[Animats]

Lots of vendors already offer this. It's pretty standard for commercial WiFi units. It's just slightly more expensive than dumb routers.

* Eero: https://eero.com/

* Ubuquiti: https://www.ubnt.com

* Cisco: http://www.cisco.com (sized for larger buildings)

Does this new Google device come with the Google Fi feature which backhauls all your traffic to Google via a VPN?

[eridius]

For Ubiquiti I'd suggest linking to https://www.amplifi.com instead of ubnt.com. AmpliFi is their mesh networking product aimed at consumers, whereas almost everything on ubnt.com is aimed at enterprise use.

[DiabloD3]

With Amplifi out, until I see performance numbers, I'm still going to suggest UniFi AP AC Pros due to how fucking ridiculously good they are.

[yoshamano]

I can't speak to Amplifi as I've just heard about it a few moments ago, but I second the UniFi AC Pros. Long story short, the 2.4ghz spectrum where I live is saturated, and the 5ghz spectrum is wide open. 2 APs, a Cloud Key, and a PoE switch later and I have full 5ghz coverage on both floors. I can bury the capacity with file transfers, BitTorrent, Netflix, etc and it doesn't skip a beat.

The bad news is if you're used to the cost of consumer gear, this ain't it. When it was all said and done it set me back $400. Throw in the cost of a pfSense router (because my old workhorse died recently) and we're at about $600. So, much like everything else, getting to that first 90% is cheap. That last 10%, not so much.

[eridius]

I have a UAP-AC-Pro and a second UAP-AC as an extender, and they're great. But I ordered an AmpliFi HD anyway because it will probably be easier to maintain and I'm interested in the mesh networking. I'm hoping it lives up to expectations.

[drzaiusapelord]

No. It comes with pretty much nothing but a nice little price break. You get a 3-pack for $299. The Eero 3-pack is $499.00. This is a serious price break in this market, which is currently over-priced. You can get 3 Ubiquities for almost $300. A lot less user friendly, but $500 for 3 units is holding back mass adoption.

Personally, for my home I need just two units. Shame there's no $199 2-pack yet. It would be an instant buy for me.

[fps]

Ubiquiti's Amplifi is $199 for 3 units.

[hossbeast]

Amplifi has 3 models. The high end, the amplifi HD is $350 for a 3 pack

[resonantjacket5]

If they made a 2 pack it would probably be around $230 with my guesstimate.

  3-pack $300 or $100/item
  2-pack $230 or $115/item
  1-pack $130 or $130/item

[uptown]

Buy the three pack and sell one?

[jburgess777]

Also Portal Wifi: https://portalwifi.com/

This was started as a kickstarter campaign and they have just begun shipping out the first units.

Like the Google APs, Portal can form a mesh and automatically figure out which channels have the least interference.

[lazylizard]

http://www.open-mesh.com/ ???

[cobrabyte]

I have quite a few of their routers. Very underrated.

[ebrewste]

Yes. That cloud setup punches through firewalls and is just turn key. I wish they made routers.

[Terretta]

Little known, you can do wireless extending (main + one hop end nodes + clients) or WDS mesh (main + one hop relay + one hop end nodes + clients) with Airport:

Overview : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202076

Extending: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204617

WDS: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT4262

While the wireless distribution mode drops speed (as does Ubiquiti etc.) it's still faster than a DoCIS 3 cable modem, and the Airport Express for end nodes is cheap.

[jedvty]

> Does this new Google device come with the Google Fi feature which backhauls all your traffic to Google via a VPN?

Not applicable.

The purpose of Google Connectivity Services is to provide protected access (encrypted via VPN) to the Internet on an unsecured 802.11 network like one that you'd encounter at a coffee shop.

In that case, GCS sets up a tunnel from your phone to Google's edge network, traffic from your phone egresses via an IP address dedicated to GCS and then you're surfing the Interwebs.

If you've entered a SSID and a related PSK or WEP password (as one typically does on a home network), GCS isn't available to use.

Use of GCS is optional. It can be disabled as desired.

[sqs]

Big shout-out for Eero (https://eero.com/), which is the best WiFi product I've ever used.

[nickpsecurity]

I'm skeptical about the flux capacitation feature they list. The rest looks neat.