Get Faster WiFi with OLD Routers??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,736 words · ~8 min read
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so wi-fi pretty much sucks the big one especially if you're
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trying to get coverage in a large house with a traditional single router slash
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access point setup and that is exactly why we are here at james's in-laws house
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today because james stays here in the guest room from time to time and it's
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upstairs where the wi-fi reception just
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plain bites so ASUS sponsored this video
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where we're gonna show you their ai mesh system where you can take
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any one of a bunch of different routers
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in ASUS lineup and create your own wi-fi
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mesh for excellent coverage across a very large domicile
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i've just been looking for an excuse to use the word domicile
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glad it presented itself
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so one of the biggest problems with the network setup here is that when james's
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in-laws got internet service 17 years ago the assumption was that
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only the kids were going to use it and they would never give a rat spatula
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about that their newfangled internet there and
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of course we all know how that worked out everybody uses the internet now so
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the only place in the house that has coax and the Ethernet cables that they
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actually ran themselves using the same technique that i did like up the side of
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the house to the study and then to one of the upstairs bedrooms is here in the
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basement where the kids were living all those years ago
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so as you can imagine this here
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combo modem router switch access point
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thing provided by the isp just
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isn't gonna cut it okay so to show one of the most problematic locations i'm just gonna
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jump into bed with uh james here
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this is a pretty realistic scenario we're both gonna fire up a video to
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watch on our computers and or phones
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okay so on james's phone he's actually getting 1080p video
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but that's on 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi then on your laptop what do you got
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nada and on my laptop i'm watching this strange parts video on five gigahertz at
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a magnificent 360p resolution
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now that seems like it's kind of working well enough you can have two devices
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running up here and 2.4 gigahertz does have better range but consider this
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there are many many neighbors out this
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window here all of whom are not at home right now because it's
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whatever time it is i don't have my watch on today if they were 2.4
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gigahertz would have too much interference and they've experienced
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this in order to work reliably up here and 5 gigahertz total mess from this
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distance okay so here at location number two the
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hot tub um my laptop is connected to five gigahertz and can stream netflix
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if you can call this pixelated mass guardians of the galaxy 2 i'm not sure
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that i would uh but james's laptop also on 5g
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either can't see it at all or when it can see it can't connect to it now you
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might go okay well why don't you guys just connect to 2.4 g and that's sort of
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an option but if both of us were connected to it at the same time
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and heaven forbid the living room tv for example
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was also running netflix we would quickly run out of bandwidth because you
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got to remember 2.4 gigahertz does offer better range
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but it doesn't support nearly the speeds of five gigahertz so if you want to be
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streaming especially 4k content you want that 5g network working
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so hot tub is another fail for us
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now before we go any further i do want to make it clear that in an optimal
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world you just use a single access point to cover everything because then you
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don't have any issues when you're roaming between access points and the
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less complexity you can have in a home network generally speaking the better
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but if for whatever reason that's not possible like where we are today a mesh
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network can help you out now ai mesh
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which is what we're showing here is far from the only mesh wi-fi solution in
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fact it's not even the only one that ASUS has but what's really cool about it
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is that what ASUS has done is on their newest models they're really high-end
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stuff like the rog rapture all the way back to a premium model from 2013
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they're providing this firmware update that lets you upgrade your network while
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also breathing new life into your older gear and make a mesh network out of
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hardware that was just already available out on the market so they've got 16
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different models that are supported and these are just three random ones that
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they sent us to set things up here so we're going to throw this baby in bridge
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mode and we are going to turn off all of its
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wireless functionality so it doesn't interfere with our
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good wireless that we are adding
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look at this thing it's like right my head grabbed it
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no nothing not even a chuckle you want a laugh here
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i want i wanted a chuckle or like uh
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open a web browser you will be redirected to the ASUS setup wizard if
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not navigate to router.ASUS.com
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okay i mean james i'm thinking placement wise
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this goes pretty well with the live love laugh candle right
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like just kind of okay so now that we've reconfigured this
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all that's left to do is check out this
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ball and friggin rog router interface i've never actually seen that before
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and make sure the internet is working
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yes all right now we need to mesh it up
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it's amazing how much of the tooling they reuse
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all right then we're gonna stick with our theory
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that staggering our routers is going to be good
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and we're going to do the same thing upstairs so now we're back at the front
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of the house and we're just going to oh
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i would hate to obstruct this uh beautiful original stribe cree
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james you suck uh and i'm gonna put this right here
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okay so to get into ai mesh we go into the
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network map and it says new feature available
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cool now what we wanna do
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is go to
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here ai mesh combines more than one ASUS router to form an ai mesh system yep yep
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got it got it um
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search for available ai mesh nodes nearby to join your ai mesh system
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hey there's one the ac68u
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so i think that's the one upstairs and is it going to find the ad6u
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let's find out
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it does suggest putting them right next to each other during setup which we
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clearly didn't do or read the instructions so we might have to go get
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the ac86u but we'll see
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all right here we go so we've got a successful ad and a bunch of
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instructions that might have been good to look at before we positioned everything high in open space between
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your ai mesh router and your existing dead zone tippity bloppity yup that
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sounds good all right let's search again and see if we can pick up the other one
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it's cool that you don't have i assumed we would have to like plug Ethernet into
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those ones and like configure them as nodes but instead it just grabs their default
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ssids and just finds them oh yeah yeah that's kind of smart
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actually okay this one
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is meshed so we are all the way up in the upstairs bedroom again
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let's go ahead and
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netflix it up hd youtube it up
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how are you doing not bad not bad at all okay what
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resolution are you running at though let's see 1080 on that one
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sure hit it and this netflix stream looks not bad so this is interesting
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james's father-in-law came home while we were working on this and said he's been
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thinking of putting a tv out here by the hot tub so because we're going to have
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amazing wi-fi signal strength let's go ahead and uh i'm just going to
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skip to part of this that isn't buffered go ahead and play that just like that
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bam all you'd have to do is run power to it
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and he'd be able to get full quality 4k netflix
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no problem and with something like that tcl tv that
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you actually did the review of recently
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that whole thing could be done pretty cheaply very cheaply
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and that's still playing really well too
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not bad so james is uh james has wi-fi on the
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gram not great not something we should figure out how to test in future
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notebook videos but uh as for mine i'm on i'm on five gigahertz and i'm
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skipping around in these videos like nobody's business
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crazy and we're at the furthest point on the property now behind this trailer so
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this is between us and that access point in the window not bad ah
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these rocks ow my soft youtuber feet
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so that's it my work here is done all that remains is to throw away the
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garbage that we produced and uh oh
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tell you guys about the opportunity of a
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lifetime you too can own an ai mesh compatible router from ASUS just by
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checking out the link in the video description you've got to make a 15 to
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30 second video talking about how bad
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your internet solution is and three lucky winners that's three not six sorry
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three lucky winners will get their very own ai mesh router the contest closes
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seven days after this video airs so go
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check it out and uh right like and dislike and buy
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the stuff we featured in
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subscribe yes and our met merch store