 So Wi-Fi pretty much sucks the big one, especially if you're trying to get coverage in a large house with a traditional single router slash access point setup. And that is exactly why we are here at James' in-laws house today. Because James stays here in the guest room from time to time, and it's upstairs where the Wi-Fi reception just plain bites. So Asus sponsored this video where we're going to show you their AI mesh system, where you can take any one of a bunch of different routers in Asus' lineup and create your own Wi-Fi mesh for excellent coverage across a very large domicile. I've just been looking for an excuse to use the word domicile. Glad it presented itself. So one of the biggest problems with the network setup here is that when James' in-laws got internet service 17 years ago, the assumption was that only the kids were going to use it, and they would never give a rat's-patoot about that their newfangled internet there. And of course, we all know how that worked out. Everybody uses the internet now. So the only place in the house that has coax and the ethernet cables that they actually ran themselves using the same technique that I did, like up the side of the house to the study and then to one of the upstairs bedrooms, is here in the basement where the kids were living all those years ago. So as you can imagine, this here, yuck, combo modem router switch access point thing provided by the ISP just isn't going to cut it. Okay, so to show one of the most problematic locations, I'm just going to jump into bed with James here. Which is your first time? This is a pretty realistic scenario. We're both going to fire up a video to watch on our computers and our phones. Okay, so on James's phone, he's actually getting 1080p video, but that's on 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi. Then on your laptop, what do you got? Nada. Nada. And on my laptop, I'm watching this strange parts video on 5 gigahertz at a magnificent 360p resolution. Now, that seems like it's kind of working well enough. You can have two devices running up here and 2.4 gigahertz does have better range, but consider this. There are many, many neighbors out this window here, all of whom are not at home right now because it's whatever time it is. I don't have my watch on today. If they were, 2.4 gigahertz would have too much interference, and they've experienced this in order to work reliably up here, and 5 gigahertz, total mess from this distance. Okay, so here at location number two, the hot tub, my laptop is connected to 5 gigahertz and can stream Netflix. If you can call this pixelated mess Guardians of the Galaxy 2, I'm not sure that I would. But James's laptop, also on 5G, either can't see it at all or when it can see it, can't connect to it. Now, you might go, okay, well, why don't you guys just connect to 2.4G? And that's sort of an option. But if both of us were connected to it at the same time, and heaven forbid, the living room TV, for example, was also running Netflix, we would quickly run out of bandwidth. Because you've got to remember, 2.4 gigahertz does offer better range, but it doesn't support nearly the speeds of 5 gigahertz. So if you want to be streaming, especially 4K content, you want that 5G network working. So hot tub is another fail for us. Oh lordy. Now, before we go any further, I do want to make it clear that in an optimal world, you just use a single access point to cover everything, because then you don't have any issues when you're roaming between access points. And the less complexity you can have in a home network, generally speaking, the better. But if for whatever reason that's not possible, like where we are today, a mesh network can help you out. Now, AI mesh, which is what we're showing here, is far from the only mesh Wi-Fi solution. In fact, it's not even the only one that ASUS has. But what's really cool about it is that what ASUS has done is on their newest models, they're really high-end stuff like the ROG Rapture, all the way back to a premium model from 2013, they're providing this firmware update that lets you upgrade your network while also breathing new life into your older gear and make a mesh network out of hardware that was just already available out on the market. So they've got 16 different models that are supported, and these are just three random ones that they sent us to set things up here. So we're going to throw this baby in bridge mode, and we are going to turn off all of its wireless functionality so that it doesn't interfere with our good wireless that we are adding. Look at this thing. It's like, bleh, my head crab, bleh. No, nothing. Not even a chuckle. You want a lap track here? I want it a chuckle, or like a ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Open a web browser, you will be redirected to the ASUS Setup Wizard. If not, navigate to router.asus.com. Okay. I mean, James, I'm thinking placement-wise, this goes pretty well with the Live Love Laugh candle, right? Like, I'm just kind of, whoop, whoop. Okay, so now that we've reconfigured this, all that's left to do is check out this ball and friggin' ROG router interface. I've never actually seen that before. And make sure the internet is working! Yes! All right. Now we need to mesh it up. It's amazing how much of the tooling we use. All right. Then we're going to stick with our theory that staggering our routers is going to be good. And we're going to do the same thing upstairs. So now we're back at the front of the house. And we're just going to, oh! I would hate to obstruct this beautiful, original, Stribe crea- Ha ha ha ha! James, you suck. And I'm going to put this right here. Okay. So to get into AI Mesh, we go into the network map, and it says, new feature available. Woo! Cool. Now what we want to do is go to here. AI Mesh combines more than one ACS router to form an AI Mesh system. Yep. Yep. Got it. Got it. Um, search for available AI Mesh nodes nearby to join your AI Mesh system. Hey! There's one! The AC68U. So I think that's the one upstairs. And is it going to find the AD6U? Let's see. Find out. It does suggest putting them right next to each other during setup, which we clearly didn't do or read the instructions. So we might have to go get the AC86U, but we'll see. All right. Here we go. So we've got a successful ad and a bunch of instructions that might have been good to look at before we positioned everything. High and open space between your AI Mesh router and your existing dead zone. Dippity bloppity. Yep. That sounds good. All right. Let's search again and see if we can pick up the other one. It's cool that you don't have, I assumed we would have to like plug ethernet into those ones and like configure them as nodes. But instead it just grabs their default SSIDs and just finds them. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's kind of smart actually. Okay. This one is meshed. So we are all the way up in the upstairs bedroom again. Go ahead and Netflix it up. HD YouTube it up. How are you doing? Not bad. Not bad at all. Okay. What resolution are you running at though? Let's see 1080 on that one. Sure. Hit it. And this Netflix stream looks not bad. So this is interesting. James's father-in-law came home while we were working on this and said he's been thinking of putting a TV out here by the hot tub. So because we're going to have amazing Wi-Fi signal strength, let's go ahead and I'm just going to skip to part of this that isn't buffered. Go ahead and play that just like that. All they'd have to do is run power to it and he'd be able to get full quality 4K Netflix. No problem. And with something like that TCL TV that you actually did the review of recently, that whole thing could be done pretty cheaply. And that's still playing really well too. Not bad. So James is, James is Wi-Fi on the gram. Not great. That's something we should figure out how to test in future notebook videos. But as for mine, I'm on 5 GHz and I'm skipping around in these videos like nobody's business. Crazy. And we're at the furthest point on the property now behind this trailer. So this is between us and that access point in the window. Not bad. These rocks. Ow. My soft YouTuber feet. So that's it. My work here is done. All that remains is to throw away the garbage that we produced and, oh, tell you guys about the opportunity of a lifetime. You too can own an AI mesh compatible router from ASUS just by checking out the link in the video description. You've got to make a 15 to 30 second video talking about how bad your internet solution is. And three lucky winners, that's three not six, sorry, three lucky winners will get their very own AI mesh router. The contest closes seven days after this video airs. So go check it out. 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