Enjoy the new episode! Special thanks to ⚡️ Anker for sponsoring this episode! And huge thanks to Joe's Computer Museum for helping write this episode. Check out his channel here: th-cam.com/users/JoesComputerMuseum
I love the Amazon reviews that are clearly for a different product. Like you see a laptop case and the comments all say "the color compliments my complexion" or "it fits my 3-month-old perfectly"
I have a theory about that! I think they buy off legitimate product listings because it has good reviews and then edit it and list their own product. For someone who isn’t paying attention it looks legitimate. It’s one of the biggest red flags I look for
To be fair, a laptop case usually does fit a 3 month old pretty closely. When they’re newborns, you use an iPad case. And at the local NICU, they use otterbox (TM) iPhone cases on the preemies!
Hey, stop attacking me. What I do with my 3 month old and a laptop case is my business. I loved the review I saw for a Jeep part and the person said it wouldn't fly. If your Jeep is flying you might have screwed up.
Was just shown the German ad. Here it's invented by two computer scientist who were working for an ISP who happen to know a secret that the latter is artificially throttling your bandwidth.
I’m noticing a common thread in the style of advertising between this, the Blaux and its “Kid upends the air-con industry” narrative, and other scammy ads that present a false “underdog” story as the excuse for a crummy product. I bet we are going to uncover that same ad agency as the “final boss” of all these crappy products and misleading ads.
It's the same thing Jake Paul did with his scam wasn't it? He talked about how college was useless, and they were just using people for their money. So you should give your money to him instead.
The underdog effect. I also noticed this somewhere else but I forgot...crowdfunding campaign? This is not good, though... Though to get past the underdog effect, I usually need to think "would I buy this for someone else?"
I swear this man deserves millions of subscribers for how much creative thought he puts into his videos to find things no one else does. We'll see the boom sooner or later 👍🏻
It's funny he claims to be a quantum physicist because a good part of that discipline seems to revolve around admitting that you don't know how things work.
Actual quantum physicists are smart enough to know what they don't know. It's a strange field to be in. They basically observe things to know the weird things that happen, but as of yet have no clue why most of the time. I don't think any of them are trying to improve internet speeds or bring down those "evil, greedy tech companies." Pretty sure these ads just think "quantum physicist" sounds like a really smart guy, so hey he could build something like this.
Small manger switch (as backbone maters for Nas if not internet ) 2 or 3 poe Access ports for mobile and laptops and wire your main Pc/nas/sever and you got great set up !!!!!
@@Anthony-cx4iy Small managed switch: Basically takes in all the wired connections in your house and switches them. POE access points: A WiFi router (access point to be specific) that is powered over the network cable vs needing a separate power line. The rest just says to wire stationary devices like a desktop PC or really anything you want to be constantly online and not wireless. Server/NAS (Networked attached storage) isn’t necessary, but is great for in-home media distribution and file storage.
4.6/5 stars is exactly a 92% rating. Maybe the bot programs are designed to make new reviews to keep the average ratings above 4.5 stars or 90%. Why 4.6 stars instead of 4 stars? May have something to to with overcoming good competition, or something to do with seller guidelines with amazon. I know with amazon, unlike eBay, as a seller you can appeal negative reviews and have them removed if you solve the customers problem or you convince support it’s irrelevant. I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall, but I want to know why 4.6 stars too!
I think it's more simple - 4.6 appears more credible than a solid 5/5, and if people look at the distribution of votes, see most are 5, the next highest is 4 and most of the remainder are 3, well that is more convincing than if they're ALL 5, or even majority 5 with only 2 or 3 4s.
So like the reply said above me it’s pretty simple but also it has a some features that work on some sites and not others first off if a person sees 100+ 5star reviews with never one bad thing to be said this can have the effect on ppl that the reviews are fake because let’s be honest there’s always gonna be at least that one person that has to complain about something so what it looks like with all those stores having the 4.6 rating there using an api bot service(there’s a lot of them and most are just C&P’d skid code{nothing is ever chanced beside the name of the service all the values are left as too not mess anything up}) in this api you can have it watch a product page (duh) to see the current rating or the amount of ppl watching the item you can have it post good and bad reviews on a brand new product posting this is where the 4.6 comes from it’s just the default ratio in the code this value can be changed but it’s never on the userside to change it as ppl could buy the service to bad review “bomb” other sellers with hundreds of negative reviews and when the seller reports them as fake Amazon and eBay etc will take those more seriously and banned the accounts and flagging the ip(s) that the api is using(they have a way to use sock proxies but that doesn’t happen all the time because again it’s a skid using skid code) thus making it a problem for the api seller because now they have to get new verified accounts (which can cost money not much but still it depends) and possibly moving to a different server and stopping sales while this is happening it’s just safe to leave that where the user has no control there other stuff but I’m too lazy to keep typing short answer the 4.6 is everywhere because that api files are everywhere and the “bot sellers” have little to no coding experience to change anything.
I would just say it is a good hallmark for the last convincing-looking point: it's more than 4.5, so that's good - but anything above 4.7 starts to look fishy. It's the seet spot between sheer OP and believability.
Typical claims for these kind of things: 1. Really smart people made this. 2. Evil greedy companies are trying to keep you down; buy this thing to stick it to them. Then they make claims about what it does which are improbable at best or physically impossible at worst. You could almost auto-generate these things at this point.
Great video, sir! I've been dealing with WiFi for clients for years, and whenever I hear, "But I got this repeater...", I cringe. Thanks for addressing this issue.
@@vyor8837 Yes, but getting a good one is like playing the lottery. On the other hand, those Unifi access points that were shown in the video can act as repeaters (and do it very well). They start at 69 bucks...
This comment definitely deserves more thumbs up… 99% of the people who think they need repeaters/range extenders either have a failing/low quality AP or badly placed AP.
When it comes to reviews for me, I try to find the one that has the least good to say about it, but isn't a 1 star rating. Those tend to be the most fair, non-paid for reviews. They aren't going to pay for a super-critical review, and 1-star reviews tend to be people who find one flaw (sometimes with just the seller, even) and ignore everything else.
When it comes to product reviews, I usually ignore 5 star/perfect reviews and go right to the 1-2 star reviews. It gives me a good bottom bar to check somethings legitamacy.
@@zfjames It's where you'll find the "It didn't arrive and won't refund," and "It shorted from faulty wiring and nearly burned my house down," comments.
Yesn't. Sometimes folks from another company send out a bot army to spam those products with bad review. This is actually more common then you might think. I go for a "balanced" approach, watching reviews from any star category and I will only watch reviews, that actually write more then "great product!" "bad product!" or something like that. An actual review, that explains why the person thinks the product is good/bad. The 1-2 Star category is btw pretty damn weird, when it comes to tech products. Like in 70% of cases, the user is just to dumb to use it and therefore leaves a 1 Star rating. That's also one of the main reasons people send in "damaged" products. At the former Company I was, I've spent 2 weeks in the techical support appartement and had to check the stuff we got back. In I'd say 95% of cases the products were totally fine and functional. But honestly, I don't give a shit anymore about ratings and don't even bother with the reviews. I've bought an automatic HDMI splitter last week. And it had an average rating of 3. And it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do and what it says it would do. And any idiot can install it. So I'm guessing bad review bots? Don't have any other explanation for that.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 True. I will say I usually pay a bit more attention to reviews that attatch an image, since it definitely shows effort was put into the review. I remember I almost bought a skate tool until I read the comments and found out it was only metal at the ends and brittle plastic in the middle, causing the tool to break on someone, and them showing a picture of the break.
I like how they try to sell this as something that would increase your internet speed without having to pay more. It's just a repeater! If you pay for 100mbps, then a repeater isn't going to magically change it to 800mbps. Even young children know this.
You make a valid point, but come on man don't do minecraft players like that. You could've just said 'young children' if that was your intended meaning.
It reminds me of all those jokes where someone will blatantly lie to you but there will be a tiny disclaimer on the screen telling you it's not actually true. Technically, they made the truth available... they just de-emphasized it. Maybe they think that's enough to deflect complaints about false advertising. I'm no lawyer, but maybe that's enough to not be the legal equivalent of false advertising... but in my book, it's still the moral equivalent. Maybe a lot of people, sometimes even most people, are savvy enough to not believe the lies... but some people will believe them, which makes it still pretty scammy as far as I'm concerned.
So just a couple of things to pass along: 1) range extenders that don’t use 802.11r - aka MESH - technology suck.because you have to switch networks when going from extender to extender. Router systems that support 802.11r - like Orbi, Eero, Plume, UniFi, AIMesh, and Velop among others - hand off and even load balance devices between nodes. 2) wired backhaul can actually slow performance on some high-end consumer tri-band mesh systems, especially those with 802.11ax connectivity, as many of those units have either 100mbps ethernet ports on ac600/750 radios or 1 gigabit ethernet ports on a tri-band AC3000 node with a 4x4 ac radio (1733mbps, like with Plume SuperPods or Orbi RBK50) or a tri-band AX node (Orbi, Velop, and Eero). There are times when wireless beats wired, and until 2.5 gig, 5 gig, and 10 gif ethernet become a common thing with consumer wired networking ports, it’ll be a while until wired is always faster. 3) while the outside design of that particular extender doesn’t sell on Wish right now, other companies that have used the “stick it to the internet companies” approach have sold the units from Wish with a 400-500% markup previously. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised of it’s just a new shell for an old product. 4) speaking of Wish (and Ali Baba), if you do a followup in the future, you should compare it to the $10-ish unit both sites have that looks similar. I bet the hardware is likely the same and the setup page looks identical. Anyway, keep the good anti-scammer content coming.
Repeaters usually half the bandwidth for every repeater in the chain. Or, like in this case, don't even have enough power to provide at least half. So repeaters should only be the last resort. In many cases "Power Line" adapters that use the electric wiring to transmit signals are more useful. They provide a network port on the host end and wifi and/or network port on client sides. But be aware that their performance can vary between 30-80% of the advertised bandwidth (or even more). Installing more directly connected access points in the house is of course the best option. I recommend everyone who renovates their house or builds a new one should also add twin CAT.7 or at least CAT.6e cables to their wiring.
My guess for the 4.6 ratings is this: if they say that it is 5 stars, that would seem fishy to many people. 5 stars is a red flag. They want to say it is 5 stars but know that it would trip many peoples' BS detectors. So they say 4.6: a very high rating, but still not 5, and so much more believable. "Ooh, 4.6 stars! Well, that must be legitimate because why would someone say their product is less than perfect? That must mean it's really really good!"
This is very likely the reason. If I see 5 stars on something I'm instantly skeptical. Given that no product is perfect there's really only 2 possibilities when the aggregate user rating is 5 stars: It's been artificially inflated to that point or there aren't many reviews for it. Both of those severely hurt my confidence in the product.
@@RestoreTechnique 4.6 is the magic number that doesn't trip most people's BS meters. Anything higher or less may cause the consumer to do more research, look at more reviews, etc. But 4.6 is like a "safe" number. When it comes to marketing for products like this you want your customer to purchase the product based on impulse & emotion. The longer or more they have to think about it the less likely they will buy it.
With the 4.6 thing, I expect it’s a mix of the occasional bad customer review and a need for the reviews to seem legit, at least at a glance. 5 stars would be suspiciously perfect, so somewhere in the 4.5-4.8 range is where they’d aim, and I’m assuming the actual customer reviews further balance that out to 4.6 most of the time.
Thanks, we live in an old 5 bed victorian house, narrow but very thick walls. Wifi repeaters never seem to be a good option but having good success with mesh system at the moment, so would recommend.
That isn't even their own software, (and hardware design). I've got a repeater lying around here somewhere I got at an Aldi a few years back for less than 10 euro's with exactly the same software, 2 Ethernet ports and ap/repeater/router mode. The only difference is the logo on the software skin.
I just saw the ad and now they are saying that the internet service providers just hate you and it’s not your plan limiting your internet connection but the company being greedy.
Everytime I've ever written a review for a product I've bought I always try to be as informative as I can about what I like about the item, its features, and also the cons and such of the item. I've seen a lot of fake reviews and I always try to help counteract those by giving an actual good review and try to provide pictures whenever possible. I've been swayed by fake reviews in the past so that's why I've always tried providing a real one, even if people don't end up believing it. Another great episode as always! Keep up the awesome work Ken!!
I've had legit reviews I've written turned down by Amazon (for example, I took some pictures through a camera filter, and they were like "this is not of the product" -- of course it isn't! it's a picture of something else taken with the filter I bought!). I think they have "security" that excludes real reviews and encourages fake ones.
I'm in PR and wifi has very lil access... I bought two of these and despite of all that mumble , well it works for me and at a pretty good speed. Sorry if you didn't experience the same I do. Such is love
At $99 I would recommend going and getting a repeater that is made by a bigger company. I had one for years from the same company that made my router, and it worked fairly well. It wasn't as fast as the normal WiFi, but for boosting the connect ability of the router to another room it worked wonders.
I have been exposed to so many scams in a long life I barely buy anything, and trust no one. However it is people like you that gives me faith as to a genuine buy. Thanks for these videos, subscribed.
I bought a 100M cable and ran it from my router on the ground floor to my bedroom which is in the attic of my house and the house is a decent sized house too based on the area I live in
When I look at reviews I look at the low 1-3 star revies, that will give you an idea of the problems people had with the product and I think it is a much better to learn about a product.
I think removing reviews for items on retail sites is pointless and somewhat foolish. That said, I do believe that reviews need to be limited to verified purchasers. I also think that the reviews should be contingent upon you actually keeping the item. You purchase it, write a review and then return it... the review gets removed. Simple. This won't stop people from buying and reselling stuff but at least if the review has a cost of admittance, it might chill the proliferation of fake reviews. Also, sites that allow third party vendors, no reviews for the third party vendor sold items as they could be "selling" items to themselves to circumvent the verified purchaser status. Only reviews for items sold by the site host would be allowed. At any rate, I tend to pick through reviews and limit the ones I go off of to those that actually discuss the product with some depth. One or two word reviews are useless.
But that wouldn't work. What if the product was unsatisfactory? You would return it. But in order to inform other potential buyers you maybe left a bad review, but then in your scenario it would be removed because you returned the item. You would have no bad reviews on bad products again. The rest of your proposition does sound better than the current situation I think.
Repeaters are particularly useful when if you draw a straight line from you to your router, you have to go through a bunch of crap (wet walls, walls with tons of cables, TV cabinet, etc). If you can essentially "bounce" that signal off of a different point that has less crap in the way, sometimes it helps. Being in the middle doesn't mean it will work the best, sometimes you want to take a wide angle to get around some obstructions. Think about shining a light around a corner, then adding a mirror. Same concept basically. That being said, repeaters should go die, mesh network is the way to go for the sake of convenience and not having to constantly monitor which network you're connected to.
This name doesn't sound so fishy, but it just will be cool. Can't wait for next week, heard you will be doing a video on something you were teasing for a year (you said it on Twitter)
I think 4.6 is a psychological reason . Round numbers in sales is avoided usually (like ending in 5 or 0), so often hav numbers ending in 9 6 or 4! Like free shipping over $99. So seeing a rating of 4.5 might seem to matter of fact. Like, when is something REALLY a half star? By moving this percentage .1 in either direction (at 4.4 or 4.6 stars), it feels less rigid and more natural, less thought is put into discerning the number.
I'm thankful for reviews in Amazon as I will always go to the lowest ratings and see if these are plagued with issues that I might've not thought about. Also, product photos by users is nice to have
Whenever I look at reviews on Amazon I always go straight to the 1 and 2 star reviews/ negative reviews. They tend to give a more honest perspective of the product.
@@roboticvenom1935 Because uBlock is for the ads before and during the video served by TH-cam itself, while Sponsorblock is as community extension to skip ads, sponsor messages, intros and outros etc. in the video itself
The way I try to avoid scam reviews is to find ones with genuine images different from other reviews along with searching for some lower rated reviews to see if they contradict the positive ones or point out valid flaws the positive reviews fail to mention. I’ll also try and search up the product online to see if it is available elsewhere or if there is a genuine review video.
Also, as Ken mentioned, i do WIRED Access Point. I avoid wireless mesh where it can. The Mesh setup does work because it uses specific Wifi standards to create a specific connection type back to the main router. When placed appropriately, it works well enough. But for all my person clients, i always wire connections IF it is possible. I have one AP currently at my home that is using Wireless Mesh until i get around to wiring a connection to it next month but it is working as expected because it is not a repeater or extender but is specifically designed by a main brand manufacture to be able to leverage that function. But another important note too. These Extenders/Repeaters came out at a time where internet speeds were sub 50mbps. SO the lack of performance they have wasn't all too detectable. But with 100+ speeds, these order devices do not have the processing to keep up. That is why "MESH" is the new term for that. But you still have issues with weak signals and speeds reduced. If you know someone who can run a wired ethernet cable from one end of your house to another, do that. It is the best way to guarantee that you can achieve MAX speed from across your house. Because "Extenders", in theory, will half that available speed, then you extend the extender, etc. Because the father away you are from the Wireless Router or Access Point, the slower you speed will be. If you internet speed is 300mbps, You put your extender at a spot where you get maybe 150mbps during a speed test with your phone. In theory, it will not be able to do even half of that by what it is able to access and then process and repeat. Yes, you can have MORE coverage but the coverage will not be good/stable/reliable. If i run a wire to that extender and use it as a Access Point, first i will have the full processing available to broadcast meaning my speeds will be better but the products themselves aren't very powerful as a whole. Not to mention they are low to the grounds where other obstructions can hinder their broadcasting abilities.
well, probably because most of them work through one or two systems, aka their ad service providers are mostly the same, so the setup is usually the same too.
It allways gots to be that one brilliant loner, that crafts a BRILLIANT product to fight against the bad evil corporations! And something with "quantum" NEEDS to be in an ad. Because it sounds cool and smart. So just "infuse" something with "quantum wafes" or whatever, it'll sell to idiots.
I had to stop at 4:12 because you just reminded me of something that happened to me on Amazon 2-3 years ago now? I didn't use Amazon that much back then, maybe a few things here and there but over all it wasn't my way of shopping back then. One month I started getting messages from reviews I left, I think they were just random messages about how my reviews were doing or whatever. i thought nothing of it because I had left a few reviews of things I picked up and maybe they were helping. At the end of the month i started to notice what was going on. Someone had some how got on my account and instead of purchasing a bunch of things or stealing my info they were leaving fake reviews on my account for some product line, kept saying stuff like, 'Works amazing! My kids love them and I'll probably buy more later!' or 'It works great and makes me feel like my kids are safe.' and so on. I wish I could see them now but after I reported it they removed all of the reviews and restricted me from making any more reviews until recently but the pattern for the reviews is what bugged me the most....besides having my account hacked into. They always averaged between 4-5 stars, back and forth with 4 and 5 then another 4. There was maybe 15 products just going back and forth between the two.
Just a note about range repeaters/extenders: The important thing is to have 3 channels if you do wifi to wifi. Otherwise you have to use 2.4 or 5 on one way or use the same channel effectively halving your potential speed. In Europe most houses are brick built so it is much more challenging having Wify in every room.
Moved into a 3 story condo last year and my Asus AC1900 had a hard time reach all areas by itself. Decided to get the Eero mesh system and it's awesome! Comes with 3 units. One acts as main router and the other act as wifi repeaters. If your house is wired you can wire them instead too so it's pretty flexible.
Yep. I mean I really don't know how this product is an argument against "evil phone corporations" or whatever. You still gotta pay your ISP, no way around it. I don't even know how you could pay more without that extended range. The only scenario I could think of is using mobile Data, if your connection is out of reach. Because that certainly costs more. Other then that, I have no idea. And if you had that problem, any sane person would just google it and get a Repeater with better specs for a quarter of the price. Or other solutions. Like my dad wanted WiFi on the whole farm, since it can be pretty handy and mobile Data costs a fortune (and is pretty bad there as well). So we got a big ass outdoor WiFi Antenna and it works flawlessly.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 do some isp’s sell you a second router if you have dead zones? That’s they only other way I could think of. I’ve been confused about that point for a decade, or, ever since u bought my first Belkin wifi repeater (which these days tops out at 24Mbps, a quarter off of connection speed but still plenty fast enough for Netflix in the kids bedrooms)
@davidlawrence8711 Oddly enough, our isp gave us a repeater/extender with our installation so we could put our WiFi system back where it belongs, yes this isp was the one we had before Spectrum, so it used all those old wall connection ports. I forced a wiring hole punch when we had Spectrum just to put the WiFi in the office, which, ironically, had a bad, unreliable power outlet, just so I could have a good connection in my room.
9:52 The whole reason for using repeaters is for when you can NOT wire an access point. However, remember that repeaters cut speeds in half, so use mesh networks instead. Shown here is Ubiquiti, excellent equipment.
Yeah, I was gonna say. I'd love to wire access points, but I live in a rental property. It's not my house to go drilling holes in walls. I ended up going with a mesh network setup.
Fun fact on repeaters: we actually used *several* of them in my parents' house for a while. Something about the walls was causing older 5g wi-fi routers to lose a ton of signal strength and even cut out entirely. But since hardware has gotten better, we replaced the repeaters and two routers with a single access point and have had zero issues since. I suspect a lot of sales for these comes down to people still using older wi-fi hardware that can't push signals through walls, or remembering the issues they had and thinking they still need these - you really don't anymore, not in residential situations.
I cannot get behind the message of "get rid of reviews". Absolutely terrible advice. Yes, some reviews are going to be gamed, but they are FAR more valuable to have than not to have. Particularly negative reviews. As you did say, cross check them, confirm them, be sure to check negative reviews out as well always. But the call to abolish reviews is absolutely the wrong call to make.
These range extenders only really have a couple of very specific use cases, I bought one years ago to use in a house I shared and was unable to wire in actual access points. It wasn't great but it worked for a while until I "upgraded" to powerline adapters
I use a Netgear Nighthawk RAX45, and it is unstoppable. It’s on the second floor near the front corner (I use a cellular modem and it goes in a upstairs window for a better signal) and even in the basement, backyard, and shed I still have a rock-solid connection.
That's precisely why they advertise this way: it fools people that are uninformed and are too lazy/gullible to research the claims made. They don't need everyone to believe them, just enough.
If i do a survey on reviews i normally search for a plain technical one. If the product and it's problems are well described my alarm goes of. Finding a second review similar to the first means i am not going to buy it. Served me well for years.
Just recentl discovered your channel, catching up on older content. Loving the videos. For the algo! On note on extenders, I've used them before for a quick and dirty way to get a signal further outside so I could work remote from outdoor locations nearby when speed isn't that important. It was fine dropping speeds since the main thing was just being a consistent connection for chat, voip, etc and worked peachy. Was a lot easier than dealing with running a wire for an access point; just able to plug repeater into an outlet at the corner of the house near a window, got the signal way far outside and still plenty fast enough for what was needed. Just depends on what is needed, if you can deal with the latency/speed issues repeaters can be fine so long as the consumer isn't expecting "better" performance or even equal performance. But 15-25 Mbps is fine for a lot of applications when just looking for a simple way to extend the wifi.
Krazy Ken, why not do a colab with Thunderf00t about 5G? He debunked several subjects on 5G and he is a Professor, i think if you ask him he would be glad to help you out!
in europe, houses are built out of massive stone walls. my mom and brother for example share the same internet, despite there being a 60cm concrete wall between both house halves. when i visit them, i get almost no internet in my room despite being like 30m away from the router, because it travels through 3 walls and one floor.
Repeaters generally suck because they partition your wireless network and cut your bandwidth in half at the very least. One half is used to communicate with the wireless access point and the other half is used to communicate with your device. This is compounded by using an older wireless standard that can't get very good rates in the first place. Mesh routers are a bit better because they can more intelligently handle the retransmission, but it's still eating bandwidth for it. The best mesh routers are the ones that dedicate a band to the mesh network so it doesn't interfere with your device's traffic.
Thanks for these videos, they save people some money in the long run. They’re also very informative about how the product is manufactured, and how it’s marketed. They have saved me money.
As soon as I saw the “up to 300 mbps” I figured what this would be. You didn’t mention it in the video, but what frequency was this repeater using? I’m gonna bet it was 802.11n on 2.4GHz. Great video though! I love your scam review series.
I saw the ad for this product here in the Philippines and it's different from yours. In the ad here, they said it was invented by two IT employees from a big tech corporation!😂
Gotta say, good choice on sponsorship with anker. I have multiple of their charging hubs, wall chargers, cables but their best product IMO is their powerbank. Think I have the 22,000mah beast and while not small it's the right size you'd expect from that sort of capacity. And having tested the claims it definitely holds up, I was able to charge a 4200mah battery nearly 5 times, from absolutely dead. Never had a problem and their 5/6 port desktop hubs with with QC 3.0 works an absolute charm and is left on 24/7 with no issues. Top brand IMO and the only brand I trust for true high Mah battery packs.
3-star reviews are my go-to. They usually aren't fake, and the people see some value and some problems. I look to see if their problems would be problems for how I would use it.
A repeater is good say if you live in a RV park and can't setup a access point, or just plain ol stealing your neighbors unsecured wifi...... I've done both over the years, don't use one anymore since I have my own fiber internet finally but there were times in life where I used a repeater (not the one shown here) because there was no other option, specially in RV park, signals were so weak and they would have a limit how many devices could be connected so that also got me around that as well.
With the design of repeaters having to receive and then resend wireless packets they will always slow down any wireless connection, it is always worthwil testing them in AP or Router mode to see if they are even capable of the speeds they suggest when not repeating wireless
I live in a travel trailer full time and wireless internet access is a problem. The cable modem is located in a small game room in the center of the 40-foot trailer, and a small Intel NUC computer is connected to the living room TV in the back of the trailer. Now I've gone through numerous USB wireless network adaptors and none of them worked well. I would lose the internet about every 5 to 10 minutes and have to reset the device to get the internet back. In addition, I work from home and have two devices that don't have wireless but require them to be connected via Ethernet. This means I have Ethernet cables strung around the trailer. So I broke down and bought four power line adaptors which use the 110 volt house wiring for the Ethernet. I have one connected to the cable modem and three others connected to the devices in my trailer (Intel NUC, work devices, and a PS4 in the bedroom). The models I got are rated at 2 Gbit/second and I've had no problems streaming HD videos with them. $200 well spent. And it also eliminates the snowbirds that come down to Arizona in the winter from saying, "Hey, can I tap into your WiFi? I'm only gonna be down here for a couple of months and I don't wanna buy cable." I'm not going to mention brand names in case I get accused of being an advertiser but devices that network through house wiring are common and can be ordered online through all the regular electronic channels. But order well-known brand names rather than El Cheapo knockoffs, otherwise you may be sorry.
My parent pay for the cable company repeaters because they think it works. They also pay monthly for the cable company’s modem/router. When I ask why they don’t just wire an Ethernet downstairs where they have horrible connection (despite the extender), he says wireless is just as good as wired. Probably could have owned a commercial grade router by now.
You can also DIY a repeater with a dual band router. Use the 5g for the radio link and the 2g for the rebroadcasted signal. Youll get significantly better bandwidth.
One thing you missed about Wifi repeaters: Even if they go the maximum available speed, I am talking of the high quality products, they will half the available bandwidth. That is a technical condition since they have to use half of their available bandwidth to communicate with each site. Your solution with wired APs is not viable everywhere. At least here in Germany we have buildings with solid walls. (PSA: don't punch German walls, you will regret it instantly!) A solution I found is using the available electric system in the house. I don't know what it is called in the US, but in German we call it DLAN. Just put on adapter into the socket near the router, put another one into the socket where your computer is, or use an AP adapter for Wifi, push the pair buttons and you are good to go. Caution, it only works within a fuse box.
Wi-Fi extenders can work. I have one and it does a decent job. I couldn't get a strong signal on the second floor (router is in the basement) and installed an extender which I got on Amazon, and it does work.
It's not the review system in general that is at fault it's just Amazon's. Our local online shopping website will only give you a survey form if you have bought the item, and you can only create one ticket for one account for one item that was purchased and can only be done if you are registered. If not you can still order, but you can't rate the item.
I sure wish I even got close to triple digits download speed. I use a wired connection but my local ISP doesn't even offer internet speeds over 50Mbps, as if you actually get that speed at any point during the day.
First things first; I NEVER trust five star reviews, I read the ones and two star reviews. Second; I saw an ad for a repeater, and the buffering stopped the second it was plugged in. OK repeaters do work, like you said they have been around for 20+ years. Never have I seen one the second you plug it in. It has to startup, connect, and the device you want to use the repeater has to connect and start using it. Takes minutes, not the second you plug it in. BS detectors should be going off for any product the more they "are astounded" by the way it works. The better they claim it works, the less likely it will work.
I made kinda a homemade WiFi extender. I essentially have an actually good WiFi card going to a computer with an antenna sticking outside the window. Then I have ethernet running out of that computer with it connected to an ancient WRT54G router. It is an extremely unreliable setup. Partially I think because of my grandparents router though that I have to borrow off of. However, it does generally work decent when I can get it working. It is often faster than what you just showed, especially over ethernet. I'm honestly impressed how well it can work considering I have it working from about 350 feet away. I just wish it was more reliable, or my dad would get actual internet.
I know this is an old video but hopefully this will help someone. I've found that in most cases people will post reviews if there's a problem with their purchase. So when I shop online, I do use the reviews, but specifically sort by negative. Then look for reliability issues, or product issues, not shipping damage, open box, or DOA, but actual usage issues, or non-existent features. At that point unless you see consistent issues, or lies about the product, it's probably a safe buy.
My number one thing with reviews is to read both positive and negative reviews both ends have a touch of truth and both a bit of nosense, such as fake reviews for positive and people who bought something expecting it to be something else or who don't know how to use something. Improtant things are details about the items use and capabilities as well as being able to tell if an item has bad quality control/reliability issues.
I am existing here in the basement with the router being some kind of far away, a powerline (when properly configured) works fine. But only when I use a Cable
you can buy second hand routers online and use a cable to them from your main router, it takes a little setup but does a very good job at giving you Extra full speed WiFi coverage
Totally called it in your teaser post about this video. The worst thing about a "product" like this is you can buy a real wifi repeater for about half the cost of this thing. IMO the only people that should even bother with a wifi repeater are folks renting. Otherwise running a few wires throughout most homes is not that difficult or costly in the long run!
7:20 ACCESS POINT NOT ROUTER. The thing people call a router is a Router + Firewall + AP + switch combo I generally use MikroTik and Ubiquit access points at home (I have 2 systems, yes, I test prod on my home network)
![[LIVE] : ONE ลุมพินี 88 | คู่เอก "ป้อมเพชร vs อัสลามจอน"](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/1ZqTVVbMgbo/mqdefault.jpg)
Enjoy the new episode! Special thanks to ⚡️ Anker for sponsoring this episode! And huge thanks to Joe's Computer Museum for helping write this episode. Check out his channel here: th-cam.com/users/JoesComputerMuseum
Anker do make some good PowerBanks Tho
Hor
I mean 😎😎
LTT did a video on the fake 5G blockers, take a look a it and maybe they can help on the big stuff like the domes
Funny, I'm currently using Anker headphones. What a coincidence.
I love the Amazon reviews that are clearly for a different product. Like you see a laptop case and the comments all say "the color compliments my complexion" or "it fits my 3-month-old perfectly"
join us in our fight against the greedy internet company's join the fight we need you!!!!🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
I have a theory about that! I think they buy off legitimate product listings because it has good reviews and then edit it and list their own product. For someone who isn’t paying attention it looks legitimate. It’s one of the biggest red flags I look for
To be fair, a laptop case usually does fit a 3 month old pretty closely. When they’re newborns, you use an iPad case. And at the local NICU, they use otterbox (TM) iPhone cases on the preemies!
I saw one that said an I quote “I bought this product for my cat…my dog ate it” and it was for a laptop case
Hey, stop attacking me. What I do with my 3 month old and a laptop case is my business. I loved the review I saw for a Jeep part and the person said it wouldn't fly. If your Jeep is flying you might have screwed up.
Was just shown the German ad. Here it's invented by two computer scientist who were working for an ISP who happen to know a secret that the latter is artificially throttling your bandwidth.
its china & south korea scam.
of cause.
@@tocreatee5736 course.
Hey! I saw myself for a second...thanks Ken...cheers!
Hi! Thanks for making that video. It was a perfect snippet for b-roll.
Hello big TH-camrs
You make great videos so you earned being mentioned! :D
It’s Chris!
@Dakota Butler it was for a second
I’m noticing a common thread in the style of advertising between this, the Blaux and its “Kid upends the air-con industry” narrative, and other scammy ads that present a false “underdog” story as the excuse for a crummy product. I bet we are going to uncover that same ad agency as the “final boss” of all these crappy products and misleading ads.
It's the same thing Jake Paul did with his scam wasn't it? He talked about how college was useless, and they were just using people for their money. So you should give your money to him instead.
Check out mrwhosetheboss’ video on this he cracked it already.
th-cam.com/video/hq_5opT-MR4/w-d-xo.html
Apparently he deleted it but here it is, same style of ads for tons of products
It also has the same style of check out
The underdog effect. I also noticed this somewhere else but I forgot...crowdfunding campaign?
This is not good, though... Though to get past the underdog effect, I usually need to think "would I buy this for someone else?"
Has no one noticed how all the products have the same sort of ad, with the animated text and no narration?
@@EliasSchmid00 youtube music library lol - wish was using youtube music for ages..!
It’s probably a service you can buy.
From the very same bunch. Many scam products use identical advertising scenarios. Hey, it obviously works. A lot of fools out there, fall for it.
they use all the stock footage they could find
One ad can be reworked in multiple languages for a lot less than voice over.
Mrwhostheboss debunked the 5G BioShield, but I think me and everyone would like to see your response, right everyone?
Yes
Also EEVBlog
YESSS
Linus Tech Tips debunked the router Faraday cages too. They're nothing more than paper trays from office an office supply shop.
and Linus tested the wifi shields, that were just document trays from IKEA
I swear this man deserves millions of subscribers for how much creative thought he puts into his videos to find things no one else does. We'll see the boom sooner or later 👍🏻
Thank you : )
*Billions
It's funny he claims to be a quantum physicist because a good part of that discipline seems to revolve around admitting that you don't know how things work.
Actual quantum physicists are smart enough to know what they don't know. It's a strange field to be in. They basically observe things to know the weird things that happen, but as of yet have no clue why most of the time. I don't think any of them are trying to improve internet speeds or bring down those "evil, greedy tech companies." Pretty sure these ads just think "quantum physicist" sounds like a really smart guy, so hey he could build something like this.
I just drilled holes and ran ethernet around the basement, bad Wi-Fi problems solved.
Small manger switch (as backbone maters for Nas if not internet ) 2 or 3 poe Access ports for mobile and laptops and wire your main Pc/nas/sever and you got great set up !!!!!
@@jenibond i- understood nothing that you Said lmao
@@Anthony-cx4iy Small managed switch: Basically takes in all the wired connections in your house and switches them. POE access points: A WiFi router (access point to be specific) that is powered over the network cable vs needing a separate power line. The rest just says to wire stationary devices like a desktop PC or really anything you want to be constantly online and not wireless. Server/NAS (Networked attached storage) isn’t necessary, but is great for in-home media distribution and file storage.
Same. Two story house, ran wired through the crawl spaces lol
I ran Ethernet out one window and in another! It’s ghetto but it works!
This thing looks like the range extender device I bough like five years ago for $10.
It is exactly the same innards
@@thefreedomguyuk yep. Similar case, same layout and same software.
4.6/5 stars is exactly a 92% rating. Maybe the bot programs are designed to make new reviews to keep the average ratings above 4.5 stars or 90%. Why 4.6 stars instead of 4 stars? May have something to to with overcoming good competition, or something to do with seller guidelines with amazon. I know with amazon, unlike eBay, as a seller you can appeal negative reviews and have them removed if you solve the customers problem or you convince support it’s irrelevant. I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall, but I want to know why 4.6 stars too!
I think it's more simple - 4.6 appears more credible than a solid 5/5, and if people look at the distribution of votes, see most are 5, the next highest is 4 and most of the remainder are 3, well that is more convincing than if they're ALL 5, or even majority 5 with only 2 or 3 4s.
So like the reply said above me it’s pretty simple but also it has a some features that work on some sites and not others first off if a person sees 100+ 5star reviews with never one bad thing to be said this can have the effect on ppl that the reviews are fake because let’s be honest there’s always gonna be at least that one person that has to complain about something so what it looks like with all those stores having the 4.6 rating there using an api bot service(there’s a lot of them and most are just C&P’d skid code{nothing is ever chanced beside the name of the service all the values are left as too not mess anything up}) in this api you can have it watch a product page (duh) to see the current rating or the amount of ppl watching the item you can have it post good and bad reviews on a brand new product posting this is where the 4.6 comes from it’s just the default ratio in the code this value can be changed but it’s never on the userside to change it as ppl could buy the service to bad review “bomb” other sellers with hundreds of negative reviews and when the seller reports them as fake Amazon and eBay etc will take those more seriously and banned the accounts and flagging the ip(s) that the api is using(they have a way to use sock proxies but that doesn’t happen all the time because again it’s a skid using skid code) thus making it a problem for the api seller because now they have to get new verified accounts (which can cost money not much but still it depends) and possibly moving to a different server and stopping sales while this is happening it’s just safe to leave that where the user has no control there other stuff but I’m too lazy to keep typing short answer the 4.6 is everywhere because that api files are everywhere and the “bot sellers” have little to no coding experience to change anything.
@@heidirichter then, why not 4.2, 4.4, 4.8? Why just 4.6?
I would just say it is a good hallmark for the last convincing-looking point: it's more than 4.5, so that's good - but anything above 4.7 starts to look fishy. It's the seet spot between sheer OP and believability.
6.9/10.0
I love how they change the story on a dime. I saw an ad saying is was two computer scientists like wtf?
Typical claims for these kind of things:
1. Really smart people made this.
2. Evil greedy companies are trying to keep you down; buy this thing to stick it to them.
Then they make claims about what it does which are improbable at best or physically impossible at worst.
You could almost auto-generate these things at this point.
Great video, sir! I've been dealing with WiFi for clients for years, and whenever I hear, "But I got this repeater...", I cringe. Thanks for addressing this issue.
And thank you for helping!
We have an access point in the next apartment over and a range extender outside for the backyard and it works good enough for us.
Eh, they can work well enough as long as the antenna design is done right.
@@vyor8837 Yes, but getting a good one is like playing the lottery.
On the other hand, those Unifi access points that were shown in the video can act as repeaters (and do it very well). They start at 69 bucks...
This comment definitely deserves more thumbs up… 99% of the people who think they need repeaters/range extenders either have a failing/low quality AP or badly placed AP.
When it comes to reviews for me, I try to find the one that has the least good to say about it, but isn't a 1 star rating. Those tend to be the most fair, non-paid for reviews. They aren't going to pay for a super-critical review, and 1-star reviews tend to be people who find one flaw (sometimes with just the seller, even) and ignore everything else.
2, 3, and 4 star reviews tend to be the most honest, in my experience.
When it comes to product reviews, I usually ignore 5 star/perfect reviews and go right to the 1-2 star reviews. It gives me a good bottom bar to check somethings legitamacy.
Same here. Not sure why Ken would want to remove all ratings because reading most of the bad ones when there are a lot on a product keeps me away.
@@zfjames It's where you'll find the "It didn't arrive and won't refund," and "It shorted from faulty wiring and nearly burned my house down," comments.
Yesn't. Sometimes folks from another company send out a bot army to spam those products with bad review. This is actually more common then you might think.
I go for a "balanced" approach, watching reviews from any star category and I will only watch reviews, that actually write more then "great product!" "bad product!" or something like that. An actual review, that explains why the person thinks the product is good/bad.
The 1-2 Star category is btw pretty damn weird, when it comes to tech products. Like in 70% of cases, the user is just to dumb to use it and therefore leaves a 1 Star rating. That's also one of the main reasons people send in "damaged" products. At the former Company I was, I've spent 2 weeks in the techical support appartement and had to check the stuff we got back. In I'd say 95% of cases the products were totally fine and functional.
But honestly, I don't give a shit anymore about ratings and don't even bother with the reviews. I've bought an automatic HDMI splitter last week. And it had an average rating of 3. And it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do and what it says it would do. And any idiot can install it. So I'm guessing bad review bots? Don't have any other explanation for that.
@@W3r3gam3r Yeah, some users might not understand how to use the product. I think a balanced approach is necessary to read reviews.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 True. I will say I usually pay a bit more attention to reviews that attatch an image, since it definitely shows effort was put into the review. I remember I almost bought a skate tool until I read the comments and found out it was only metal at the ends and brittle plastic in the middle, causing the tool to break on someone, and them showing a picture of the break.
TH-cam needs more and more people like you. Not only reviewing and uncovering fake and false products but services also. 👍
I like how they try to sell this as something that would increase your internet speed without having to pay more.
It's just a repeater! If you pay for 100mbps, then a repeater isn't going to magically change it to 800mbps. Even young children know this.
You make a valid point, but come on man don't do minecraft players like that. You could've just said 'young children' if that was your intended meaning.
@@h3ftymouse I actually meant that with respect, but I can see your point. I'll edit that part, thanks for the heads-up!
@@amsyarzero No problem my guy. Glad to see someone so understanding and respectful.
The name already says it all "repeater"
It reminds me of all those jokes where someone will blatantly lie to you but there will be a tiny disclaimer on the screen telling you it's not actually true. Technically, they made the truth available... they just de-emphasized it. Maybe they think that's enough to deflect complaints about false advertising. I'm no lawyer, but maybe that's enough to not be the legal equivalent of false advertising... but in my book, it's still the moral equivalent. Maybe a lot of people, sometimes even most people, are savvy enough to not believe the lies... but some people will believe them, which makes it still pretty scammy as far as I'm concerned.
So just a couple of things to pass along:
1) range extenders that don’t use 802.11r - aka MESH - technology suck.because you have to switch networks when going from extender to extender. Router systems that support 802.11r - like Orbi, Eero, Plume, UniFi, AIMesh, and Velop among others - hand off and even load balance devices between nodes.
2) wired backhaul can actually slow performance on some high-end consumer tri-band mesh systems, especially those with 802.11ax connectivity, as many of those units have either 100mbps ethernet ports on ac600/750 radios or 1 gigabit ethernet ports on a tri-band AC3000 node with a 4x4 ac radio (1733mbps, like with Plume SuperPods or Orbi RBK50) or a tri-band AX node (Orbi, Velop, and Eero). There are times when wireless beats wired, and until 2.5 gig, 5 gig, and 10 gif ethernet become a common thing with consumer wired networking ports, it’ll be a while until wired is always faster.
3) while the outside design of that particular extender doesn’t sell on Wish right now, other companies that have used the “stick it to the internet companies” approach have sold the units from Wish with a 400-500% markup previously. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised of it’s just a new shell for an old product.
4) speaking of Wish (and Ali Baba), if you do a followup in the future, you should compare it to the $10-ish unit both sites have that looks similar. I bet the hardware is likely the same and the setup page looks identical.
Anyway, keep the good anti-scammer content coming.
Computer Clan deserves more subs. Love this series!
Repeaters usually half the bandwidth for every repeater in the chain. Or, like in this case, don't even have enough power to provide at least half.
So repeaters should only be the last resort.
In many cases "Power Line" adapters that use the electric wiring to transmit signals are more useful. They provide a network port on the host end and wifi and/or network port on client sides.
But be aware that their performance can vary between 30-80% of the advertised bandwidth (or even more).
Installing more directly connected access points in the house is of course the best option. I recommend everyone who renovates their house or builds a new one should also add twin CAT.7 or at least CAT.6e cables to their wiring.
My guess for the 4.6 ratings is this: if they say that it is 5 stars, that would seem fishy to many people. 5 stars is a red flag. They want to say it is 5 stars but know that it would trip many peoples' BS detectors. So they say 4.6: a very high rating, but still not 5, and so much more believable. "Ooh, 4.6 stars! Well, that must be legitimate because why would someone say their product is less than perfect? That must mean it's really really good!"
Could also be with filters as well.
But why not 4.7, or 4.8 sometimes
This is very likely the reason. If I see 5 stars on something I'm instantly skeptical. Given that no product is perfect there's really only 2 possibilities when the aggregate user rating is 5 stars: It's been artificially inflated to that point or there aren't many reviews for it. Both of those severely hurt my confidence in the product.
@@RestoreTechnique 4.6 is the magic number that doesn't trip most people's BS meters. Anything higher or less may cause the consumer to do more research, look at more reviews, etc. But 4.6 is like a "safe" number. When it comes to marketing for products like this you want your customer to purchase the product based on impulse & emotion. The longer or more they have to think about it the less likely they will buy it.
@@RestoreTechnique Probably someone did research on what ratings seem best to people and found 4.6 to be the best. Dunno.
Lol if you see those ADs that start with "This product was created by [Name]"
It's 99% a scam and bullshit.
Cute profile!
With the 4.6 thing, I expect it’s a mix of the occasional bad customer review and a need for the reviews to seem legit, at least at a glance. 5 stars would be suspiciously perfect, so somewhere in the 4.5-4.8 range is where they’d aim, and I’m assuming the actual customer reviews further balance that out to 4.6 most of the time.
Hey, Teri! How's your sister Polly these days?
@@Sigurther 😳
Thanks, we live in an old 5 bed victorian house, narrow but very thick walls. Wifi repeaters never seem to be a good option but having good success with mesh system at the moment, so would recommend.
That isn't even their own software, (and hardware design). I've got a repeater lying around here somewhere I got at an Aldi a few years back for less than 10 euro's with exactly the same software, 2 Ethernet ports and ap/repeater/router mode. The only difference is the logo on the software skin.
I just saw the ad and now they are saying that the internet service providers just hate you and it’s not your plan limiting your internet connection but the company being greedy.
Also, reason why you wouldn't just wire in access points: You in in an apartment, and your bathroom is a deadzone.
Probably the biggest value to a repeater; you don't own the property you live in, so hard wiring access points just isn't an option.
Everytime I've ever written a review for a product I've bought I always try to be as informative as I can about what I like about the item, its features, and also the cons and such of the item. I've seen a lot of fake reviews and I always try to help counteract those by giving an actual good review and try to provide pictures whenever possible. I've been swayed by fake reviews in the past so that's why I've always tried providing a real one, even if people don't end up believing it.
Another great episode as always! Keep up the awesome work Ken!!
I've had legit reviews I've written turned down by Amazon (for example, I took some pictures through a camera filter, and they were like "this is not of the product" -- of course it isn't! it's a picture of something else taken with the filter I bought!).
I think they have "security" that excludes real reviews and encourages fake ones.
Technically, the product was 100% of your FOV. 😂
I'm in PR and wifi has very lil access... I bought two of these and despite of all that mumble , well it works for me and at a pretty good speed. Sorry if you didn't experience the same I do.
Such is love
I literally just saw an ad for a “revolutionary ring withi love you in 100 different languages” that has that generic stock footage
"This ring is revolutionary! It's slightly too big so it can revolve around your finger! Why, what did you think we meant?"
i did digital communications in the military. we worked with radio jammers for cell phones against ied attacks.
0:14 As soon as I saw it was this type of ad I thought "Oh NO!"
At $99 I would recommend going and getting a repeater that is made by a bigger company. I had one for years from the same company that made my router, and it worked fairly well. It wasn't as fast as the normal WiFi, but for boosting the connect ability of the router to another room it worked wonders.
Linus actually did a video about the "faraday cage". It was just a paper holder
Ik lmao
I have been exposed to so many scams in a long life I barely buy anything, and trust no one. However it is people like you that gives me faith as to a genuine buy. Thanks for these videos, subscribed.
Just buy a long Ethernet cable
I bought a 100M cable and ran it from my router on the ground floor to my bedroom which is in the attic of my house and the house is a decent sized house too based on the area I live in
Buy a box of UTP cable and some plugs then make your own.
When I look at reviews I look at the low 1-3 star revies, that will give you an idea of the problems people had with the product and I think it is a much better to learn about a product.
I think removing reviews for items on retail sites is pointless and somewhat foolish. That said, I do believe that reviews need to be limited to verified purchasers. I also think that the reviews should be contingent upon you actually keeping the item. You purchase it, write a review and then return it... the review gets removed. Simple. This won't stop people from buying and reselling stuff but at least if the review has a cost of admittance, it might chill the proliferation of fake reviews. Also, sites that allow third party vendors, no reviews for the third party vendor sold items as they could be "selling" items to themselves to circumvent the verified purchaser status. Only reviews for items sold by the site host would be allowed. At any rate, I tend to pick through reviews and limit the ones I go off of to those that actually discuss the product with some depth. One or two word reviews are useless.
But that wouldn't work. What if the product was unsatisfactory? You would return it. But in order to inform other potential buyers you maybe left a bad review, but then in your scenario it would be removed because you returned the item. You would have no bad reviews on bad products again. The rest of your proposition does sound better than the current situation I think.
Repeaters are particularly useful when if you draw a straight line from you to your router, you have to go through a bunch of crap (wet walls, walls with tons of cables, TV cabinet, etc). If you can essentially "bounce" that signal off of a different point that has less crap in the way, sometimes it helps. Being in the middle doesn't mean it will work the best, sometimes you want to take a wide angle to get around some obstructions. Think about shining a light around a corner, then adding a mirror. Same concept basically.
That being said, repeaters should go die, mesh network is the way to go for the sake of convenience and not having to constantly monitor which network you're connected to.
This name doesn't sound so fishy, but it just will be cool.
Can't wait for next week, heard you will be doing a video on something you were teasing for a year (you said it on Twitter)
wdym it just will be cool
I think 4.6 is a psychological reason . Round numbers in sales is avoided usually (like ending in 5 or 0), so often hav numbers ending in 9 6 or 4!
Like free shipping over $99.
So seeing a rating of 4.5 might seem to matter of fact. Like, when is something REALLY a half star? By moving this percentage .1 in either direction (at 4.4 or 4.6 stars), it feels less rigid and more natural, less thought is put into discerning the number.
I'm thankful for reviews in Amazon as I will always go to the lowest ratings and see if these are plagued with issues that I might've not thought about. Also, product photos by users is nice to have
You have to be careful with that too - just a clickfarms will generate positive reviews, they'll also attack rival products with negative reviews.
@@TonyHoyle Exactly; there's no real reason to believe that negative reviews are automatically more genuine than positive ones.
Whenever I look at reviews on Amazon I always go straight to the 1 and 2 star reviews/ negative reviews. They tend to give a more honest perspective of the product.
Sponsorblock not blocking this video yet BUT this is the sponsor I won't ever skip. Also man thanks for the scam videos! Very informational.
Why not use unlock
@@KORUPTable what about ublock?
@@roboticvenom1935 ublock is an AD blocker.
@@roboticvenom1935 Because uBlock is for the ads before and during the video served by TH-cam itself, while Sponsorblock is as community extension to skip ads, sponsor messages, intros and outros etc. in the video itself
@@Remogeus Oh, WOW so it's supposed to work for every single video? There's just too many
The way I try to avoid scam reviews is to find ones with genuine images different from other reviews along with searching for some lower rated reviews to see if they contradict the positive ones or point out valid flaws the positive reviews fail to mention. I’ll also try and search up the product online to see if it is available elsewhere or if there is a genuine review video.
Coincidentally saw an ad for another one of these dumb range extenders called Novitech claims to bypass ISP throttling
Also, as Ken mentioned, i do WIRED Access Point. I avoid wireless mesh where it can. The Mesh setup does work because it uses specific Wifi standards to create a specific connection type back to the main router. When placed appropriately, it works well enough.
But for all my person clients, i always wire connections IF it is possible.
I have one AP currently at my home that is using Wireless Mesh until i get around to wiring a connection to it next month but it is working as expected because it is not a repeater or extender but is specifically designed by a main brand manufacture to be able to leverage that function.
But another important note too. These Extenders/Repeaters came out at a time where internet speeds were sub 50mbps. SO the lack of performance they have wasn't all too detectable. But with 100+ speeds, these order devices do not have the processing to keep up. That is why "MESH" is the new term for that. But you still have issues with weak signals and speeds reduced.
If you know someone who can run a wired ethernet cable from one end of your house to another, do that. It is the best way to guarantee that you can achieve MAX speed from across your house. Because "Extenders", in theory, will half that available speed, then you extend the extender, etc. Because the father away you are from the Wireless Router or Access Point, the slower you speed will be.
If you internet speed is 300mbps,
You put your extender at a spot where you get maybe 150mbps during a speed test with your phone. In theory, it will not be able to do even half of that by what it is able to access and then process and repeat. Yes, you can have MORE coverage but the coverage will not be good/stable/reliable.
If i run a wire to that extender and use it as a Access Point, first i will have the full processing available to broadcast meaning my speeds will be better but the products themselves aren't very powerful as a whole. Not to mention they are low to the grounds where other obstructions can hinder their broadcasting abilities.
god these cheesy ads are always the same STUFF LIKE THIS JUST HAPPENS YES
well, probably because most of them work through one or two systems, aka their ad service providers are mostly the same, so the setup is usually the same too.
It allways gots to be that one brilliant loner, that crafts a BRILLIANT product to fight against the bad evil corporations!
And something with "quantum" NEEDS to be in an ad. Because it sounds cool and smart. So just "infuse" something with "quantum wafes" or whatever, it'll sell to idiots.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 Quantum wafers. yUmMy. lol
(I'm talking about the edible wafers, except quantum.)
I had to stop at 4:12 because you just reminded me of something that happened to me on Amazon 2-3 years ago now?
I didn't use Amazon that much back then, maybe a few things here and there but over all it wasn't my way of shopping back then. One month I started getting messages from reviews I left, I think they were just random messages about how my reviews were doing or whatever. i thought nothing of it because I had left a few reviews of things I picked up and maybe they were helping. At the end of the month i started to notice what was going on. Someone had some how got on my account and instead of purchasing a bunch of things or stealing my info they were leaving fake reviews on my account for some product line, kept saying stuff like, 'Works amazing! My kids love them and I'll probably buy more later!' or 'It works great and makes me feel like my kids are safe.' and so on.
I wish I could see them now but after I reported it they removed all of the reviews and restricted me from making any more reviews until recently but the pattern for the reviews is what bugged me the most....besides having my account hacked into. They always averaged between 4-5 stars, back and forth with 4 and 5 then another 4. There was maybe 15 products just going back and forth between the two.
Wifi Range Extenders suck. I always recommend a proper Mesh network for large homes.
Just a note about range repeaters/extenders: The important thing is to have 3 channels if you do wifi to wifi. Otherwise you have to use 2.4 or 5 on one way or use the same channel effectively halving your potential speed. In Europe most houses are brick built so it is much more challenging having Wify in every room.
Mrwhosetheboss did an excellent video about the 5GBioShield product.
Linus Tech Tips did one of the paper baskets...I mean, Faraday cages as well
@@silmarian Worth $150 to me!
/s
It was a waste of $450 for him
@@GavinsiOSWorld but it was in the name of science.
@@daemonspudguy oh yeah
Moved into a 3 story condo last year and my Asus AC1900 had a hard time reach all areas by itself. Decided to get the Eero mesh system and it's awesome! Comes with 3 units. One acts as main router and the other act as wifi repeaters. If your house is wired you can wire them instead too so it's pretty flexible.
Honestly the entire thing about saving on bills sounds like it’s for extending somebody else’s WiFi, not your own :D
Yep. I mean I really don't know how this product is an argument against "evil phone corporations" or whatever. You still gotta pay your ISP, no way around it. I don't even know how you could pay more without that extended range.
The only scenario I could think of is using mobile Data, if your connection is out of reach. Because that certainly costs more. Other then that, I have no idea. And if you had that problem, any sane person would just google it and get a Repeater with better specs for a quarter of the price. Or other solutions.
Like my dad wanted WiFi on the whole farm, since it can be pretty handy and mobile Data costs a fortune (and is pretty bad there as well). So we got a big ass outdoor WiFi Antenna and it works flawlessly.
@@sagichdirdochnicht4653 do some isp’s sell you a second router if you have dead zones? That’s they only other way I could think of.
I’ve been confused about that point for a decade, or, ever since u bought my first Belkin wifi repeater (which these days tops out at 24Mbps, a quarter off of connection speed but still plenty fast enough for Netflix in the kids bedrooms)
@davidlawrence8711 Oddly enough, our isp gave us a repeater/extender with our installation so we could put our WiFi system back where it belongs, yes this isp was the one we had before Spectrum, so it used all those old wall connection ports. I forced a wiring hole punch when we had Spectrum just to put the WiFi in the office, which, ironically, had a bad, unreliable power outlet, just so I could have a good connection in my room.
9:52 The whole reason for using repeaters is for when you can NOT wire an access point. However, remember that repeaters cut speeds in half, so use mesh networks instead. Shown here is Ubiquiti, excellent equipment.
Yeah, I was gonna say. I'd love to wire access points, but I live in a rental property. It's not my house to go drilling holes in walls. I ended up going with a mesh network setup.
Thunderf00t has made videos debunking the basic radiation principles of 5G radiation, so you could possibly ask him for some help with that!
Fun fact on repeaters: we actually used *several* of them in my parents' house for a while. Something about the walls was causing older 5g wi-fi routers to lose a ton of signal strength and even cut out entirely. But since hardware has gotten better, we replaced the repeaters and two routers with a single access point and have had zero issues since.
I suspect a lot of sales for these comes down to people still using older wi-fi hardware that can't push signals through walls, or remembering the issues they had and thinking they still need these - you really don't anymore, not in residential situations.
I cannot get behind the message of "get rid of reviews". Absolutely terrible advice. Yes, some reviews are going to be gamed, but they are FAR more valuable to have than not to have. Particularly negative reviews. As you did say, cross check them, confirm them, be sure to check negative reviews out as well always. But the call to abolish reviews is absolutely the wrong call to make.
The ad I got claimed it was invented by 2 computer scientists, wow the inventors really are men of many talents!
So it's an AirPort Express. So revolutionary we had one in my house in 2004!
This is a quantum physics one though
These range extenders only really have a couple of very specific use cases, I bought one years ago to use in a house I shared and was unable to wire in actual access points. It wasn't great but it worked for a while until I "upgraded" to powerline adapters
Wow this channel is good keep up the good work ken! My favorite episodes has to be the scam videos. And exposing the s*itty company’s doing this stuff
I use a Netgear Nighthawk RAX45, and it is unstoppable. It’s on the second floor near the front corner (I use a cellular modem and it goes in a upstairs window for a better signal) and even in the basement, backyard, and shed I still have a rock-solid connection.
"I don't see how anyone would fall for that ad."
"You're just not in the target group."
"What target group?"
"Stupid people."
That's precisely why they advertise this way: it fools people that are uninformed and are too lazy/gullible to research the claims made. They don't need everyone to believe them, just enough.
If i do a survey on reviews i normally search for a plain technical one. If the product and it's problems are well described my alarm goes of. Finding a second review similar to the first means i am not going to buy it. Served me well for years.
Plot twist: anker nano is also a scam
Nah, Anker is actually a very decent brand
Just recentl discovered your channel, catching up on older content. Loving the videos. For the algo!
On note on extenders, I've used them before for a quick and dirty way to get a signal further outside so I could work remote from outdoor locations nearby when speed isn't that important. It was fine dropping speeds since the main thing was just being a consistent connection for chat, voip, etc and worked peachy. Was a lot easier than dealing with running a wire for an access point; just able to plug repeater into an outlet at the corner of the house near a window, got the signal way far outside and still plenty fast enough for what was needed.
Just depends on what is needed, if you can deal with the latency/speed issues repeaters can be fine so long as the consumer isn't expecting "better" performance or even equal performance. But 15-25 Mbps is fine for a lot of applications when just looking for a simple way to extend the wifi.
Krazy Ken, why not do a colab with Thunderf00t about 5G? He debunked several subjects on 5G and he is a Professor, i think if you ask him he would be glad to help you out!
in europe, houses are built out of massive stone walls. my mom and brother for example share the same internet, despite there being a 60cm concrete wall between both house halves. when i visit them, i get almost no internet in my room despite being like 30m away from the router, because it travels through 3 walls and one floor.
I use powerline adaptors for my internet. Hook it up to a 2nd router and no more weak signals. Works well and less cords as well.
Repeaters generally suck because they partition your wireless network and cut your bandwidth in half at the very least. One half is used to communicate with the wireless access point and the other half is used to communicate with your device. This is compounded by using an older wireless standard that can't get very good rates in the first place.
Mesh routers are a bit better because they can more intelligently handle the retransmission, but it's still eating bandwidth for it. The best mesh routers are the ones that dedicate a band to the mesh network so it doesn't interfere with your device's traffic.
FYI, in American English, the plural of a radio/TV antenna is "antennas". The term "antennae" refers to the appendages on an insect.
Thanks for these videos, they save people some money in the long run. They’re also very informative about how the product is manufactured, and how it’s marketed. They have saved me money.
As soon as I saw the “up to 300 mbps” I figured what this would be. You didn’t mention it in the video, but what frequency was this repeater using? I’m gonna bet it was 802.11n on 2.4GHz.
Great video though! I love your scam review series.
I saw the ad for this product here in the Philippines and it's different from yours. In the ad here, they said it was invented by two IT employees from a big tech corporation!😂
Gotta say, good choice on sponsorship with anker.
I have multiple of their charging hubs, wall chargers, cables but their best product IMO is their powerbank. Think I have the 22,000mah beast and while not small it's the right size you'd expect from that sort of capacity. And having tested the claims it definitely holds up, I was able to charge a 4200mah battery nearly 5 times, from absolutely dead. Never had a problem and their 5/6 port desktop hubs with with QC 3.0 works an absolute charm and is left on 24/7 with no issues. Top brand IMO and the only brand I trust for true high Mah battery packs.
If I’m buying from a brand I’ve never purchased from before, I always check Better Business Bureau and ask around on forums
3-star reviews are my go-to. They usually aren't fake, and the people see some value and some problems. I look to see if their problems would be problems for how I would use it.
A repeater is good say if you live in a RV park and can't setup a access point, or just plain ol stealing your neighbors unsecured wifi...... I've done both over the years, don't use one anymore since I have my own fiber internet finally but there were times in life where I used a repeater (not the one shown here) because there was no other option, specially in RV park, signals were so weak and they would have a limit how many devices could be connected so that also got me around that as well.
With the design of repeaters having to receive and then resend wireless packets they will always slow down any wireless connection, it is always worthwil testing them in AP or Router mode to see if they are even capable of the speeds they suggest when not repeating wireless
I live in a travel trailer full time and wireless internet access is a problem. The cable modem is located in a small game room in the center of the 40-foot trailer, and a small Intel NUC computer is connected to the living room TV in the back of the trailer. Now I've gone through numerous USB wireless network adaptors and none of them worked well. I would lose the internet about every 5 to 10 minutes and have to reset the device to get the internet back. In addition, I work from home and have two devices that don't have wireless but require them to be connected via Ethernet. This means I have Ethernet cables strung around the trailer.
So I broke down and bought four power line adaptors which use the 110 volt house wiring for the Ethernet. I have one connected to the cable modem and three others connected to the devices in my trailer (Intel NUC, work devices, and a PS4 in the bedroom). The models I got are rated at 2 Gbit/second and I've had no problems streaming HD videos with them. $200 well spent. And it also eliminates the snowbirds that come down to Arizona in the winter from saying, "Hey, can I tap into your WiFi? I'm only gonna be down here for a couple of months and I don't wanna buy cable."
I'm not going to mention brand names in case I get accused of being an advertiser but devices that network through house wiring are common and can be ordered online through all the regular electronic channels. But order well-known brand names rather than El Cheapo knockoffs, otherwise you may be sorry.
My parent pay for the cable company repeaters because they think it works. They also pay monthly for the cable company’s modem/router. When I ask why they don’t just wire an Ethernet downstairs where they have horrible connection (despite the extender), he says wireless is just as good as wired. Probably could have owned a commercial grade router by now.
You can also DIY a repeater with a dual band router. Use the 5g for the radio link and the 2g for the rebroadcasted signal. Youll get significantly better bandwidth.
One thing you missed about Wifi repeaters: Even if they go the maximum available speed, I am talking of the high quality products, they will half the available bandwidth. That is a technical condition since they have to use half of their available bandwidth to communicate with each site. Your solution with wired APs is not viable everywhere. At least here in Germany we have buildings with solid walls. (PSA: don't punch German walls, you will regret it instantly!) A solution I found is using the available electric system in the house. I don't know what it is called in the US, but in German we call it DLAN. Just put on adapter into the socket near the router, put another one into the socket where your computer is, or use an AP adapter for Wifi, push the pair buttons and you are good to go. Caution, it only works within a fuse box.
Good information! Extenders are in almost all cases, ineffective. Thanks for the video!
I think review systems are still needed. There are just way too many products online to really research. But it definitely needs improvement.
Wi-Fi extenders can work. I have one and it does a decent job. I couldn't get a strong signal on the second floor (router is in the basement) and installed an extender which I got on Amazon, and it does work.
It's not the review system in general that is at fault it's just Amazon's. Our local online shopping website will only give you a survey form if you have bought the item, and you can only create one ticket for one account for one item that was purchased and can only be done if you are registered. If not you can still order, but you can't rate the item.
TH-cam is a great place to see product reviews, actually any site that offers the relative content is great.
I sure wish I even got close to triple digits download speed. I use a wired connection but my local ISP doesn't even offer internet speeds over 50Mbps, as if you actually get that speed at any point during the day.
First things first; I NEVER trust five star reviews, I read the ones and two star reviews.
Second; I saw an ad for a repeater, and the buffering stopped the second it was plugged in. OK repeaters do work, like you said they have been around for 20+ years. Never have I seen one the second you plug it in. It has to startup, connect, and the device you want to use the repeater has to connect and start using it. Takes minutes, not the second you plug it in.
BS detectors should be going off for any product the more they "are astounded" by the way it works. The better they claim it works, the less likely it will work.
I made kinda a homemade WiFi extender. I essentially have an actually good WiFi card going to a computer with an antenna sticking outside the window. Then I have ethernet running out of that computer with it connected to an ancient WRT54G router. It is an extremely unreliable setup. Partially I think because of my grandparents router though that I have to borrow off of. However, it does generally work decent when I can get it working. It is often faster than what you just showed, especially over ethernet. I'm honestly impressed how well it can work considering I have it working from about 350 feet away. I just wish it was more reliable, or my dad would get actual internet.
I know this is an old video but hopefully this will help someone. I've found that in most cases people will post reviews if there's a problem with their purchase. So when I shop online, I do use the reviews, but specifically sort by negative. Then look for reliability issues, or product issues, not shipping damage, open box, or DOA, but actual usage issues, or non-existent features. At that point unless you see consistent issues, or lies about the product, it's probably a safe buy.
My number one thing with reviews is to read both positive and negative reviews both ends have a touch of truth and both a bit of nosense, such as fake reviews for positive and people who bought something expecting it to be something else or who don't know how to use something.
Improtant things are details about the items use and capabilities as well as being able to tell if an item has bad quality control/reliability issues.
I am existing here in the basement with the router being some kind of far away, a powerline (when properly configured) works fine. But only when I use a Cable
you can buy second hand routers online and use a cable to them from your main router, it takes a little setup but does a very good job at giving you Extra full speed WiFi coverage
Totally called it in your teaser post about this video. The worst thing about a "product" like this is you can buy a real wifi repeater for about half the cost of this thing. IMO the only people that should even bother with a wifi repeater are folks renting. Otherwise running a few wires throughout most homes is not that difficult or costly in the long run!
7:20 ACCESS POINT NOT ROUTER.
The thing people call a router is a Router + Firewall + AP + switch combo
I generally use MikroTik and Ubiquit access points at home (I have 2 systems, yes, I test prod on my home network)