This sounds like a horrible feature.
"Honey, WiFis not working in the bathroom, could you wave over the router, that might fix something?"
Having said that a router like this is a huge step forward for the masses. Most people don't bother configuring their routers, changing admin passwords, etc. They never update the firmware. These new routers from Google solve that, which in itself is fantastic. Here's what I'd love to see happen in addition to all this.
- OpenWRT + automatic updates. Why don't we have this yet? I am contemplating building an x86 based router just because of the auto-update thing.
- Wi-Fi AP's that double as smoke detectors. I already have a bunch of those in the house on every floor. As a bonus they could probably use the wires they already have to set up a high speed backbone. I currently use a Ubiquiti Uni-Fi that looks like a smoke detector and it's fantastic.
- Ability to sign onto a Wi-Fi network that is less painful than sharing the passphrase. For example, if a guest comes to my house all we have to do is bump our phones to get them on my guest network. My router is hidden and my access point is on the ceiling of the second floor.
InstaWifi does this. I think you only need to have it installed on the sending device. It hasn't been updated in a while but it probably still works. Would be nice to have this feature built in to Android.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.jessechen....
If you use WPA-Enterprise, you can create a rolling username/password that's deterministically generated. [0] And/or you can load a passphrase into a Yubikey or similar for laptops that have a USB port and other devices that have NFC.
> - Ability to sign onto a Wi-Fi network that is less painful than sharing the passphrase.
If all smartphones came with a QR code reader (seriously, why doesn't every Android phone come with ZXing's Barcode Scanner??), you could print the passphrase and frame it or something. Additionally, if Google got their shit together, they could make a URI of the form
$wifi_crypt_method//$uriescaped_ssid:$uriescaped_username:$uriescaped_pass
I'm not sure why they've failed to do so for the past several years.
> I currently use a Ubiquiti Uni-Fi...
Ooh! Which one? I have a UAP-AC v1 and a UAP-AC-LR.
[0] Actually, you can do a lot more than just this. I've been having so much fun with FreeRADIUS over the past week. >:D
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 help a lot, but that's not what happens. Instead, a power outage occurs, all devices reboot, and some pathological combination causes my wireless to degrade because my router came up faster and picked a channel that my neighbor's stupid ISP-provided POS decided to squat after-the-fact. Used to be I could sidestep a lot of this by using the 5GHz band, but it appears that ISP-provided devices are starting to show up there, too (though I _think_ the newer 802.11 protocols have better behavior around channel congestion? Maybe?)
Anyways, that's my $2: this is an issue, and involving the user will just result in magic-thinking/cargo-culting being taught to non-techies for problems that could be solved through better standards. It's 2015 and the best I can get from my 802.11n network is still ≈ 50mbps, even in the same room. If wireless is the future, we need solutions, not band-aids.
For those interested in the difference , but I wish they would actually provide hardware specs somewhere.
>OnHub is available from both ASUS and TP-Link. Both are powerful AC1900 routers and work with the Google On companion app. But each has a different elegant exterior design, along with two key differences. OnHub from TP-Link features a front-facing antenna reflector that acts like a satellite dish enhancing Wi-Fi range in that direction. OnHub from ASUS lets you control your OnHub with a wave over the top. For example, wave to prioritize a device to ensure it has enough Wi-Fi bandwidth, like Chromecast while streaming a movie.
https://on.google.com/hub/#specs
Click the "Specs" link at the top right.
Here is a help article that explains the wave control a little more. https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6294727#post-wave
It's difficult to find more info on that as a developer. Can you guys help me out?
I don't think Weave and Thread are really in play yet (Nest might use Weave?). Weave looks like a protocol for phones talking to smart home devices, and thread is a network layer built on the same radios as ZigBee.
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.
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.
Don't know about this one, but with the last one you could disable the LEDs completely.
To be honest, this could be a great prop for some sort of Hollywood thriller, in which the protagonist, a family man portrayed as computer illiterate, buys a new router for his family. At first it's the best thing they ever purchased, but after the scene with the children going to bed and the OnHub™ emitting a strange fluorescing light, things seem to go awry for the family. His wife is getting really confronting targeted advertisements jeopardizing their relationship and his children end up really sick due to painful headaches which the doctor says only occur in nuclear zones of destruction due to intense radiation. Will he find out what's causing all of this or is it already too late? Coming soon in a theater near you.