9 ms·

<<A special discount code has been emailed to OnHub users only, for 40% off Nest Wifi on the Google Store.>> Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enoug

<<A special discount code has been emailed to OnHub users only, for 40% off Nest Wifi on the Google Store.>> Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enough to buy a new device from them like this. It is like 'bite me once, bite me again please.'. 'eh, we just self destroyed your device, because, fuck you, but here is a coupon to buy a new one from us that we will also kill in a few years' ...

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
I dunno, I'd have to do a TCO analysis; if they give you 40% off, and you just assume it'll die after X years but be fully supported for that time and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever, it could still work out to be a good deal. Like... not my cup of tea (TCO is even nicer when the unit's lifespan is indefinite), but it's a plausible tradeoff.
- gruez 5y ago
  >and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac-2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac-2013
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g. Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.
    - pantalaimon 5y ago
      > I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g. Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.
    - wtallis 5y ago
      At the moment, I would definitely choose an older 802.11ac device with mature open-source drivers over any 802.11ax device. Especially since last I checked, the only affordable 802.11ax routers were limited to 2T2R, so they would be a step backwards in peak throughout for some client devices.
      - diamondo25 5y ago
        Latency is a thing, and newer networks have lower latency or are affected by other clients being slower (eg MIMO and improved channeling), though other ethernet devices can still have a big effect (eg remote server latency, dns latency, retransmissions).
        wtallis 5y ago
        Latency is exactly why I'd prefer a last-gen radio with open-source drivers. An 802.11ac router with the latest open-source drivers (ath10k and mt76) will give you better real-world latency, because there are open-source developers working to optimize for the metrics that actually improve real-world user experiences rather than seeking the largest achievable throughput numbers on naive speed tests. 802.11ax on its own does nothing to address the problem of wasting too much airtime serving a client at the extreme edge of your AP's range where neither 802.11ax or ac transmission rates will work. That kind of problem must be tackled with better QoS strategies that are not inherently tied to any particular generation of the WiFi standards, but in practice can only be developed and tested for chipsets that are sufficiently hackable
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - baskethead 5y ago
      Faster is not always better. I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had. I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything. We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
      - nitrogen 5y ago
        We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important. To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.
      - vel0city 5y ago
        > I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences. The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I have ~7 year old bog standard wifi router that has more than enough speed to saturate my 200Mbs downlink. Up to 7 or 8 devices online at a time when all family members are home, and there's never a contention issue. I can hog the connection w/ a huge Steam download, and then when they kids start streaming netflix to the TV it's still all shared nicely with me getting a reduced speed as the stream kicks in, everything still working perfectly & taking full advantage of the 200Mbs speed. That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app. And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
      - thetinguy 5y ago
        You live in a house. In an apartment there are 50 other networks within a 100 feet of you.
        ineedasername 5y ago
        You actually don't know my residential environment. I don't live in an apartment with 50 networks, but I can see ~30 SSID's right now. On a semi-regular basis I benefit from going into my router config to choose the channel with the least congestion. For me, that's not worth spending $$ to upgrade when speed & latency are not otherwise an issue. I don't begrudge people who decide to upgrade to get that incremental boost, but I don't think it should be forced on them. Because I'm not claiming there are no benefits to upgrading. I'm saying that people who have lived with their current WiFi setup-- hiccups & all-- for years shouldn't be required to pay more if they're satisfied with their own status quo.
      - vel0city 5y ago
        I'd highly recommend looking at just getting a wired AP to put in the basement and have it ceiling mounted. It really depends on how your house was designed, but it could be relatively easy to drop a cable down from an above floor to the ceiling. You'll get much better performance having a wire carrying the signal than trying to do WiFi mesh setups, especially when you're trying to cover an area that already has terrible WiFi performance.
    - gruez 5y ago
      >I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g. You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable. Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.
      - lmns 5y ago
        802.11n with 5 GHz is okayish, but using 2.4 GHz can be brutal. It's not just the bandwidth, the whole frequency band is just bad. My latency regularly goes through the roof and voice calls are noticeably worse than with 5 GHz wifi. 802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.
    - jjav 5y ago
      > Faster is always better. For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.
  - basch 5y ago
    is Bandwidth the only factor? What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?
    - gruez 5y ago
      I don't have an IOT house, so I don't know how well they'll cope. That said, most IOT chips (eg. the famed ESP8266 and most variants of its successor, ESP32) seem to only support 802.11n, a standard from 2009. Therefore any benefits are probably not going to be gained by upgrading to an 802.11ac router. Newer routers might have beefier cpu/ram, but IOT devices are pretty low bandwidth, so I doubt they'll be taking up much cpu/ram to handle them.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
      For smarthome, I would recommend Zigbee devices. That way, you limit your attack surface to just your Zigbee gateway, rather than every single light bulb in your house, with the added benefit that those don't clog up your Wi-Fi. We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.
    - prmoustache 5y ago
      Why would you want to cram 50 so called "smart" devices is the real question. Is your quality of life improved by having your lightbulbs and switch connected to the internet. Why do you need sensors at all? My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.
      - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  - jordanthoms 5y ago
    I ran a Asus ac-68u at home at home for years and was generally happy, but the speed bump from upgrading to a ax-86u has actually been very substantial even for ac devices. BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…
  - YokoZar 5y ago
    > Do people actually need next-gen wifi? Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    The question isn't whether people need it, question is whether people were going to use it as a reason for upgrading anyways
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I would only agree with that if Google fully published their support roadmap ahead of time so that I could know what I'm buying. Especially in light of the $ at any given time: $300 when there's 6 years of support ahead is fine, but it's not worth $300 anymore when there's only 4,3,2 years of support left. How can you possibly do a TCO analysis without that information? They at least do this for their Pixel phones.
- greatgib 5y ago
  You TCO is negative in all cases. Because you had something that was working enough, otherwise you would have changed it. But now you need to spend money to change. Even if for a good price. Also you have to take into account that you pay but not have 2 working devices in the end (old and new). Just one. Sure, if the new one was providing significant value, there could have been an interest. Like if you network was saturated. But that would be surprising because currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers are more than enough for most households usage. Also, what is interesting is the Stockholm syndrom: some comments here are saying that it was probably old enough to be changed, so not so bad. But in that case, did you think about that, that you would probably have to change your router for a new one before receiving the obsolescence notice from Google?
  - vel0city 5y ago
    > currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers 802.11ac was released in 2014, only 7 years ago. You wouldn't have a 10 year old AC router, and really probably wouldn't have an 8 year old AC router quite yet.
zmj 5y ago
I probably will. The OnHub has performed substantially better than the other consumer wireless routers I've used, and after 5 years it's due to be replaced anyway. Might as well take the discount.
- tw04 5y ago
  I would suggest taking a look at synology. The 2600ac is going on 6 years old and about to get the latest feature release (1.3) with no immediate plans to eol it. And unlike Google they have a long history of LTS.
  - pde3 5y ago
    How do you find the RF performance? For me the OnHub was vastly better than other home wifi gear I've used, but would consider more trustworthy replacements if they have comparable performance...
    - tw04 5y ago
      I guess I don’t have a ton to compare it to. Installed for the neighbors and they get signal from the office in the front of the house to the pool out back, so good? Before that they had a cambium router running DD-wrt that didn’t have anywhere near the range. You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
  - rpdillon 5y ago
    This is precisely what I did. My OnHub was having issues about 18 months ago, so I did some research. I was mostly interested in getting a browser-based interface back, push security updates from the vendor, and buying from a company that had a good track record of treating customers well and supporting their products. I picked up the Synology and have been very impressed. It got my family through the pandemic scenario of four simultaneous video conference streams with 30+ participants each with flying colors. This is my third Synology product, and I have an extremely high opinion of them. The other two products are NAS products, and both have been just as bulletproof for me.
jakogut 5y ago
> Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enough to buy a new device from them like this It seems this is more common than it should be. Apple users who complain of new products lacking features older products had, but who continue to buy those products come to mind.

yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago

I dunno, I'd have to do a TCO analysis; if they give you 40% off, and you just assume it'll die after X years but be fully supported for that time and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever, it could still work out to be a good deal. Like... not my cup of tea (TCO is even nicer when the unit's lifespan is indefinite), but it's a plausible tradeoff.

gruez 5y ago
>and then you upgrade to a faster unit with next-gen wifi or whatever Do people actually need next-gen wifi? My impression is that 99.9+% of people would be well served by a mid-range 802.11ac router (eg. AC1750[1]) from years ago, because the most bandwidth intensive thing they do is watch 4k netflix (~25 Mb/s). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac-2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11ac-2013
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g. Faster is always better. New 802.11ax also improves contention between devices.
  - pantalaimon 5y ago
    > I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g. Certainly not - 802.11ac felt like the biggest leap, 802.11n was decent for browsing, but when starting a download I would try to switch to Ethernet for it not take too long. With 802.11ac I didn't have to bother anymore as usually the difference was negligible.
  - wtallis 5y ago
    At the moment, I would definitely choose an older 802.11ac device with mature open-source drivers over any 802.11ax device. Especially since last I checked, the only affordable 802.11ax routers were limited to 2T2R, so they would be a step backwards in peak throughout for some client devices.
    - diamondo25 5y ago
      Latency is a thing, and newer networks have lower latency or are affected by other clients being slower (eg MIMO and improved channeling), though other ethernet devices can still have a big effect (eg remote server latency, dns latency, retransmissions).
      - wtallis 5y ago
        Latency is exactly why I'd prefer a last-gen radio with open-source drivers. An 802.11ac router with the latest open-source drivers (ath10k and mt76) will give you better real-world latency, because there are open-source developers working to optimize for the metrics that actually improve real-world user experiences rather than seeking the largest achievable throughput numbers on naive speed tests. 802.11ax on its own does nothing to address the problem of wasting too much airtime serving a client at the extreme edge of your AP's range where neither 802.11ax or ac transmission rates will work. That kind of problem must be tackled with better QoS strategies that are not inherently tied to any particular generation of the WiFi standards, but in practice can only be developed and tested for chipsets that are sufficiently hackable
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - baskethead 5y ago
    Faster is not always better. I upgraded to 10Gbps for my network and I barely use above 1Gbps, what I originally had. I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all, despite having around 40 wireless devices on my network. All our phones support it and I literally don’t notice anything. We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important.
    - nitrogen 5y ago
      We may be getting to the point where more speed is not as important. To an extent this is true, but part of this is just how long US broadband speeds stagnated, especially upload speeds, killing off any product ideas that required high upload bandwidth. I'm sure that over time we'll find uses for more speed.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      > I upgraded my Wi-Fi to wifi6 and I can’t tell any difference at all How many WiFi 6 clients do you have though? If all (or even the large majority of) your clients are 802.11ac clients, you're not going to notice any real differences. The biggest differences are going to be spectral efficiency especially when it comes to many devices chirping small packets. So think having lots of IoT things around the house while you're doing VoIP and gaming stuff. Things like streaming video won't really see an incredible difference most of the time. Streaming video usually has at least several second buffers and isn't actually constantly clogging the band, its brief blasts of several seconds worth of data at a time.
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I have ~7 year old bog standard wifi router that has more than enough speed to saturate my 200Mbs downlink. Up to 7 or 8 devices online at a time when all family members are home, and there's never a contention issue. I can hog the connection w/ a huge Steam download, and then when they kids start streaming netflix to the TV it's still all shared nicely with me getting a reduced speed as the stream kicks in, everything still working perfectly & taking full advantage of the 200Mbs speed. That's not meant to refute you: Sure, faster etc. is good. But I'd be pretty angry if I was told it was being bricked by the manufacturer under the conditions that Google is citing when everything still works perfectly well. There's no reason at all that Google has to disable management within the app. And since I have a new finished basement that doesn't get the WiFi signal very strongly I am considering an upgrade to a modern mesh setup, and was heavily considering Nest Wifi. Now? Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope.
    - thetinguy 5y ago
      You live in a house. In an apartment there are 50 other networks within a 100 feet of you.
      - ineedasername 5y ago
        You actually don't know my residential environment. I don't live in an apartment with 50 networks, but I can see ~30 SSID's right now. On a semi-regular basis I benefit from going into my router config to choose the channel with the least congestion. For me, that's not worth spending $$ to upgrade when speed & latency are not otherwise an issue. I don't begrudge people who decide to upgrade to get that incremental boost, but I don't think it should be forced on them. Because I'm not claiming there are no benefits to upgrading. I'm saying that people who have lived with their current WiFi setup-- hiccups & all-- for years shouldn't be required to pay more if they're satisfied with their own status quo.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      I'd highly recommend looking at just getting a wired AP to put in the basement and have it ceiling mounted. It really depends on how your house was designed, but it could be relatively easy to drop a cable down from an above floor to the ceiling. You'll get much better performance having a wire carrying the signal than trying to do WiFi mesh setups, especially when you're trying to cover an area that already has terrible WiFi performance.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >I'm sure people said the same thing about 802.11ac when everyone was on n, or n when everyone was on g. You'd probably be well served by 802.11n right now. Take a typical setup of 802.11n with 2x2 MIMO: theoretical speeds would be 300Mb/s. Halve that for "real world" performance, and you have speeds of 150Mb/s. That's more than enough for multiple streams of 4k netflix. Looking around it looks like most 802.11n adapters of the day (I checked 2011, the spec was released in 2009) only support 2.4ghz, so spectrum congestion might be an issue in high density areas, if we halve the speed again to account for this, we get 75Mb/s, which might be slower than your internet access, but is still otherwise usable. Based on this, I'm thinking the prudent strategy is to upgrade every other wifi generation.
    - lmns 5y ago
      802.11n with 5 GHz is okayish, but using 2.4 GHz can be brutal. It's not just the bandwidth, the whole frequency band is just bad. My latency regularly goes through the roof and voice calls are noticeably worse than with 5 GHz wifi. 802.11ac mandates 5 GHz, so it's a reasonable baseline. I don't even care if it's SISO, MIMO or whatever as long as I don't have to fall back to 2.4 GHz.
  - jjav 5y ago
    > Faster is always better. For wifi faster isn't always better if there's nowhere to go. That is, if the uplink from home isn't itself faster.
- basch 5y ago
  is Bandwidth the only factor? What about 30-50 smart home devices? Every bulb or switch, water sensors, etc. Some of modern equipment is load balancing old legacy stuff better, no?
  - gruez 5y ago
    I don't have an IOT house, so I don't know how well they'll cope. That said, most IOT chips (eg. the famed ESP8266 and most variants of its successor, ESP32) seem to only support 802.11n, a standard from 2009. Therefore any benefits are probably not going to be gained by upgrading to an 802.11ac router. Newer routers might have beefier cpu/ram, but IOT devices are pretty low bandwidth, so I doubt they'll be taking up much cpu/ram to handle them.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Tijdreiziger 5y ago
    For smarthome, I would recommend Zigbee devices. That way, you limit your attack surface to just your Zigbee gateway, rather than every single light bulb in your house, with the added benefit that those don't clog up your Wi-Fi. We have the Philips Hue gateway at home (which has limited support for other brands, but IKEA Trådfri bulbs work), but you can also get a Zigbee USB stick/Raspberry Pi HAT, install Home Assistant or deCONZ, and go wild without being tied to any vendor.
  - prmoustache 5y ago
    Why would you want to cram 50 so called "smart" devices is the real question. Is your quality of life improved by having your lightbulbs and switch connected to the internet. Why do you need sensors at all? My home is completely analog, like I even have to operate my windows blinds manually. I have lived in a totally connected and electrified house and I didn't view any improvement in my quality of life. Only downsides when the power grid had an issue.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
- jordanthoms 5y ago
  I ran a Asus ac-68u at home at home for years and was generally happy, but the speed bump from upgrading to a ax-86u has actually been very substantial even for ac devices. BTW I’m using a mikrotik router, but I’m not sold on Ubiquiti for home use even though I’ve deployed plenty of them at our office - my impression is that while the management on them is nice and they may be better for handling large numbers of clients, the more high end home aps have long range external antennas and seem better at providing high speeds to a small number of devices. It’s hard to find many objective tests of that though…
- YokoZar 5y ago
  > Do people actually need next-gen wifi? Streaming VR to a wireless headset (SteamVR on Oculus Quest) is generally considered to require Wifi 6, though that is admittedly a niche use currently.
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  The question isn't whether people need it, question is whether people were going to use it as a reason for upgrading anyways
ineedasername 5y ago
I would only agree with that if Google fully published their support roadmap ahead of time so that I could know what I'm buying. Especially in light of the $ at any given time: $300 when there's 6 years of support ahead is fine, but it's not worth $300 anymore when there's only 4,3,2 years of support left. How can you possibly do a TCO analysis without that information? They at least do this for their Pixel phones.
greatgib 5y ago
You TCO is negative in all cases. Because you had something that was working enough, otherwise you would have changed it. But now you need to spend money to change. Even if for a good price. Also you have to take into account that you pay but not have 2 working devices in the end (old and new). Just one. Sure, if the new one was providing significant value, there could have been an interest. Like if you network was saturated. But that would be surprising because currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers are more than enough for most households usage. Also, what is interesting is the Stockholm syndrom: some comments here are saying that it was probably old enough to be changed, so not so bad. But in that case, did you think about that, that you would probably have to change your router for a new one before receiving the obsolescence notice from Google?
- vel0city 5y ago
  > currently 8/10 years old ac wifi routers 802.11ac was released in 2014, only 7 years ago. You wouldn't have a 10 year old AC router, and really probably wouldn't have an 8 year old AC router quite yet.

zmj 5y ago

I probably will. The OnHub has performed substantially better than the other consumer wireless routers I've used, and after 5 years it's due to be replaced anyway. Might as well take the discount.

tw04 5y ago
I would suggest taking a look at synology. The 2600ac is going on 6 years old and about to get the latest feature release (1.3) with no immediate plans to eol it. And unlike Google they have a long history of LTS.
- pde3 5y ago
  How do you find the RF performance? For me the OnHub was vastly better than other home wifi gear I've used, but would consider more trustworthy replacements if they have comparable performance...
  - tw04 5y ago
    I guess I don’t have a ton to compare it to. Installed for the neighbors and they get signal from the office in the front of the house to the pool out back, so good? Before that they had a cambium router running DD-wrt that didn’t have anywhere near the range. You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.
- rpdillon 5y ago
  This is precisely what I did. My OnHub was having issues about 18 months ago, so I did some research. I was mostly interested in getting a browser-based interface back, push security updates from the vendor, and buying from a company that had a good track record of treating customers well and supporting their products. I picked up the Synology and have been very impressed. It got my family through the pandemic scenario of four simultaneous video conference streams with 30+ participants each with flying colors. This is my third Synology product, and I have an extremely high opinion of them. The other two products are NAS products, and both have been just as bulletproof for me.

jakogut 5y ago

> Looking at that, I'm wondering who is stupid enough to buy a new device from them like this It seems this is more common than it should be. Apple users who complain of new products lacking features older products had, but who continue to buy those products come to mind.