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More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

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Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#21

Does anybody have any thoughts on how the hand wave feature works? I'm interested in the OnHub as a Nest owner and potential future developer. I like the addition of Thread and Weave, and the other future-enabled sensors on this thing. Still, though, hard to justify the $220 price tag without knowing what its really intended for.

Looks like you need to preconfigure a "priority device" in the app, and then waving over the router at any given time reserves more bandwidth for that device for 2 hours.

Here is a help article that explains the wave control a little more. https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6294727#post-wave

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#22
post #20

"With the ASUS OnHub, we’re also introducing Wave Control, which lets you boost the Wi-Fi speed for a particular device by simply waving your hand over the top of the ASUS OnHub—great for busy houses." This sounds like a horrible feature. "Honey, WiFis not working in the bathroom, could you wave over the router, that might fix something?"

What exactly does it do? I can't figure out how to translate "boost the Wi-Fi speed for a particular device" into any technical process.

It likely uses QoS to prioritize traffic to the device.

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#23
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary it sounds like an remarkably pragmatic feature which - assuming it works as advertised - will solve many actual real-life issues with wifi better than something less manual would have done.

No, it patches over actual real-life issues by requiring intervention from users. This is a terrible strategy. Pretty soon, every person in a crowded apartment complex will be waving over their router any time they need to do something. Channel congestion is a huge problem in urban environments. From my home office I'm seeing 20 networks right now. Even a rudimentary dynamic channel-switching implementation could hel…

> It's 2015 and the best I can get from my 802.11n network is still ≈ 50mbps, even in the same room.

Odd. My 2007 laptop gets 160+ Mbps goodput in the same room using 11n @5GHz.

New Macbook Pro gets routinely 500 Mbps+ goodput using 11ac.

Maybe you should get a better router?

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#24
I like the self-update and its simple operation. The hand-wave seems to be gimicky, but it looks quite useful.

As for the design, I think Apple's Airport Extreme looks much nicer, and more importantly, the Asus onHub as glowing base. Anything that has LED or glowing lights will not pass my wife, especially if it is placed anywhere prominent in the living area.

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#26

I like the self-update and its simple operation. The hand-wave seems to be gimicky, but it looks quite useful. As for the design, I think Apple's Airport Extreme looks much nicer, and more importantly, the Asus onHub as glowing base. Anything that has LED or glowing lights will not pass my wife, especially if it is placed anywhere prominent in the living area.

> Anything that has LED or glowing lights will not pass my wife, especially if it is placed anywhere prominent in the living area.

Don't know about this one, but with the last one you could disable the LEDs completely.

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#27

"With the ASUS OnHub, we’re also introducing Wave Control, which lets you boost the Wi-Fi speed for a particular device by simply waving your hand over the top of the ASUS OnHub—great for busy houses." This sounds like a horrible feature. "Honey, WiFis not working in the bathroom, could you wave over the router, that might fix something?"

horrible? its BRILLIANT, just think of the placebo effect alone!

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#28

Does anybody have any thoughts on how the hand wave feature works? I'm interested in the OnHub as a Nest owner and potential future developer. I like the addition of Thread and Weave, and the other future-enabled sensors on this thing. Still, though, hard to justify the $220 price tag without knowing what its really intended for.

placebo

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#29

"With the ASUS OnHub, we’re also introducing Wave Control, which lets you boost the Wi-Fi speed for a particular device by simply waving your hand over the top of the ASUS OnHub—great for busy houses." This sounds like a horrible feature. "Honey, WiFis not working in the bathroom, could you wave over the router, that might fix something?"

Or competition between family members.

Re: More Ways to Wi-Fi with the New ASUS OnHub

#30
post #25

Is it just me who finds auto upgrade on a router very scary? I mean, I get it, ordinary ppl wouldn't upgrade otherwise but still the security / surveillance aspects are frightening.

Do you take the time to reverse engineer and fully understand both the original firmware shipped with and every subsequent update that is issued for your home networking equipment?

If you don't, then you only stand to benefit from a router that silently auto-updates from software delivered by a company that has really good OPSEC.

As an aside:

If you don't encrypt your traffic, any device on the path between you and your traffic's destination can read your traffic. If you're not concerned about that, then you should be, as it's a much larger -and ongoing- threat to privacy.

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