Receiving into the weeds of its requirements for a minute, the Vilo routers guidance IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. There is no guidance for the most up-to-date ax common, also acknowledged as Wi-Fi 6. Which is not a huge offer considering you have to have to upgrade all your products to allow Wi-Fi 6, but it would’ve been a wonderful addition for future-proofing. Protection-smart, it won’t use the most up-to-date WPA3 protocol, but WPA2 (Wi-Fi Guarded Obtain 2) rather. Like Wi-Fi 6, WPA3 is still fairly new, so this is not shocking. But it does make passwords more challenging to crack and connections to products with out screens a lot easier and far more safe, so it is an upgrade you ideally want. 

Every single router has 4 inside antennas and supports multiuser, a number of-enter, a number of-output (MU-MIMO), which permits it to far better tackle a number of products connecting to the router simultaneously. There is also beamforming to target the wireless signal towards products. 

The Vilo process has band steering turned on by default, which suggests it picks the band (2.4 GHz or 5GHz) it thinks is proper for each individual device, but both equally surface as the very same network identify. This can make difficulties when location up wise home products. My Nanoleaf gentle panels, for instance, connect only to 2.4 GHz but also have to have the cellular phone that’s location them up to be connected to the very same band. Luckily, Vilo permits you to toggle band steering off, so you can break up the bands, which I did quickly to set up a several products in advance of turning it on all over again.

Your mileage will fluctuate depending on your setup. The limitation for me is the world-wide-web pace coming into my residence, but the Vilo process does a good occupation of spreading readily available bandwidth, and I have not had any random disconnections in three weeks of screening. That is not to say I have not had any issues.

The Catch

The app is slick, but it can be slow to load or update after you make alterations. In some cases it can take a several minutes to update with the recent status. Even after you’ve correctly improved one thing, it can choose a even though to show up correctly. 

During setup, to keep away from reconnecting my multitude wise home products, I planned to give the Vilo process the very same identify and password as my former Wi-Fi network. Unfortunately, it refused to settle for the password and failed to operate. The excellent news is this turned out to be a bug the company quickly fixed by using a firmware update.

There is also no way to power a connection to a unique router. This isn’t commonly a trouble, due to the fact products connect to the closest possibility for the most effective attainable pace, but my desktop Pc stored connecting to a router farther away on the 2.4-GHz band rather of the closest on the 5-GHz band like I would hope. A firmware update improved this much too, nevertheless it still sometimes connects to the router upstairs. 

Due to the fact the company is so new, it is really normal to see a several kinks like this, but it is really wonderful to see Vilo lively at addressing them speedily. Hopefully, that continues all over the router’s shelf everyday living.