Google OnHub Router
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
2,327 words · ~11 min read
0:00
the google on hub router on their product page some of the first text you
0:04
run into is that the onhub gives you fast wi-fi good uh
0:08
good to know it also states that the onhub speaks human that it's helpful
0:13
feedback and simple setup will be easy to use we will check these things out
0:17
and we'll test its performance to see if it's worth a damn so stay tuned to find
0:21
out and hit that like button below if you want to see me investigate the
0:24
diminishing returns of adding more fans to your rig
0:36
mass drop is launching three new communities for rc cars photography and
0:40
corvette enthusiasts check them out in the links in the description and
0:44
subscribe so you don't miss any updates
0:47
this router is a collaboration between google and TP-Link but why you might ask
0:53
that's a very valid question it seems like the combined attack is designed to
0:57
conquer the frustration of people who don't want to or don't know how to go
1:01
through the advanced process of setting up your network and the onhub also seems
1:06
to be designed specifically for a wi-fi signal crowded apartment which can kind
1:11
of be a war zone for certain routers and can cause a huge amount of signal
1:15
reception issues in terms of specs this two-pound 7.5 inches tall 4.6 inch
1:20
diameter flower pot esque router is packing a dual core 1.4 gigahertz
1:25
processor four gigs of e mmc flash one
1:29
gig of ddr3l memory one usb 3.0 port a
1:33
three watt speaker ambient light sensor six tri-color led arrays bluetooth 4.0
1:40
802.15.4 conformance gigabit wan
1:43
broadcasted by six 2.4 gigahertz antennas and six 5.0 gigahertz antennas
1:49
and finally a single lonely gigabit lan port with one more thing let's not
1:54
forget the last single 2.4 gigahertz antenna which we'll talk about later so
1:59
yeah i hear you a standard 1900 megabit
2:02
per second ac wi-fi router with one gigabit lan out connection for 200 bucks
2:08
it needs to prove itself and we'll get to that in a moment but first there are
2:12
a few oddities in that spec list that we should explore now that single 2.4
2:17
gigahertz antenna that's kind of off by itself is actually just a dedicated
2:21
antenna for finding the most appropriate channel to broadcast on which is
2:25
actually pretty cool it will search every about five minutes i believe and
2:28
it won't switch channels unless you're not really using the internet so that
2:31
can be kind of handy so that it can be the most efficient for you when you get
2:35
home but the bluetooth radio the usb 3.0 port and all that compliance gear is all
2:39
kind of off at the moment of filming and the
2:43
certain speakers like the three watt speaker are kind of not properly
2:46
utilized in my opinion then there's the ambient light sensor like what do you do
2:51
anyways this will all be working for google on in the form of a brillo
2:54
enabled device using the common language protocol called weave but as far as i
2:59
know there isn't anything out that can communicate with the google on hub in
3:03
this way yet you're paying for all that
3:06
compatibility now the value of this part of the onhub is currently just a giant
3:11
question mark so this is the onhub in the box you'll
3:15
get a kind of power brick thing that's plugged into the wall already two
3:18
Ethernet cables that'll come wrapped up like this they're flat which is pretty
3:22
nice but they're not all that long neither is the wall power plug thing um
3:28
it's kind of interesting because in a lot of their product stuff they show it
3:31
on shelves like bookshelves and whatnot and that
3:35
might be fairly difficult for some people to get power and Ethernet too so
3:40
i don't know about that but if you can make it work then it does actually look
3:43
pretty good we have the blue one there's a black one as well on the bottom of the
3:47
onhub you'll see kind of a half circle symbol right below where it says onhub
3:51
that will line up with another half circle at the bottom to take the outer
3:54
shell off all you have to do is turn it so that it lines up with the dot and
3:58
then you can lift it off i already have it plugged into Ethernet and power and
4:02
you can see at the top there's a blue ring there's a piece of paper somewhere
4:07
that i don't remember where it is right now but it basically says a solid blue
4:11
ring means that you're good to go a teal ring means that it's ready to be set up
4:15
and an amber ring means that there's a problem and no light means well it's not
4:19
receiving power which is fairly self-explanatory i've already downloaded
4:22
the app so let's get going so in the app now it is actually very simple but
4:26
there's a few cool things like this is how it uses the three watt speaker first
4:29
off it finds the on hub but then it communicates a secret code through audio
4:35
it's kind of interesting you'll see in a sec
4:40
all right so now we got the code it's going to connect to the onhub
4:45
just setting up the wireless name please don't use a password that bad for
4:49
anything ever
4:54
and that's it now we're in the app it's pretty straightforward in wi-fi access
4:58
you can reveal your password and even actually share your password using this
5:03
button through social media or email or whatever i don't really recommend using
5:07
this password and i don't really recommend using that because having a full copy of your
5:12
password on the cloud somewhere is probably not the
5:16
most secure way to do things now i'm gonna have to change this a little bit
5:20
because as it is complaining i have another router on this network and i'm
5:24
not bringing that one down so i'm going to turn this into bridge mode and then we're going to test it against the
5:28
ruckus r710 this is not going to be a very fair test this router is like over
5:34
twelve hundred dollars and this one is two hundred dollars but we can see kind
5:38
of how good it is in general and have a kind of
5:42
best possible scenario comparison against it
5:45
okay so now we're actually testing the ruckus and the on hub what i'm going to
5:49
use for testing them is the wi-fi adapter that runs off of the x99 deluxe
5:53
board that we have the reason for that is this is actually the only thing that
5:57
can receive three by three memo wi-fi connections that we have so i have to
6:02
haul this thing around it's gonna be super annoying don't worry about it i've
6:05
already tested the on hub and the onhub is currently unplugged we're going to be
6:09
testing in a whole bunch of different scenarios we're testing in here just
6:12
kind of across the table retesting through the wall in the benchmarking
6:16
room through the wall and a bunch of random metal stuff and a few other
6:20
things in the library and then also
6:23
upstairs in Linus's office then i'm going to do a range test while just like
6:27
watching a twitch stream and walking and waiting till it disconnects so this is
6:31
the first test like i said i already have the onhub numbers and we're going
6:34
to do a file transfer test not a speedtest.net
6:37
because it's more representative we have an SSD array server so file transfer
6:41
speeds should be fine so first thing i'm going to do is going to try transferring
6:46
the test file from the server to our computer just past one minute and 20
6:50
seconds almost done done one minute 24 seconds now i'm going
6:54
to upload from the computer to the server
6:58
one minute 51 seconds one minute 28 seconds 0.1
7:02
122.4 two minutes and seven seconds point
7:07
eight so we are connected to turn up wi-fi as you can see turn up wi-fi is our on hub
7:12
router now i'm just gonna jump over here we are watching a twitch tv show this is
7:17
faceit tv and we're just going to kind of walk out of the office and see how
7:21
far we can go until it disconnects still totally working i'm going to go towards
7:26
this construction site
7:31
it's buffering but i'm not entirely sure if that's the router's problem
7:35
yes i have lost my rotor signal it's got some pretty
7:39
hardcore stuff to contend with but i'm wondering the ruckus might win this one
7:44
all right so now we're gonna do the range walking test just like we did with the on hub but with the ruckus r710
7:49
going out the door still working
7:54
still connected to wi-fi oh
7:58
nope i'm off wi-fi now so i've lost wi-fi so our very unscientific range
8:03
test has shown that the ruckus r710 made it to here
8:06
and the onhub made it
8:10
three four five six
8:13
seven random luke side steps further
8:18
whatever that means and we're back and
8:23
that was not expected i when pitching a
8:26
200 rotor against a 1200 ap in an ap
8:31
style test you'd expect the 1200 ap to just
8:35
completely run away with everything and that's not actually what happened the
8:38
onhub won in most scenarios granted not
8:42
by a lot but it did and in some scenarios it was a fairly significant
8:46
amount that being said there was the one random test in the editing den where the
8:51
ruckus just totally ran away with it the
8:54
one time but that's not that significant in the
8:58
grand scheme of things it didn't represent all the other tests that we ran and then even when we did the
9:02
walking test outside it's still lost and by a pretty significant amount that
9:08
being said it was still running quite fast and ruckus's strength is focused
9:13
around a massive amount of users which i can't really represent here all that
9:18
well i'm not a school i can't have like 30 different students with phones
9:23
and laptops all running at the same time i actually don't have enough devices for
9:27
that that being said i could get a pretty heavy load but
9:32
it the onhub has a really strong CPU for a router in it for like a random 200
9:37
router so it might be able to kind of keep up with that as well it was
9:42
interesting i'm very impressed with the onhub but it comes down to a few
9:47
different things you lose a lot of your customizability you can't change a huge
9:52
amount of options on the on hub you can almost change nothing you can set into
9:57
bridge mode you can change your password there's not much more than that to be
10:01
completely honest whereas the ruckus you have total control over a huge amount of
10:05
stuff especially if you get the control hub thing um and
10:09
there's always the kind of freaky part about what data exactly is google taking
10:14
off of this there's what they tell us they're taking off of it but tinfoil hat
10:18
on they could definitely be taking more
10:21
anyways for the value it actually seems really strong it's an extremely
10:25
extremely competent router for 200 with mystery features coming in the future
10:30
you guys think it's worth it let me know in the comments down below
10:33
squarespace is simple powerful and beautiful and only eight dollars a month
10:37
but if you sign up for a year at a time you get a free domain for that year
10:41
pretty awesome they have responsive design which makes it so that your
10:44
website scales and looks great on any device including phone tablet laptop
10:48
full computer whatever you want they have commerce platforms if you want to
10:52
have a store and even have little module features like cover pages which is a
10:56
feature that allows you to set up a beautiful one-page online presence in
10:59
minutes for things like a cover page or a resume they have 24 7 support via live
11:04
chat and or email so start a trial today with no credit card needed and start
11:09
building your website immediately when you decide to sign up for squarespace
11:12
make sure you use our offer code alignus to get 10
11:16
off your first purchase thanks to squarespace for sponsoring this video
11:20
also check out their link in the video description down below
11:23
thanks for watching this guys if this video sucked you know what to do but it was awesome get subscribed hit the like
11:28
button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to
11:32
shop at amazon find a cool t-shirt like this one or with a direct monthly
11:36
contribution now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click the little
11:40
button in the top left right top right hand corner to check out this video
11:45
where i do something random i didn't pick one so click it anyways it's a
11:49
mystery