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 tune in to watch Colton
game stream and ignore his wife every week
oh what's this i see
that's a factory router that look at all the cat hair in this thing
so this is it Colton
this is how you ended up with the free router upgrade from netgear you betcha
so netgear wanted to sponsor a video where we took the LMG employee with the
worst networking setup and got them up to speed
and uh 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 air time so you can get uh 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 gotta 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 are here okay
so problem number one is that on Colton or should i say caltane's
stream um 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 your stream even though the so is the internet working like other
devices still work most of the time yes but the real issue from a like household
harmony standpoint is 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 can't run cables okay it doesn't it doesn't matter
it 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 is 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 signal strength is pretty
darn good Colton that thing must just really suck if you're dropping your
connection all right 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 um the the piece of paper with the password
has apparently fallen down next to the fridge uh because the magnet came off
and they never changed the password on their access point because
for shame 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 xr500 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
netduma 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 netduma 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 uh here we are in the doom
os dashboard can Colton do it
what do i got to do well first you need to set your
wi-fi to something that uh is not rustic road 168 here
so uh here okay do you want me to yeah you drive okay i'll drop
ah so i did the thing funniest thing for a while i live in a cul-de-sac
and so i called my ssid 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 if i did like hate my neighbors
wow not bad i'm gonna do it well i don't care okay they won't nobody uses Wi-Fi
around okay do it did we 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 cool
hey not bad
hey Colton yeah what's up good news what's the good news you're like uh
eight percent faster than you're supposed to be
on the download anyway dang also your wi-fi is as fast as you're wired now now
we're outside though and
i mean it's acceptable like we're still getting over 100
megabit down actually that's not bad but uh
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 a precious spectrum
communicating from the range extender
back to your router but this particular one this is the x6s 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
uh 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 back haul and then another five gigahertz out there and
your two and a half gigahertz 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 oh thank god yeah 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 going to put that there and i'm going to go back outside
faster yeah yeah i mean i don't know what i was expecting but it's like
double the speed hey
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 2.4 and 5 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 uh 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 set it 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 a loan to reserve for that high
priority traffic and then another amount let's say uh 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 going to 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 okay philips hue you get one percent of the
bandwidth you are like super not important
versus let's just go ahead and update that
desktop gt9 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 uh you know my
one plus seven we could say okay you get you know two percent 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 geofilter 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 um really low ping
but nowadays it's all matchmaking based so you don't really get to do that what
this does is on your router's 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 going to 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 we'll go ahead and say yeah call of duty i don't want to 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 um
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 their geo
filter 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 own 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 when she uses her 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's streams not cutting
out all the time very valuable caltane on twitch okay
go check it out subscribe to pewdiepie excuse me i'm sorry that's dead dead
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