed
designed more for uh commercial use or Enterprise use where you'll have
individual access points that all come back to like a central server closet and
they're all hardwired fundamentally though this works in pretty much the
same way where each of these is a Wi-Fi 6 access point that could be used in a
standalone fashion so you can see we've got uh a fully enclosed antenna design
little rubber feed on the bottom so it doesn't slip around power input and then
two gigabit Ethernet jacks one really cool thing about The Deco line is that
while commercial Solutions will tend to use individual Ethernet cables wired out
to each access point and then back to a central switch obviously that's not
feasible in most homes it gives you the choice you can use Wi-Fi to communicate
between the satellites and the main unit or they have Ethernet ports so you can
connect them via an Ethernet cable which is going to be less susceptible to
interference or leg as long as it's convenient to do so overall The Deco X20
is an affordable choice that's going to give you whole home coverage for video
calls or downloads without worrying about buffering or robot voice or any of
those annoying Wi-Fi problems of course all that's left for us to do now is give
it a shot to simplify the setup I am going to be using our residential
internet connection so I plug in a deco
over here in logistics and I need an Ethernet cable ah sure internet light is
stable deco's LED is pulsing Blue
Logistics Linus Wi-Fi
it's gigabit cool that is some spicy Wi-Fi performance 800 megabit on Wi-Fi
okay we're not going to make it over the ShortCircuit set come on Andy let's
go oh yeah it's dropping it's dropping
it has not fully dropped yet though no no it dropped hey perfect okay good
that's what we wanted so let's go install an intermediary Deco oh yeah
even the little animations different this time I think it sees the the blue
one cuz there's a little blue flashing light on here it's solid hey there it is
okay where are we going to place this this is going to go in the uh PC build
corner cool jonno do you want to pop this one in the PC build corner in the
spot where I had it so the whole process for each Deco takes I don't know I'd
give it about 2 to 3 minutes but all three of them are showing up in the app
since we're in the app there's actually a couple of other cool things that we can check out in here so you can see all
the devices on your home network you can go in here and change your Wi-Fi
configuration set up a guest Network so a guest network is going to have
internet access but not access to anything else that's on the network and
then Advanced none of this is particularly advanced stuff but it's
really nice that it's so simple to access so uh we're in wireless router
mode but if for whatever reason we uh
are like some isps for example it's kind of hard to get your stupid modem router
switch access point combo thing it's hard to get the router functionality
turned off last time I checked Shaw local for example requires you to phone
them okay uh so if you just want these to operate as a wireless access point
then that's totally cool let's go ahead and cart this back before we do that we
can see that from the ShortCircuit set we're getting much better reception I
have three Wi-Fi bars and uh probably
when I click this oh yep we go the zold 3 roamed to the second access point
which is over in the PC build corner TP-Link says that this transition takes
about3 seconds uh let's go ahead and do
a quick speed test as you can see our speeds a lot lower because there are
multiple hops that we're going through and we're actually quite far away from
that one as well but this is still a lot better than nothing which is what we had
before I mean yeah 90 megabit per second is enough that I'm going to be able to
have a video call you know what I think both deos have to
be within range of the main unit so I'm going to go put this in the library what
up Ethan I'm I'm leaving I won't breathe the air too much okay bye while we're
waiting for that to pick up there's a couple of other things we can check out in the app test speed detect cameras
ping test um you can check your public
IP sure so there's a little game you
play while you
and there's parental controls so you can set up times of use um services that are
allowed to be used for example and you can add devices on a one by one basis
you can prioritize gaming or streaming in your qos just it's not really deep in
terms of configuration but it's simple to use now all I need to do is see if my
third Deco is now online yes it is okay
looks like yes I grabbed on to the
library one all right all right we switched to a Wi-Fi 6 laptop here as
well for adding the third satellite and let's see what kind of speeds we get
okay that's way better we're getting double the speed with the extra
satellite and that's impressive considering that there's still a wall
and some distance between us this setup would likely work fine for the average
person but I bet we can get even better results if we connect the hubs with an
Ethernet cable dang that's definitely a big Improvement compared to before
almost doubling our performance again so this is a great for power users or for
people who are going to have quite a few devices streaming off of the satellites
if all this looks good for the next 5 days The Deco X20 is going to be
discounted from $249 to $1.99 at the
link down below just for 5 days thanks for watching guys and subscribe to Short
Circuit