When the client PC was in the same room as the router, nine feet away and without any walls between the two, it delivered TCP throughput of 431.7 megabits per second. If you live in a smaller home or an apartment, you might be able to get away with a single Velop. (As it stands, you’ll need the app to perform these tasks yourself.) The Velop app also has basic parental controls. We’d also like to see support for prioritizing client devices with voice commands-you can select up to three devices for bandwidth priority if your internet connection is constrained. Once Amazon certifies the Velop skill, you’ll be able to use voice commands to turn its guest network on and off and request login credentials for its main and guest networks. Linksys says the Velop will work with Amazon’s Alexa digital assistant, but that feature wasn’t ready in time for us to review. Two ethernet ports (the router auto-configures these as WAN or LAN ports) are recessed inside the base of the router along with the power connector to reduce cable clutter. The wait is annoying when you’re setting up a three-node system as I did, but you only need to do it this once. Bluetooth discovery process took longer than we’ve experienced with other mesh routers, and Linksys tells us there’s a bug that causes the app to time out if you leave it to do something else. The app (there are Android and iOS versions) pairs with the router’s Bluetooth 4.0 radio and then steps you through the rest of the process, which includes setting a Wi-Fi password for the router.Īs you add each node, the app automatically evaluates the strength of its connection to the next closest node and will suggest moving it closer if the connection is weak. You’ll need a smartphone or tablet to set up and configure a Velop router, as there is no web client. The ethernet connections automatically configure themselves for WAN or LAN duties, and each satellite Velop can also function as a wireless access point or a wireless bridge for clients that would otherwise need to be hardwired to your network. There’s an on/off switch and a reset button here as well (you won’t need to bend a paperclip to reach the latter). Two ethernet ports and a power connection are located inside a two-inch-deep well inside the bottom of the unit. Cables emerge from the notch in the corner.Ī single multi-color LED on top reports the Velop’s status, and there’s a silver Linksys logo printed on its solid face. The Linksys Velo offers generous ventilation for its quad-core ARM CPU, 512MB of DDR3 memory, and 4GB of flash storage. I suspect a lot of these routers will still end up in closets, but the access points might see the light of day. Be that as it may, everyone who buys an understated mesh router will still need to plug it into their ugly old broadband gateway. But that’s typical of mesh routers-manufacturers are doing their best to design network devices that consumers won’t object to placing out in the open. With its six antennas hidden in the top of its enclosure, and its cables emerging from a cutout in one corner, the Velop looks more like a room air freshener than a router. The Velop’s off-white vertical enclosure is perforated with ventilation holes on the left side, the back, and the top. The router automatically steers clients to the most appropriate network, and each automatically chooses a different channel for its backhaul duties (i.e., data traveling from client devices back to the router). One of the 5GHz networks utilizes the lower channels on that band (36 and up) while the other uses the upper channels (149 and up). And like the Orbi, the Velop is a tri-band router with three 2×2 radios (two uplink and two downlink) operating three independent networks on the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands. The Velop’s slightly rounded columnar form factor hews closer to Netgear’s Orbi (next on my review to-do list) than the puck-shaped devices from Eero (benchmarked, but not officially reviewed yet) and Google (Google Wi-Fi has been fully reviewed).
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