- I'm Andru Edwards and you're watching Gear Live.
On the heels of the big Samsung Galaxy Note 9 launch
just a few days ago, Samsung's got
another new hardware announcement today
which looks to make managing both your wifi
and your smart home devices even easier.
This is Samsung's SmartThings Wifi system,
and today, I'm gonna tell you all about it.
What is going on, Tech Squad?
Andru Edwards here, editor in chief at GearLive.com.
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As I mentioned today, we are talking about this.
This is brand new, it is the Samsung SmartThings Wifi
mesh home router system.
Samsung sponsored this video,
and not only does this likely improve upon the wifi
and the router that you currently have in your home,
but this also acts as a smart home hub as well.
What you get inside the box are three
of these Samsung routers,
and the question that probably comes to your mind
right away is, why would I need three routers in my home?
I have one router, I get decent signal,
sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad.
Why would I need three different routers in my home?
Well, the problem with homes today
is that they're so many different shapes,
so many different sizes, on one end of the spectrum,
you can live in a small apartment,
and on the completely opposite end of the spectrum,
you may have a three or four story home,
and both places need wifi,
but one router is gonna perform differently
in a small apartment versus a multi story dwelling.
That's where the SmartThings Wifi system comes in.
The reason that there are three units
is because they act in a mesh configuration.
What that means is, you plug one of these guys
into your home Internet connection,
probably connected to a modem,
and the other two, you spread throughout your home,
so let's just say you have a home
where you have decent wifi, but in one area of the house
or maybe a couple areas of the house,
it's not as fast or just doesn't even exist at all.
You take the other two units, and you plug them in
where the dead spots are, and they'll talk to each other,
so in other words, if you have one of these connected
to your router on the first floor,
you can plug the second one in on the second floor
and get just as good coverage up there
as you would on the first floor.
And then you can take the third one
and put it in the far corner of the house
where your signal is super weak,
or maybe near your backyard
where you might want to have signal as well,
and all three of these routers will talk
to each other wirelessly, spreading out your signal
throughout your entire living space.
Now, one of the main advantages here,
and one of the things I am most excited about
is the integration
of Plume's
wifi
software.
Now, if you haven't heard of Plume,
about a year and a half ago or so, Plume released its own
mesh wifi system,
which consisted of these really small pods
that would plug directly into an outlet.
Since the pods were so small, you needed a bunch of them
to kind of blanket your home in good wifi.
Actually, one pod per room where you wanted to access wifi.
And one thing I said to myself back then was,
I wish there was a wifi system
that had better hardware, but used Plume's software.
And guess what, that's exactly what Samsung made
with SmartThings Wifi, these are powered
by Plume's mesh wifi software,
and if you're unaware, let me tell you why that matters.
If you've been paying attention to a bunch of tech lately,
you've probably heard the term AI, Artificial Intelligence,
machine learning, that's actually what Plume does
and uses to optimize your wifi network.
Once you get things out of the box and set up,
the mesh wifi system will optimize
and give you good connectivity across your home
within 30 minutes, so right off the bat,
you're getting optimization out of the box.
But then the next day, even more optimization occurs.
Within 24 hours of usage, the system will re-optimize
to improve network speeds
as it learns the network environment
and how you've been using it on the first day.
So in other words,
since you have these spread across your home,
it knows if one of them
is handling a lot of video streaming,
and if another one's handling
just some pretty lightweight work,
and maybe the third one has a bunch
of your smart devices on it, et cetera.
It starts to learn and know what's happening
and how things are being used,
so that it can optimize and make sure things are fast
and speedy for you, but then, over the next few weeks
and continuously thereafter,
optimizations continue to take place.
The mesh system learns to allocate bandwidth capacity
to the rooms and devices that need it most,
and it'll keep doing this going forward.
So that's Plume's artificial intelligence wifi optimization.
There's another cool feature that Plume enables, though,
that I really like, which they call HomePass.
With HomePass, you can give guests access
to your wifi network,
but you don't just have to have your own network
and then one guest network.
You can actually give different guests different passwords
to your wifi and you can give each one a specific profile
that you control that lets them access
and not access certain things.
So for example, maybe you have a babysitter coming by,
you want to give them access to your wifi,
but don't want to give them access
to any of your smart devices,
and you want to make sure that their wifi access
ends at, let's just say, 10 p.m.,
when they're scheduled to leave, you can do that.
Separately, you can give your kids a wifi password
that allows them on the network, allows them to access,
let's just say, their smart speakers,
but doesn't allow them to access your smart cameras
or smart door lock, and also makes sure
that their wifi access gets shut off
each night at 9:00 p.m. and doesn't get re-enabled
until the next morning at 10:00 a.m.
HomePass gives you more control
of who gets onto your wifi network
and what they can do once they're on it,
and the best part is, if you want to revoke someone's access
to your network, you don't have to go in
and change the password for everybody,
you don't have to change the network name,
you just go in and delete that specific user
from being able to access your router.
With the older Samsung Connect Home,
you could connect up to five of these guys on one network,
which would give you about 7500 square feet of coverage,
which should be plenty for almost anyone, you'd think,
but with the new SmartThings Wifi,
you can actually connect up to 32 of these
in one system, giving you a ridiculous
48,000
square feet of wifi coverage.
On the back, you'll find the reset button,
a power input, and two ethernet ports.
You can plug wired devices into the ethernet ports
for a more solid connection,
or plug these directly into your home network
if your home or business is wired.
That allows you to take advantage of even faster speeds
with ethernet backhaul, eliminating data
from needing to hop between nodes wirelessly.
Now, as amazing as it sounds
to greatly increase the footprint of your wifi signal,
as I mentioned, these also act as hubs
to control your smart home devices.
That's right, this also acts as a smart home hub,
connecting all your Samsung, and third party,
smart home devices to your wifi network,
and aside from wifi controllable devices,
it also supports controlling ZigBee
and Z-Wave smart home devices as well.
This allows you to control a variety
of smart home appliances and devices remotely.
This includes security systems, smart locks,
kitchen appliances, TVs, speakers, lights, and more,
using the Samsung SmartThings app on Android or IOS.
So what that means is that,
rather than having to jump between different apps
to control different smart home devices inside your home,
you can use Samsung's SmartThings app
to control all of your smart home devices.
I found compatibility to be pretty wide and extensive,
as SmartThings works with devices from brands
like LIFX, ecobee, Lutron, Honeywell, Yale, Philips Hue,
Ring, Google, and many more.
If you're interested and want to pick up
the Samsung SmartThings Wifi,
you can pick up the three pack which I have here.
This runs for $279.99, or if you'd rather buy a single unit,
you can pick up single units for $119.99.
There you have it guys, that was your look
at the brand new Samsung SmartThings Wifi home mesh router.
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Is this something you would be interested in setting up,
interested in using, et cetera?
I'll meet you down there for further discussion.
If you enjoyed this one, please do drop a like
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Thanks so much for watching, as always, guys.
I appreciate your support.
I'm Andru Edwards and I will catch you in the next video.
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