Linksys New AC Router Products - EPIC Surprise at the End - Linus Tech Tips CES 2013
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2013-05-07
·
1,321 words · ~6 min read
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welcome to lonus Tech tips at CES 2013 our trip to the show this year is
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powered by Corsair maker of quality PC components and peripherals our trusted
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storage partner is Seagate technology and our trusted networking partner is
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linkis we're here in the lynis suite where Matthew is going to be telling us
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about the product refresh that they are bringing to the market this is pretty
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much the the the first real generational move in Wireless since we went from G to
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n is that correct that is absolutely correct so show us the the the Beast of
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all beasts the ac750 sure so we actually have an ac750
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in the market today but what we're doing with this refresh through the spring and
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availability you'll be later in the spring is we're going to buffer it up
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and take a little bit more uh Power behind this and give you a USB 3.0 port
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and the capabilities of our new AC routers through the spring as well are
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also going to have of the specification of AC which includes beam forming
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technology are you I'm assuming you know what beam forming is lus why don't you
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explain it to me and the viewers okay sounds great I would say that beam
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forming is going to take uh let's use the light bulb analogy if you turn on a
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light bulb it would give you coverage throughout your entire home if you had
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to turn on a flashlight it would give you directional coverage towards where
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you're aiming it same idea with beam forming technology it's going to take
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the antenna configuration and it's going to send the Wi-Fi signal directly to
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those devices throughout the home so obviously you're going to get faster transfer rates and you're going to have
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a better experience so tell me two things number one is do the antennas
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have to physically move and number two is how does it know where your devices
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are so no the antennas are not going to move that's part of the specification
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built into it and your second question was how does it know where the devices
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are it is going out looking for the devices pinging those devices once it's
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established the connection beam forming starts to do its work and that's how
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you're going to see the benefit so it's going to have to have multiple antennas if it's going to have any idea where
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something is located is that correct correct and these all three of our routers that you see in front of you
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right now these are all 3x3 antenna configuration routers on the AC side
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okay very cool so I mean something that our viewers may or may not have picked
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up from that is USB 3 is not only going to you know look blue and sexy on the
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back of the router but what it's also going to do is it's going to allow you to take advantage of that AC transfer
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speed with a network attached storage device that can be something as simple
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as a plain old external usb3 hard drive
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so let's go ahead and put this one down because this is probably going to be
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pretty expensive so maybe not every viewer can afford the super uber premium
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one so why don't you tell us about the ac600 sure so the the biggest difference
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between the two and it's pretty straightforward Linus and viewers
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obviously is that uh we're taking you from ac750 to
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ac600 so what we're doing is we're still going to give you the great speeds on
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the 5 gig Spectrum at 1300 megabits per second but but on 2.4 instead of 450
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megabits per second we're going to take you down to 300 so again you're still
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going to get pretty good 300 megabits per second speeds on 2.4 but still have
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1300 megabits per second on the five the other difference that we'll notice here
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we've also taken one of the USB ports away so we're going to give you USB 3.0
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but not that additional USB 2.0 Port
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okay so you still get to take advantage of the fast AC transfer speeds for your
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network attached storage but just you don't have that other auxiliary report
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that is absolutely correct okay now this guy over here has like a green box and
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sort of is smaller than the other ones what is the key difference between the
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ea6300 and the other two that we just looked at sure so again we're going to
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go back and look at the speed and what this is going to do for you this is the
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entry level in our AC lineup 300 megabits per second on the 2.4 867 on
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the 5 GHz Spectrum so when you put it together you're upwards to ac200 as a
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combined speed so again it's just a little bit less speed on the AC Spectrum
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but if you need more you easily take yourself up the line and choose the right product for you again on the back
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USB 3.0 Port 4 gig Land one gig Wan very
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straightforward okay now here is here is
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sort of the trick now AC is still not
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that prevalent out there so we're going to move actually sorry diesel we're going to move this way a little bit so I
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actually tested on uh on my YouTube channel I took a uh a USB you know
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unnamed you know competitor D say for example uh an unnamed USB stick that was
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ac200 and I put that up against a wireless
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n450 uh not some other USB stick competitor T say for example um what we
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discovered was that the 450 was actually dramatically faster than the AC USB
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stick so if the USB sticks aren't there yet and they're not ready to take
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advantage of the speed um can you show us what you guys have to allow customers
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to actually use the AC gigabit Wireless
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yeah it it's absolutely a great point lineus and you hit it right on the head so what we did when we launched our
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ac750 skew into the marketplace in the
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spring of 20 or sorry the fall of 2012 is we launched the universal Media
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connector alongside it's a single band four port AC Media connector so for the
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customer that is buying any one of the spring routers coming up or the one
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that's currently in Market you're now going to be able to transfer up to 1300
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megabits per second wirelessly from router to Bridge and any one of those
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four devices that are plugged in so we looked at that as an opportunity to say
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let's bring not only the router to Market but let's give him a corresponding Media connector to do the
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job that we know AC can do so I mean that was a bit of a I I led him on on
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that one a little bit because I already knew that the Media connector just
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absolutely destroys both the n450 and
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the USB AC stick and we we actually tested one of those as well so it was
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something along the order of about four or five times faster than either of the
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other Solutions so uh I think think that pretty much wraps it up for our CES 2013
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coverage of the link is Suite thanks again Matthew for joining us thanks lus
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for having us and guys as always don't forget to subscribe to lus Tech
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tips