 So in our homes, Wi-Fi is not been that great. Lots of the cable companies and internet providers have provided us with really crappy cable models that built in Wi-Fi and very limited range, very limited capabilities. Now, between our phone, our wonderful talking devices like this Amazon Echo laptops, you're talking about a lot of devices in your house. Even some people's refrigerators and toasters need to get on the internet and they do this via wireless. So I've been looking for a recommendation for consumers. We love Ubiquiti Networks and their commercial equipment. Their commercial equipment's really good, but it's not as consumer friendly. We love setting these up. We put these in offices, buildings, large deployments. They're a little bit trickier to set up but the quality is top notch because Ubiquiti makes really good Wi-Fi equipment. They're experts at it. So I was excited when I found the EarCube. The EarCube is their expertise from these folks we love over here at Ubiquiti, pushed into a small little box that works off of a basic phone app to get it set up, which makes it very consumer friendly. So I'm gonna walk you through this device. We're gonna do some comparisons between this EarCube and the Unify APAC that I had over here, which is their commercial device. I'm gonna put them both next to each other and we're gonna talk about the range on them, the connectivity on them and do a little bit of testing. So everyone asked me what's the best Wi-Fi to get and I can't really in good conscience recommend some of the crap I see selling at the retail stores. It's just not that good, especially for what you're paying for it. This device is much more affordable and the performance on it, we're gonna find out just how good this is. There's not much in the box. You get the unit itself and you've opened it before. So I've already got the wire unwrapped. You get this and then, well, a manual. So there's the unboxing. There's not a lot in it, which is fine. The manual walks you through this setup and how to load the app on the phone. And that's what we're gonna do. We're gonna show you from start to finish, how to plug it in and how to set the app up on your phone and how to get it going. And we'll see just how good this works for Wi-Fi and how it compares to some of their commercial equipment and whether or not it's a good recommend for purchasing and putting in your home. The first thing we'll note about the AirCube is it's genuinely a cube. Measures three and a half inches by three and a half inches. So pretty small. It's not too intrusive sitting on your desk or wherever you may wanna put this. Plugging it in, pretty simple. One little cord here, plug in and it lights up. Ports on the back, you have four wired ports. So we plug in our network port here. They labeled it in blue, make it easy to see. And then we can have a couple other devices plugged in. The way you hook this up, let's say you have a cable modem here. You're gonna come out of the cable modem into that port there and this will do the basic configuration. So it does not replace your cable modem for those who are wondering. We'll plug it in and we'll set up the internet on it which is pretty straightforward. I'm gonna show you how the app works. Setting up is actually pretty easy because you just plug it in and it starts glowing which looks pretty cool. And then we just plug the network cable into here and the light starts glowing until it's solid and that's when we get to go set it up. So we have the U-Mobile app from Ubiquit Networks loaded and now we're gonna go ahead and set up our air cube. So we're gonna go to open it. Don't worry about the beta settings. We're just gonna focus on this, the connections, no save devices. You can set up multiple devices in here. So we're gonna set one up and we'll go for the discover. Oh, there it is. Does it gonna find them? There we are. There's the network. Now here's the thing. There's a QR code on the bottom. I like that. That's a nice feature especially for a consumer facing product. Scan it with your phone. It logs in and finishes the setup. So it's gonna take a second here and it's gonna run through the setup and now it's connecting to it. Then it brings up the air cube setup, the license agreement and the configuration. So this is a summary page and this is the model that has two gigahertz and a five gigahertz mode. And it looks like it decided to reconnect to it. I'm not sure why. I won't rule out that it's not a phone issue because I've had my phone do that completely at random with some Wi-Fis. Connect, reconnect to them real quick. It could be because it's choosing between the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz because this supports both. Now these are just the view settings mode and by default this operates in bridge mode. I recommend leaving in bridge mode and I'm sure they'll add features later but if you want it in routed mode it doesn't have a lot of firewall features. So ideally you're gonna leave in your cable companies router and then you'll use this as a bridge to that. So just the default mode is fine but of course we have to set up and we're gonna go over here to configuration. Let's set up the name. So we have 2.4 and 5 gigahertz setting separate. We're gonna go ahead and edit the 2.4. We'll call it air cube demo. Then we gotta set a password. So we'll scroll down a little bit so apply that. It's gonna take a second and then we set the password here. What Wi-Fi is my favorite password lately? So someone asked you what your Wi-Fi password is? What Wi-Fi? You're answering them and not answering at the same time. So it's reconfiguring there. Now you can rename the 5 gigahertz separately. For now we're just gonna hit same as radio one which means just put them both. Now that's up to you but I generally leave them the same and most of the devices will choose between whichever it thinks is the better signal. Because 5 gigahertz has more speed but most of these speeds are generally faster than your internet connection at home depending on where you live but the 2.4 reaches further. Now the other setting options in here are network. This is where you can set it to be in bridge mode or routed mode and then device names. They have a PoE pass-through option and the idea is you could have a power over anything that pass through this to connect it to other devices. It's more of an advanced configuration but not really a big deal. They do have night mode and what night mode does will apply this. It's going to turn off the little LED light here at the bottom based on a time setting. So it doesn't turn off automatically but you can set it to do to turn things off or if you just don't want the LED on it'll apply and it'll just completely disable it. I like the LED. It's not very bright. It's not very annoying. It tells me it's on so we'll definitely go ahead and leave it there. I'm going to turn it back on. Now a couple other things in here, firmware upgrade. We've already updated the firmware on this the latest version as of December 5th, 2017. So there's no more firmware upgrades for it but it's really straightforward and simple. The firmware is in here and I said yes and upgraded it. We probably should have recorded it but my employees started playing with it because they were excited because it's a pretty cute little box here. It also has a site survey option so it'll look around and see what networks are available next to it. What it sees and this thing left in automatic mode under the configuration because you can focus and do certain things in the configuration like change which channels it's on. Leaving this all at auto is great. Now this is something Unify, Ubiquiti Networks is always specialized in is understanding the networks around them and adjusting it automatically. They're really good at that. So leaving it all at it at the own. I trust them. Their commercial products were great all at auto. I'll trust they brought that same expertise inside of this device. So it should be perfectly fine at auto. The last couple of features in here is reboot or reset factory defaults. There's also a reset button on the bottom so if you hold it in, it'll blink a few times and reset to factory defaults. And we'll jump back to the status page tells you where it connected to. That's kind of the basics of the unit. We will do a quick test here though to show you the range it has. And what I have is Unify, APC, ALR, one of their commercial ones. The one I had at the beginning of the video and we'll just do a quick comparison for range to show you the range at which these can reach. But the setup though, easy to do, tells you the IP address, nothing difficult about it. Matter of fact, this is one of the reason we like it as a consumer product. So let's get started on that. So I have Wavemon fired up on my laptop and I'm gonna walk around the office real quick. But I know even this far back throughout the building really, it's really not dropping down at all. And you can see we're connected to the AirCube demo network. I separated the wireless, the five and the 2.4. I stay connected to the 2.4, which is why you see the frequency over here as exactly which channel it's on on the 2.4. Now what that does is we're gonna test for range. We'll do a separate test for speed, but I wanna see just how far this reaches. And you know, wandering around, my building's about 2,000 square feet. So wandering around the office, range isn't really an issue. It's a little chilly outside, but we're gonna take a walk across the parking lot. So I have a brick building that we're in and it's kind of drops down the wifi a little bit going outside. Sorry, there's a little bit of windows. We're gonna walk across the parking lot here to see just how far this degrades. And I'm putting a pretty good amount of distance between me and the wifi unit. Oh, laptop's almost getting blown out of my hand with the wind. All right, all the way across the parking lot, 40%, not bad. Now while we're out here, we're gonna do a comparison to what it looks like connected to the APAC. Connected to the APAC, and we're just slightly stronger. I'm moving around a little bit. So the wifi is just a couple percent stronger, really not a big difference. And I'm cold and I'm going inside now. I love you guys here on YouTube, but this is chilly out. Okay, we're back inside and it's now switched back to the five gigahertz. So we're gonna do maybe a quick speed test on this to see how much difference between the air cube and that for a speed test. The devices are sitting right next to each other. So this should be a pretty decent comparison. All right, so on the network, I have my, on the right pane, IPerf started up and on the left pane, I have IPerf logged into the Unify server, which is on the same network for this demonstration. So we're just gonna go across the wifi over to the other side. So it's IPerf and in the IP address of my machine and my machine's listening on the other side. So these are actually two machines logged in. What I want you to do is watch up here, the statistics and you'll see the data going across. Now right now, I'm gonna go down here and we are connected to the Unify APACLR. So we're doing that. We're at the five gigahertz one. So let's go ahead and do a speed test. Now you're gonna get some variation, but what am I doing here is the two devices are right next to each other on the table. And I'm keeping a laptop in a fixed position. I'm sitting here at my kitchen table in the office and we're just gonna do a speed test between these and see how it goes. All right, we've seen a speed test of 243. Do one more, just run the same test again. So not bad. So we've seen 203 megabit and 199 megabit on the five with the Unify APAC. So I'm actually gonna exit real quick from here so it doesn't break to connection. So we'll exit, go back to my ThinkPad here and we're gonna switch networks and we're specifically gonna connect two and I named them differently here. So I make sure I connected to the right one. This is the five on the air cube. All I did was add a five. I know I didn't do it in a setup but I added that so make sure I lock onto that network. Connect, you're gonna see the connection drop. And scanning, all right, it is connected. We're gonna go back into my Unify and run the same test again. So with the AC, we got the about 199, 203 and we're just gonna run exactly the same test by this up arrow again. I get the same IP address because my server hands out the same ones and we'll see what kind of speed tests we get with the air cube. Wow. All right, let's run that again. I'm getting more speed out of the air cube. Now by the way, the Unify AC is plugged into the extra port on the air cube. I don't know if that makes any difference but me I'll have to do one more test because I'm seeing such a substantial speed difference here. The air cube is outperforming the AC and I don't know why. Yes, we are consistently getting more transfer speed out of the air cube. That's actually rather impressive. So let me just try moving the air cube into a different network port to see if that makes any difference at all. All right, I plugged the Unify AP AC in directly and bypassed the air cubes as plugged in directly to my network to the same switch port that the air cube was plugged into. See if it makes any speed difference at all. Maybe just a little bit. But I also unplugged the air cube. I powered it off to do this part of the test. No, we're still seeing a, the air cube is a little bit faster than AC. The AC has very slightly more range and I'm not sure why this is. I don't have any internals on this. Maybe it's still adjusting to different network settings because the air cube's off. So let me have the air cube plugged in as our final test but not hooked up to the same network, just plugged in to see if it creates interference that is causing a speed issue at all. Okay, I've left the AC plugged into its own network port but I just plugged back in the air cube just to see if it causes like some type of wireless and interference or speed. Cause we're seeing 246 out of the Unify AP AC now that we have the air cube physically unplugged. Now I just plugged it back in but it's kept the network port separate. No, we're just seeing some variation in speed here. Now this is the one thing that I don't do a ton of tests on Wi-Fi and the reason why is things can cause interference. I know at home I start seeing lower speeds just by my microwave being on. I have a Chromecast in between the microwave and when the microwave comes on sometimes the Chromecast pauses that's closest to it. So wireless can be really tricky unless you're doing speed tests directly next to it. So you really need to have a fixed point and nothing coming on or off to cause interference. So we're seeing a little bit of variation. I don't know what's causing it but it's consistently though the air cube is getting faster speed. So that's really interesting. It's not substantial but every little bit counts if that's what matters but most people don't even have a connection that fast on their cable or however their ISPs providing them. So if you don't have that fast of a connection then it's not as critical because you can only get out to the internet as fast as the slowest piece of that. So if you only have a 40 meg or 50 meg circuit at home or in your office then having a 200 meg connection to that circuit it slows down to the speed of the circuit. I, people think a lot of times they're slow speeds because their wifi is slow. They want a faster wifi but I first suggest look at who your provider is and see if that's where the issue is. So my final thoughts on the air cube are it's awesome. This is a really impressive small compact device that really the wifi range on this I think for consumers in most houses you're talking about something that's gonna be aesthetically pleasing not to try to run crap over your house or have some big honking wifi thing that people want it. So it's got a nice sleek modern design but that is not the most important thing to me doesn't work. It works great. That's what is really impressive. The strength and wireless I mean I'm all the way across my parking lot here. So I've really put some distance walls actually several walls and products and everything that's in between here. There's nowhere in my 2,000 square foot office that I didn't have full signal. So if you have about a 2,000 or 3,000 square foot house depending on what it's made of because wifi unfortunately some things will like act as a faraday cage and block wifi signals. But if you're looking home office apartment this thing's impressive. This works really, really well. Compact design I did notice and it actually feels really good cause I was outside after I left it on I'm talking like for hours. It's only slightly above room temperature. It's warm but not what I would consider hot but it feels great on my fingers right now cause they're cold after going outside and dealing with the Michigan winter. But so this is definitely a product that I'm excited that Unify they have in their beta. It's limited. It's hard to find. We got this one Amazon they were on sale. The don't know exactly what the final price is like I know it's a beta product but I am excited to see future development cause as it stands right now it works great. So to think that they would do anything to improve this further that'd be incredible. Couple side notes. If you want to use this as a firewall as of right now as of the firmware here in December of 2017 it doesn't have much features. It's just really basic routing. But then again, if you're looking for more advanced routing this isn't what you look for or buy buy one of the more higher end devices and get routing. But for people who go I need coverage for all the many devices I have in my house I need them to work all throughout the house. This is a pretty good little purchase here. You can't beat it for the price. I think the MSRP and E's is right around a hundred something dollars. I don't know the final pricing on it. I know we got it on sale for a little bit less than that. But we're pretty excited about it. I don't know if I'll sell this one or take it home in music cause it works really well. It's the five gigahertz is really fast on this. All right, thanks for watching. If you like the content here like and subscribe and that's about it. AirCube, good little box. Awesome stuff. I wonder if I can take it apart.