Linksys Takes on Mesh Wifi With Velop

Linksys is the next company to take on the mesh wifi concept as it announces Velop at CES 2017-- a multi-router system promising to envelope (thus the name) the house with wireless bandwidth.

Linksys VelopThe Velop system uses a tri-band 802.11ac MU-MIMO mesh network, with one band dedicated to communication between routers to prevent some of the bottlenecks two-band systems suffer from. The routers also include two ethernet ports in case customers prefer cable connectivity. The mesh system is self-healing, and can handle up to 5 Velop units to ensure wifi coverage in even the largest of houses.

Inside the routers is a quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU, 4GB flash storage and 512MB DDR3 RAM, together with wifi and Bluetooth radios. Interestingly support for Amazon Alexa is also included for users wanting to take advantage of voice-based control.

Linksys says the Velop system is aimed at newcomers, and as such it adds easy setup via companion mobile device app. The setup process guides users through plugging the router into existing infrastructure, naming the network and setting passwords for default WPA2 encryption, as well as the addition of more Velop units, firewalls, port forwarding and the like.

Velop routers should start shipping in packages of either 2 or 3 by end January 2017.

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