Review: Google Wifi

Mysteriously, my Asus NT-66R started dropping connections on the 2.4Ghz band. That was the only band that would reach the far side of our house. I have been frustrated for sometime because I could get signal one foot in the direction closer to the router, but it wouldn’t get any signal from my spot in the bed. It has been a great router and if you are the market for a router, I would highly recommend one from Asus.

With all of that said, I decided that if I was going to replace my misbehaving router, I was going to go wtih a mesh type system. I don’t need many of the advanced features, I don’t really do much networking, and I only have one hard wired device. After much thought and consideration, I decided to go with Google Wifi. I had narrowed it down to Netgear’s Orbi or the Ubiquity Amplifi HD, but in the end, I didn’t need the features and Google was cheaper.

Setup

Getting started was dead simple and only took be about 15 minutes to get all the access points configured. I bought a three pack knowing it would cover my entire house, but I was suprised a the real results. It was packaged nicely with minimal waste and came with a really small set of instructions that said, install the phone app and get going. That may be the only downside is that you can only configure and manage from a phone app, but then again who doesn’t have a phone that is worried about signal strength in their spot of the bed.

Once all the access points where configured, an automatic update of the firmware happened and then told me it was going to reboot. Once back up I explored the app to discover that in fact there is QoS and it can be set by device. I didn’t really need to make any tweaks to the default settings, besides adding a guest network.

Results

Now here is the part that most will be interested. I had read several reviews on the web and many of those reviews complained about performance of the devices. It wasn’t that it wasn’t good, it was just not as good as some of the more expensive setups. All I can say is that I am extremely pleased with my internet speeds and I can live without the most throughput internally.

I have a 75Mbps connection to my house and I am seeing 65Mbps+ in every room. Doesn’t matter what device I am using I am seeing that kind of performance. I also did some tests as I mowed by yard, which is abou one acre in size. I get 30Mbps+ in the street and the point farthest away from my house I was able to get 15Mbps. Not to shabby considering in my master bedroom, I was getting only 10Mbps with my previous setup.

Overall, I would highly recommend it if you are a set it and forget type or someone who doesn’t need all the bells and whistles that other systems provide.

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