hey guys EBPMAN here do you struggle with internet access in your home are
you having spotty coverage well in today's video we're gonna be reviewing
the deco m4 mesh wireless system from tp-link let's go ahead and check it out
so if you're looking to have complete coverage in your home and I'm talking
about 5,500 square feet something that's simple to use something that can support
up to hundred devices then you're gonna want to watch this video and learn more
about this product from tp-link so what in this video we're gonna cover the
product the specs we're gonna show you how it can be used and also we'll review
the mobile app that's used in order to support it so let's get right to it make
sure you hit the subscribe button and tap the little bell icon to get notified
when new videos become available so the first thing we're gonna do is just cover
the overall specs and some of the things that we see here in the packaging so
this is a whole home mesh Wi-Fi system right that has parental controls and
also adaptive path selection seamless roaming no matter where you are in the
house you have fast stable internet everywhere it has a feature that's gonna
help kill dead zone so that means if you notice that certain parts of your home
that things slow down you won't have that problem with this router you can
connect up to a hundred different devices and you think about a hundred
devices a long time ago could have been a lot but nowadays if you have a huge
bulb if you have a tp-link bulb if you have any kind of nano leaf like what I
have behind me all these things are using the Internet they're counted as a
device if you have an Alexa if you have a Google device if you have an Apple
device they're all connected and they're considered devices so that hundred can
go really quick also something that can be supported really easily on your phone
so we're gonna see how this setup and the deco app works and it has dual band
speeds and like we covered you have up to five thousand five hundred square
feet that this is going to cover so that's pretty large three to five
bedroom house so for those of you who have never really heard of mesh
solutions let's take a look at how its explained here in this illustration so
the way this is gonna work is you're gonna have one of these components here
right one of these mesh points is going to be placed right connected to
your router so this is where the internet comes in as you can see here
and then what you're gonna do is you're gonna take the other mesh points this
guy right here and you're gonna place it throughout your home spread equally so
that you can cover everything that you want to cover so you'll notice here in
this illustration you have one where the urine and it comes in and then you have
one in this location and one in this location and the goal is is that it is
going to then cover this area completely without any kind of gaps you can see how
you have these circles that are circling everything so again a couple things that
I just wanted to highlight that we didn't see in the on the other side of
the box so you also have these parental controls so you can limit online time if
that's something that you would like to really focus on you have no buffering so
this is using AC 1200 dual band Wi-Fi and you'll notice that it's supporting
all the newer standards when it comes to connectivity it also has an adaptive
path selection which you saw earlier and pretty much what that's going to do is
it's going to keep your network running fast and at top speeds by automatically
choosing the best connection for the device that you're going to be
connecting to and then you know the real focus about this is we're trying to
demystify and simplify how you use the product and how you connect so easy
setup so let's get right to it now in the box you're gonna have three mesh
points as we saw here and then you're gonna also have a package that what's
gonna have all the connectivity for each one of those mesh points so you'll
notice that you have power because that's what you'll need and then you
will also have some additional accessories if we move this to the side
you'll notice that it does include one Ethernet cable and this season a cable
is what you're gonna be connecting to your router so wherever your internet
comes in 18t xfinity or other this is what you connect to that router and you
connect this to one of the mesh points and really the way this works it doesn't
matter which one you connect it to so you just grab one of the mesh points
connected power it up and then we'll go through the setup process let me show
you how easy it is now before doing this setup I just wanted to take a look at
the mesh point itself so you can see all the features that are included there so
you have your mesh point it's white it has kind of like a black or gray type
material leaning more towards black on the back here you have two ports again
it doesn't really matter you know this is for Ethernet connectivity because not
only can you you use this to connect to your router
but if you need a physical collection connection where this mcNeish point is
you can actually connect to this mesh point to a physical connection on your
laptop or your desktop if that's something that you need so here you have
your connectivity on the bottom here you have a reset button so you can see that
right there so there you have your reset and then also I'm gonna flip this over
as you can see that right here you have your power connector right there so
really simple it does have some cord management so you can see how you can
hide things right there so that's available as well but it's very very
simple implementation not intimidating at all because there's really just power
it plug it in and you're set to go so we've already connected the three
mesh points throughout the house I actually have one connected to my
basement inbound router I have one on my first
floor and then I have one now in my office studio and that's the one that
you see here on camera so the next thing I'm going to do is going to walk through
the setup so you're going to download the tp-link app you're gonna register
you're going to have to put in your email and then you'll go through the
setup process and that's where we're exactly at right now so let's see what's
involved so the setup process is very very simple all I did is I took one of
the mesh points that you see here connected it to my router powered it up
and then went to another portion of the home annoyance I powered up that second
one this one's in my studio office and it is also powered up and now what we're
going to do is go through the process of how we set this up now one of the things
I've done is I've done low downloaded the tp-link app I registered and now I'm
at the part where I'm actually starting to configure the device that I have here
I'm choosing this specific router there's four of them to choose from this
is the one that we have and now the next thing I'm gonna do is just go through
some of the screens it's telling us everything that we should do and we're
gonna do this as well so it's guiding you through the entire process Internet
are stable the deckle is is pulsing so you see how it's illustrating it
right here you can see the LEDs up here and that is pulsing and now we're just
gonna let it go ahead and do its thing and remember this is supposed to be
super simple right so no technical need you know knowledge needed it should be
just push and go so now it determines that there's multiple decals
have been found and what I need to do next is I need to take the SSID that's
on the bottom with the password and input it into the phone so I can
continue the registration all right so now that I've connected to the Wi-Fi of
that specific mesh point I'm going to say I have connected and I seen
continued to do it search it's found it you know it's connecting all right so
now I'm going to define a location for this so I'm gonna just say that this is
going to be a custom location and I say basement all right hit next it's
detecting the type of Internet okay and hit next now it's creating the Wi-Fi now
I need to give it a network name so I'm just gonna be really simple I'm gonna
call that test then I'm gonna call the passwords gonna be test one I'm gonna be
resetting this anyway okay needs a little bit more
so password is test one two three four five at see if it likes that one this
does so we have our network name and our network password
all right now it's testing the internet connection okay now we're going to go
ahead and add another deck oh we have this one right here and we're going to
say that that's on the first floor the deckle LED is pulsing found it and I'm
going to how this one living around
okay we're going to add another same model and this one is on the second
floor and it's pulsing to it found it
and we're gonna call this office and now we're done alright so let's see if we're
actually connected so I'm going to swipe down and I'm looking at I'm connected to
test everything looks good and now let's go over or the app but before we do that
we're gonna update the firmware okay we're gonna go ahead and install it now
for those of you are curious as to what's in the release you'll notice here
this is the most recent build and it improves fast roaming function and
optimizes system stability so always recommend to really apply your firmware
as they become available and I wanted to make sure that for this review that we
were testing it and reviewing it with the most current and best build so
that's a good deal so we're gonna go ahead and get back here alright so next
let's take a look at the app and then we'll do a speed test all right so now
the next thing we're gonna do is we're going to perform a speed test I know you
want to see what the performance looks like so let's go ahead and try that so
eighty six down and it looks like it's gonna be twenty seven up now to give you
some background the segment that this router is connected to I actually have
multiple segments in the house with internet connections is around 120
megabits so I'm getting 86 megabits down now let me also explain I am three
floors up so this is my routers in the first level the second access point or
mesh point in this case is on my level above that and I am now a level above
that so I'm getting three levels in distance 86.4 down and 27.3 up let's go
and try it one more time
okay that's a little bit better you're still hovering around the 80s but
you saw that it went above that to 103 that's better the upload is still around
the same place a little bit better the second time around
all right let's do this one more time
alright so now it's slightly above 100 which is good I really like that speed
and the upload I have a sense that's gonna stay around the 27 I really don't
get more than 28 up so doubt that would go much higher than that so that's the
kind of speed that you can expect now I'll go throughout the home and I'll do
speed tests at every level to see if it increases my anticipation is or what I
anticipate will happen is as I go down to each level the speed is probably
gonna get better so we'll see what that looks like and I'll share that at the
end of the video now let's go ahead and we're gonna go back and we're gonna go
into the deco application let's start looking at some of the features alright
so the first thing that you see on entry is that you see the devices that are
connected to this mesh point system I would I hit this area here so you can
see everything that's involved so you have Wi-Fi and if we go into Y apply
settings you see the name of the network the password you can also set up a guest
network which is also really good so we'll hit that so you can see what that
looks like and it's setting up the network and you have test guest password
and again you can configure some of the settings there we have a blacklist right
so the blacklisting allows you to block a device access to you from your network
so you could do that you can update the software you can go into advanced
settings so here are all the settings I'll just pause this for a second so you
can see ipv4 ipv6 VLAN port forwarding you know tp-link ddns fast roaming LED
control operating mode is as a router and it
looks like you can do a couple things you can make it a router or you can make
it an access point so in my case it's connected as a router which means it's
distributing the internet for me and then you actually can have it as an
access point and then you have notifications enabled let's take a look
at the parental controls and other parental controls you can actually name
the profile so we'll call it test and we'll hit next and you can say that this
is a child and based on the pre-filtered content - setting that you have here
it's basically going to filter these things out online communications
downloads right if I say preteen you'll notice that
things change right so you can block adult content and social networking and
then when you can do in here is you can choose if you want to add something
right or you can add to remove it so it all depends on you know what you want to
be able to do if I say teen notice how it changed again and if I say adult
notice how it changed again now from a website perspective you know I could
actually add websites as well so a lot of good filtering and parental controls
going on there the next thing we're to look at is QoS right which is quality of
service so the neat thing here is if you have for example a Netflix and you have
an Amazon fire stick and you want that to have priority over all the other
devices so if your kids are playing xbox League of Legends while whatever it may
be fortnight you can actually control who gets priority when it comes to the
internet that way you're not lagging or if you're a gamers home they're not
lagging so again you could go ahead and set that as well so you have a monthly
report here that talks about activities so that's neat and then the last thing
we look at is that you can set up managers in other words these are the
individuals who can actually access the router and manage it and make changes
now we also have a message area and in the message area you'll see here that it
basically is giving information that there's a new device detected and also
giving you information around updates so the app itself is going to tell you if
there's a firmware update and then you can take it you know whatever matter
you'd like to take into your own hands and go through the firmware updates at
your leisure now the last thing I wanted to cover
before we wrapped up the video is the experience as I walk throughout the
whole house no dead zones driveway in the backyard and no issues with coverage
I saw consistent Wi-Fi everywhere I was I will say that though as I went into
the basement and I got closer to where the primary mesh point was connected to
my Xfinity router I found that the the actual bandwidth went up slightly but I
think that that's expected because you're so close to the source so all in
all consistent throughout the home which is what you want and coverage throughout
the home which is also what you want so guys that concludes our
you of the Deco m4 mesh system covering a gun 5500 square feet at the price of
one hundred and seventy nine dollars I'm going to have the common area filled
with all the details in the product as well as a hyperlink if you'd like to
order it if you have any comments questions leave it in the comment area
and as always thanks for watching