Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss Elon Musk wanting to build a city, Parler focusing on a new lawsuit against Amazon, Verizon advising users to turn off 5G to save battery life in a tweet, Roblox's popularity and a safer chat system, smart home technology and older adults, Twitter's Super Follows and more.

Our guest this hour:

Sung Vivathana, VP of Engineering - SpotOn Virtual Fence

Debbie in Raleigh, North Carolina listens on NewsRadio 680 WPTF and asked: "A question about the "ultra Wi-Fi device" or similar products. I wonder if they will be of any help since sometimes the computer drops connections and other things happen with some of the other devices. There are too many devices and only one wi-fi. The other thing is, when you ask Google a question and you are totally blind, she will not give you the answer. She will say "here it is" and show it on the stupid screen. The other device I have from Amazon is far better."

https://media.blubrry.com/into_tomorrow/content.blubrry.com/into_tomorrow/03-05-2021-H3S1.mp3

Debbie, we hadnt heard about the Ultra WiFi device but looking at their site there are some reasons to go a different way.

It seems to be targeted at users that dont know what a WiFi booster is, so they advertise features like no monthly fee which will be true of any similar device, they also advertise that its just plug and play: you plug it into the wall and devices connect to it and youre done. Thats probably not true for any connection that uses a password. These devices need to connect to the original network that theyre trying to extend.

There are lots of clearly very biased reviews on very suspicious sites as well, so this looks more like a blackhat SEO campaign to boost a mediocre product.

There are equivalent products priced similarly from better known brands. For example, the TP-Link AC1750 or the D-Link DAP-1650. Theyll do the same thing and theyre more likely to work as advertised.

If you can afford $200, you may be better off looking into an out of the box mesh system like an Eero, Netgear Orbi, or Google Home. Those are built to do what you would be doing with these extenders, and to do it in a more seamless way. They will also most likely get you much faster speeds if youre on a gigabit connection.

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