Yup, just like you, I saw the Minions Wi-Fi routers on Reddit and went,
well, this can't be real, can they? But then, unlike you, I actually bought them.
So here they are, Bob and Kevin, ready to turn your Wi-Fi evil. How evil, you ask? Does this answer
your question? Oh, there's a thing about me. The truth is, there's not a ton of information
about these other than what the manufacturer publishes on the box. The Bob version is AX1800,
so this is Wi-Fi 6, while the Kevin version is AXE 5400, so Wi-Fi 6E. Other than that,
the Kevin version is tri-band, which it has to be to be Wi-Fi 6E, so it's got 2.4GHz support,
and 5GHz and 6GHz, each at 160MHz channel widths. It has a 2.5GHz uplink port, which
is not necessarily surprising at this price, but is a little surprising on something that I had
perceived to be pretty much a novelty item. Typically, they give no thought to performance
whatsoever, but this clearly does, because all we have to do is flip over one more panel,
and we see that it also uses an upgraded Qualcomm processor versus the more basic
dual-core MIPS IA processor on the Bob version, and it's got more, I guess, DRAM. I'm assuming
Flash DRAM doesn't really mean anything. I think they mean Flash and DRAM, so it has 512MB
of RAM. This side of the box is also where we find out these are designed by DavoLink,
a Korean company that's been around since 2000 and specializes in business and education networking.
We've got a QR code for the installation guide, and then that is about it. And online, you won't
find much more in the way of information compared to what they tell you on the box. They are mesh
supported. You could have one Kevin for your internet connection, and then have a whole mesh
of Bob's connected to them. They had support for WPA3, which we actually did a video over
online as tech tips recently, and explained why that's very important. And what's included in
the box is, apparently, all. Now, we're going to need a little bit of clarification on that,
so why don't we go ahead and get, oh my god, it's so cute. My very own minion. It's not very heavy,
but a wireless router doesn't necessarily need to be heavy to indicate its quality.
Oh my god, it's so cute. If you want to connect more than one wired client, you're going to need
a network switch, so you've got just the one LAN port and the one LAN port. There's a mesh button,
which I assume is for setup, an LED, which I have to assume lights up the eyes. I really,
really hope it does. And then, powering. Oh my god, the shoes are rubber.
The attention to detail, you guys.
So cute. Even the cable's cute. Look, it's a minion's cable. Not really expecting to find
anything extra in Kevin's box, but who knows. He does cost $130 compared to just $69 for Bob.
He's a lot heavier, which highlights that this is a completely different product,
not just two different versions of the same thing stuffed into a smaller chassis and a larger
chassis. This feels like it's got some heat sinks in it too. Oh my god, his hair tuft is rubber too.
Oh, it's probably not the eyes that light up. It's probably this right here. Okay. Oh wow,
this is a really short Ethernet cable. That's kind of a bummer. Hey, there we go. We've got
activity LED now. Well, here, let's do the setup. This is pretty simple. Just scan this QR code to
connect to it and then scan a second QR code. Well, the easy setup kind of broke down here.
Well, we got there. It turns out that whatever Apple's doing with their default DNS settings
and Safari on the iPhone, it just doesn't work for this. It works just fine on Android,
and it works just fine on a desktop or laptop. So let's go ahead and check out this control panel.
I love that the default admin username is Bob. Come on. How perfect is that?
Like they really did, they really did put in the work on this one guys. Wait, what? If you reconfigure
SSID zero, SSID one just shows up. So now I've got Kevin sucks, and I've got Bob underscore one.
How do I turn that one off? Oh yeah, it's not secured. What is going on right now?
Was this enabled box here before? No, that enable and disable thing is not here,
and this apply button that is here in the easy setup is not here in the Wi-Fi settings one.
Right? Guys, tell me. Tell me what's happening right now. Is that apply?
The little paper airplane is apply. Wouldn't recommend using the easy Wi-Fi setup. There were
a couple of concerns we saw raised about the device online. Someone said that it doesn't
support PPPOE. So if you need that, then I guess the Minion router is not for you. And more importantly,
a Reddit user pointed out that there's a vulnerability where the Wi-Fi passphrase is
passed to the UART console in plain text. However, it should be noted that someone would need physical
access to the device in order to take advantage of that exploit. So once someone's got physical
access, you're pwned anyway. Enough chit chat though. It's time for the moment you've all been
waiting for. Is it actually a functioning Wi-Fi router? It's a gigabit connection running into it.
Half a gigabit. Wow, uploads even better. 500 megabit download, 700 up. Very reasonable.
But can Kevin do better? I'm not going to bother configuring everything on this one and
guys, I'm sure there's things we could do to tune things a little bit better,
but we want to see how these are going to perform out of the box because realistically,
come on. That is how most people buying a novelty router like this are going to use it.
All right, not bad. You can see our ISP is delivering a little bit more than gigabit on
this connection. Unfortunately, UBC is really not giving us good enough consistency in our
downloads to really draw any kind of reasonable conclusion. Let's move. The testing consistency
isn't that big of a deal though because under normal circumstances, you're not going to be
right next to your router anyway and the bottleneck is going to be, you know, what kind of connection
can you get to it through a wall or whatever. So we're at one wall right now. Let's see how we're
doing here. Oh, yeah, I don't think the university of British Columbia is the problem here. Wow.
Okay. So then I just go through this one door. Oh, wow. This is with no wall. Guys, look,
the set is right there. It's like right there. This is bizarre, guys. Kevin? Kevin?
Are you okay? It probably switched over to 2.4 when I went on the other side of the door
and then just didn't grab five gigahertz or six gigahertz again. Oh, that's not good.
Oh, man, I had not intended to go into Kevin's control panel, but I'm going to have to do that.
So here's what we're going to do. You're in an apartment and you just don't need 2.4 gigahertz
and we're just going to turn 2.4 off. So the question we're trying to answer here is can you
buy one of these for your mom or is she going to call you complaining the second she walks,
you know, 30 feet away from it or goes into another room if you understand the compromise
you're making that 2.4 gigahertz isn't going to work. Let's go. Let's go again. Back to the other
side of the door we go. Okay, moving around doesn't seem to be good for it. Seriously?
Surprisingly, this fares much better. So the problem is not necessarily the wall
or the distance. I'm probably about the same distance from Kevin as I was before.
The issue seems to be the pickup pattern of the antennas. So if you live in like a row home,
you know, like a three level but like small building, man, perfect. All right, we're back.
All right, yeah, like we can really see it here. So the problems are twofold. One, switching between
different bands is handled extremely poorly. Now that could potentially be exacerbated by the
devices own tendencies, but whoever's fault it is, it's not a good experience with the Minions
routers. I'm assuming Bob is no better than Kevin. And then problem number two is that the pickup
pattern on this antenna is, I don't know what word to use to describe it other than inexcusable.
It worked great upstairs. So it's not that it's completely unable to punch through walls. It's
that the pickup pattern is really strong vertically. And yeah, it's all it's, it's a can tenna sticking
out of the top of this thing and really poor horizontally. So at this point in time, I can't
say that I can recommend the Minions routers for anything other than cuteness factors. So if
you're in an extremely small space and you just want a cute little Wi-Fi access point, then they're
great. And if you want performance, then you should probably look elsewhere, like to your
ISP provided access point compared to these things. Subscribe to ShortCircuit.