 Welcome to Linus Tech Tips at CES 2013. Our trip to the show this year is powered by Corsair, maker of quality PC components and peripherals. Our trusted storage partner is Seagate Technology and our trusted networking partner is Linksys. We're here in the Linksys suite where Matthew's gonna be telling us about the product refresh that they are bringing to the market. This is pretty much the first real generational move in wireless since we went from G to N, is that correct? That is absolutely correct. So show us the beast of all beasts, the AC1750. Sure, so we actually have an AC1750 in the market today, but what we're doing with this refresh through the spring and availability will be later in the spring is we're gonna buffer it up and take a little bit more power behind this and give you a USB 3.0 port. And the capabilities of our new AC routers through the spring as well are also gonna have part of the specification of AC, which includes beamforming technology. I'm assuming you know what beamforming is Linus? Why don't you explain it to me and the viewers? Okay, sounds great. I would say that beamforming is gonna take, let's use the light bulb analogy. If you would turn on a light bulb, it would give you coverage throughout your entire home. If you were to turn on a flashlight, it would give you directional coverage towards where you're aiming it. Same idea with beamforming technology. It's gonna take the antenna configuration and it is gonna send the wifi signal directly to those devices throughout the home. So obviously you're gonna get faster transfer rates and you're gonna have a better experience. So tell me two things. Number one is do the antennas have to physically move? And number two is how does it know where your devices are? So no, the antennas are not gonna move. That's part of specification built into it. And your second question was, how does it know where the devices are? It is going out looking for the devices, pinging those devices. Once it's established a connection, beamforming starts to do its work and that's how you're gonna see the benefit. So it's gonna have to have multiple antennas if it's gonna have any idea where something is located. Is that correct? Correct. And these are all three of our routers that you see in front of you right now. These are all three by three antenna configuration routers on the AC side. Okay, very cool. So I mean, something that our viewers may or may not have picked up from that is USB3 is not only going to, look blue and sexy on the back of the router, but what it's also gonna do is it's gonna allow you to take advantage of that AC transfer speed with a network attached storage device that can be something as simple as a plain old external USB3 hard drive. So let's go ahead and put this one down because this is probably gonna be pretty expensive. So maybe not every viewer can afford the super Uber premium one. So why don't you tell us about the AC 1600? Sure, so the biggest difference between the two and it's pretty straightforward Linus and viewers obviously is that we're taking you from AC 1750 to AC 1600. So what we're doing is we're still gonna give you the great speeds on the five gig spectrum at 1300 megabits per second, but on 2.4 instead of 450 megabits per second, we're gonna take you down to 300. So again, you're still gonna get pretty good 300 megabit per second speeds on 2.4, but still have 1300 megabits per second on the five. The other difference that we'll notice here, we've also taken one of the USB ports away. So we're gonna give you USB 3.0, but not that additional USB 2.0 port. Okay, so you still get to take advantage of the fast AC transfer speeds for your network attached storage, but just you don't have that other auxiliary port. That is absolutely correct. Okay, now this guy over here has like a green box and sort of is smaller than the other ones. What is the key difference between the EA 6300 and the other two that we just looked at? Sure, so again, we're gonna go back and look at the speed and what this is gonna do for you, this is the entry level in our AC lineup, 300 megabits per second on the 2.4, 867 on the five gigahertz spectrum. So when you put it together, you're upwards to AC 1200 as a combined speed. So again, it's just a little bit less speed on the AC spectrum, but if you need more, you easily take yourself up the line and choose the right product for you. Again, on the back, USB 3.0 port, four gig LAN, one gig WAN, very straightforward. Okay, now here is sort of the trick. Now AC is still not that prevalent out there. So we're gonna move actually, sorry, Diesel, we're gonna move this way a little bit. So I actually tested on my YouTube channel, I took a USB, unnamed competitor D, say for example, an unnamed USB stick that was AC 1200. And I put that up against a wireless N450, not some other USB stick, competitor T, say for example. What we discovered was that the 450 was actually dramatically faster than the AC USB stick. So if the USB sticks aren't there yet, and they're not ready to take advantage of the speed, can you show us what you guys have to allow customers to actually use the AC gigabit wireless? Yeah, it's absolutely a great point Linus, and you hit it right on the head. So what we did when we launched our AC 1750 skew into the marketplace in the spring of, or sorry, the fall of 2012 is, we launched the Universal Media Connector alongside. It's a single band, four port AC media connector. So for the customer that is buying any one of the spring routers coming up, or the one that's currently in market, you're now gonna be able to transfer up to 1300 megabits per second wirelessly from router to bridge, and any one of those four devices that are plugged in. So we looked at that as an opportunity to say, let's bring not only the router to market, but let's give them a corresponding media connector to do the job that we know AC can do. So I mean, that was a bit of a, I led him on on that one a little bit because I already knew that the media connector just absolutely destroys both the N450 and the USB AC stick. And we actually tested one of those as well. So it was something along the order of about four or five times faster than either of the other solutions. So I think that pretty much wraps it up for our CES 2013 coverage of the Linksys Suite. Thanks again, Matthew, for joining us. Thanks Linus for having us. And guys, as always, don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips.