WiFi is just WiFi right?
During my Travelodge days, I was the chief geek who selected the WiFi for 500+ hotels and nearly 20m customers - it needed to work all the time or customers rightly complained. In fact, during my time at Travelodge, WiFi was the single greatest source of customer complaints and was head and shoulders above pretty much everything else. Travelodge chooses to charge for WiFi which certainly energised the complaints but in reality, most people weren’t too bothered about paying three quid for WiFi so long as it worked however when it was bad three great british pounds was the straw that broke the camel's back like you wouldn’t believe. Okay, you get it, the WiFi had to work all the time!
So now I’m choosing WiFi for Unicorn House and in the background, I’m thinking Meraki vs Ruckus but in reality, my use cases are different-ish. I still want WiFi that works all the time but I’m not convinced I need all those “enterprise features” for my home, or do I?
I’ve long been a fan of the Apple AirPort Extreme wireless routers because they just work however it seems Apple has given up on them so it’s time to look for something different.
A quick search revealed a bunch of review sites which all largely contradicted each other but I finally settled on this one as the most objective.
To my surprise, the Google WiFi came out as top pick which I found interesting. I was aware that Google had started making WiFi equipment but I hadn’t realised they were now recognised as number one in the market - I guess you should never bet against Google!
The final twist in this tale is that Google just announced their new Google Nest WiFi as their next-gen product so that’s what I ordered.
https://store.google.com/gb/product/nest_wifi
Not only do you get the WiFi router which comes with Google’s built-in voice assistant “Hey, Google” but each of the WiFi boosters called Points are Google Voice-enabled too. Super neat.
Having now installed the Google Next WiFi I can report that it’s every bit as awesome as I was expecting - it just works beautifully. The hardware is gorgeous and the Google Home set-up app is simples and clearly built by people who understand the needs of a home wifi operator. One great example is the broadband speed report which samples the speed daily and provides you an audit you can share with your provider. Voda is achieving significantly less than EE managed … we will have words!
I’ve not yet “formally” surveyed the Unicorn House WiFi signal but I’m hoping to achieve better than neg 65 dBm everywhere which is the standard we applied to the Travelodge hotel rooms. Ain’t that right @Graham Bull?
Director - Operations
5 年I went for the ZyXEL Multy X but now jealous of awesomeness that Google appear to offer ??
I'd check out the Ubiquiti Unifi stuff (https://www.ui.com/products/#unifi), I have 2 AC-PROs hard-wired the router and it's rock solid. And quite good looking I think :)? I think they use it in shopping malls so it's good. I hear good things about the Google stuff too.