Acquiring into the weeds of its technical specs for a minute, the Vilo routers guidance IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. There’s no guidance for the most current ax regular, also known as Wi-Fi 6. Which is not a massive offer considering you want to improve all your devices to enable Wi-Fi 6, but it would’ve been a good addition for potential-proofing. Protection-wise, it won’t use the most current WPA3 protocol, but WPA2 (Wi-Fi Safeguarded Access two) alternatively. Like Wi-Fi 6, WPA3 is nevertheless reasonably new, so this is just not astonishing. But it does make passwords harder to crack and connections to devices without having screens simpler and far more protected, so it is an improve you preferably want.
Just about every router has four inner antennas and supports multiuser, numerous-input, numerous-output (MU-MIMO), which lets it to superior take care of numerous devices connecting to the router concurrently. There’s also beamforming to target the wi-fi sign toward devices.
The Vilo system has band steering turned on by default, which implies it picks the band (two.4 GHz or 5GHz) it thinks is acceptable for each and every device, but both of those show up as the identical network name. This can develop complications when setting up intelligent household devices. My Nanoleaf gentle panels, for example, link only to two.4 GHz but also want the mobile phone which is setting them up to be connected to the identical band. Fortunately, Vilo lets you to toggle band steering off, so you can split the bands, which I did quickly to established up a several devices ahead of turning it on again.
Your mileage will vary based on your set up. The limitation for me is the world-wide-web speed coming into my dwelling, but the Vilo system does a terrific occupation of spreading obtainable bandwidth, and I haven’t experienced any random disconnections in three months of screening. That’s not to say I haven’t experienced any concerns.
The Catch
The app is slick, but it can be slow to load or update right after you make variations. Occasionally it can take a several minutes to update with the existing position. Even right after you’ve productively changed something, it can take a even though to display up correctly.
In the course of set up, to steer clear of reconnecting my multitude intelligent household devices, I planned to give the Vilo system the identical name and password as my preceding Wi-Fi network. However, it refused to acknowledge the password and failed to operate. The fantastic news is this turned out to be a bug the company quickly fastened by using a firmware update.
There’s also no way to force a connection to a certain router. This isn’t commonly a trouble, for the reason that devices link to the closest option for the best probable speed, but my desktop Pc held connecting to a router farther absent on the two.4-GHz band alternatively of the closest on the five-GHz band like I would anticipate. A firmware update improved this much too, though it nevertheless once in a while connects to the router upstairs.
Since the company is so new, it is typical to see a several kinks like this, but it is good to see Vilo active at addressing them speedily. Hopefully, that continues all through the router’s shelf life.