 Now you might assume that everyone who works at Linus Media Group is super tech savvy, but you'd assume wrong. So let's take a look at Colton's game streaming setup. So this is it. This is the room where quite literally dozens of people tune in to watch Colton game stream and ignore his wife every week. Oh, what's this I see? That's a factory router that... look at all the cat hair in this thing. So this is it. Colton, this is how you ended up with the free router upgrade from Netgear. You betcha. So Netgear wanted to sponsor a video where we took the LMG employee with the worst networking setup and got them up to speed. And I think we have chosen wisely. In some ways, Colton's Wi-Fi woes are a bit of a first world problem. Now a lot of people live in apartments where all the different competing access points make it so that it's hard to get a decent amount of airtime so you can get adequate latency for gaming or enough bandwidth for things like Netflix streaming. But Colton has a bit of a different problem. He lives so far out in the sticks that it's a non-issue. But the thing is you got to have pretty decent range or you're going to drop your signal. So let's run around and take a look at what some of the problems are here. Okay, so problem number one is that on Colton or should I say Cal-Tains stream, it's become a bit of a running gag that his internet connection just drops out outright. But the thing is you're actually plugged in via a wire. So is this thing just that bad that you just lose your stream even though the internet working like other devices still work? Most of the time, yes. But the real issue from a like household harmony standpoint is not Colton's gaming rig. Let's face it, his wife doesn't care if his game streaming setup is working. It's Netflix. So especially when Colton's streaming, there are issues with Netflix not just not defaulting to the utmost of quality. We actually unfortunately missed an opportunity where we were really watching this punch in and out of high and low resolution here. But that's the thing about Wi-Fi for some reason. Why is your TV hooked up via Wi-Fi? You can't run cables. Okay, it doesn't it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Anyway, the point is that especially while Colton's streaming, Steph has issues with Netflix and that's when it matters the most when she's being ignored when all she has is Netflix. So if Netflix doesn't work now what? So just to get a baseline for what our Wi-Fi signal looks like around the house, we're using a tool called Wi-Fi analyzer here to have a look at both the 2.4G and 5G bands. So overall signal strength from within the house actually not too bad. And actually that's bizarre even out in the yard. The signal strength is pretty darn good. Colton that thing must just really suck if you're dropping your connection. All right, maybe we just need to get on with this. I was actually going to connect to their Wi-Fi and do some speed testing. But the the piece of paper with the password has apparently fallen down next to the fridge because the magnet came off and they never changed the password on their access point. For shame Colton. Wow, this is actually a really significant upgrade. You're going from like zero to basically top of the line for an AC router. So this is the XR500 from Netgear. And what makes it special aside from just having powerful hardware in it is that it's running Duma OS, which is made by a company called Net Duma. And their goal was to create a network appliance operating system that has advanced functionality, some of which that you wouldn't normally find in like a home router. But more importantly, make all those functions accessible even to people who don't know a ton about networking. And overall it's getting rave reviews even just from the Net Duma routers. And I'm really excited to see what a company like Netgear, who's already well known for their powerful home access points is able to do with it. Oh my God, the stock password for this thing is RusticRoad168. It's like they knew who it was for. This is great. So, you know what? I think the real test is here we are in the Duma OS dashboard. Can Colton do it? What do I got to do? Well, first you need to set your Wi-Fi to something that is not RusticRoad168 here. So, here. Okay, do you want me to? Yeah, you drive. Okay, I'll drive. So I did the funniest thing for a while. I live in a cul-de-sac. And so I called my SSID the corner house. So people be like... Which one is the corner house? That's good. It's not that funny. That's great. I'm gonna do... What if I did like hate my neighbors? Wow, not bad. I'm gonna do it. Well, I don't care. Okay. Nobody uses Wi-Fi around this one. Okay, do it. Let me do it. You did it. Alright, that really wasn't the point of today's video though. Anyway, that's fine. That's just so that now we can actually get on your Wi-Fi. Oh, cool. Hey, not bad. Hey Colton. Yeah, what's up? Good news. What's the good news? You're like 8% faster than you're supposed to be. Woo! On the download anyway. Dang! Also, your Wi-Fi is as fast as your wired now. Now we're outside though. And I mean it's acceptable. Like we're still getting over a hundred megabit down. Actually, that's not bad. But hey, Netgear was like, yeah, we want this place to have like amazing Wi-Fi everywhere. And we were like, okay, so we're gonna put a range extender in. Yeah, this is like perfectly fine for whatever you're doing right now. Planning LTX presumably. Yes. In a perfect world, you would actually hook up a range extender via wired ethernet. Because that way you're not using a precious spectrum communicating from the range extender back to your router. But this particular one, this is the X6S, is actually a tri-band Wi-Fi range extender. So since most devices cannot actually use three bands at once, you can have a dedicated band as like a back channel. And then you've got dedicated bands for out there in your yard for whatever devices you're using. So you use one 5 GHz for your back haul and then another 5 GHz out there and your 2.5 GHz out there. So we can actually put this anywhere we want as long as it's close enough to your game streaming room and it has a power outlet. Oh, thank God. Yeah. So you want it in that corner? Because it also happens to have an ethernet switch on it. So this looks like a place where people sit and use their computer and then they could use it with a wire. This works. I just used WPS because I was lazy. So I'm going to put that there and I'm going to go back outside. Hey. Hey. Yeah, like see if it's going faster. Yeah. Yeah. Heck yeah. I mean, I don't know what I was expecting, but. It's like double the speed. Hey. Hey. Woo. Oh, he got me. I high-fived Colton. I congratulated him. Good job, Colton. Thanks. You rock, man. And now your internet rocks just as much as you do. Okay. So now that everything's working, we can actually poke around in the software a little bit starting with the device manager, which is this cool map of your entire network. So you've got your router here at its heart and then you've got your wired devices. So Philips Hue and desktop GD9 whatever. That's this guy. And then you've got your 2.4 and 5 GHz Wi-Fi. From inside here, you can see any details about the device. So in the case of my phone, it managed to grab my MAC address, the name of the device, the type of the device. It knew it was a phone. And if you know that's not your phone, you can go ahead and quickly block if it's like your neighbor piggybacking off your Wi-Fi or something along those lines. Then once you got your map of devices, you can actually play around with them a fair bit in the QoS tab. So they've got a feature called anti-buffer bloat, which basically will detect. Well, you can actually you can set it to go all the time, but I'd recommend leaving it on detecting. It'll detect high priority traffic, which would be game traffic. And then when it detects that you can set a certain amount of your overall bandwidth to leave alone to reserve for that high priority traffic. And then another amount, let's say, you know, 70% for everything else on the network. So that way you're still going to be able to use Netflix, but your gaming packets are going to be able to jump the queue. Another cool thing here is this little graphical bandwidth allocation. Now QoS is not a new concept. It's present on everything from entry level up to enterprise grade routers. But having it laid out graphically like this is pretty cool. So we can say, OK, Philips Hue, you get 1% of the bandwidth. You are like super not important versus let's just go ahead and update that desktop GD9. Whatever you get, like, I don't know, 75% of the upload because that's really where most of the uploading in this house happens. Then we could also take, you know, my one plus seven. We could say, OK, you get, you know, 2%. So now you can see that our download speed is significantly less than the 300 megabit we had before. And we're only getting about half of the upload allocated to us. The other cool gaming centric feature is called GeoFilter. And what this basically does is in the old days, you used to just refresh a list and you could see all the servers for a given game and connect to the one that has really low ping. But nowadays it's all matchmaking based. So you don't really get to do that. What this does is on your router's level, it will actually block any game servers that are too far away such that they're going to result in a less than satisfactory gaming experience. So you just set whatever radius you want. So I could say I don't want to connect to anything that's less than a thousand kilometers. So basically, I'm only going to be playing on like West Coast North America servers. And then we go ahead and add a device. This guy right here. And what games? Okay, so this is cross platform. Actually, most of these, by the way, Call of Duty's PC, Battlefield cross platform. We'll go ahead and say, yeah, Call of Duty. I don't want to play on a server that is more than a thousand kilometers away. Pretty cool, right? So there you have it, guys. That was how Colton managed to scan his work into giving him a free network upgrade. Yeah, you can. I guess you can you can hold on to this. So I never really understood that upgrading your router really mattered until this project. Some of the Doom OS features are really cool, like their geo filter. I use it when I'm playing Rainbow Six Siege early on, like a Saturday morning when I'm, you know, I'm on the West Coast servers and I'm getting paired up with people from the EU. So using that feature actually manages to get me in servers that are actually on the West Coast, which is really good. And if you use a VPN, you can actually set up on the router instead of having it on each device that you own. That way you use Doom OS to specify which program should go through the VPN and which don't. So it doesn't slow down your game. So some other cool points is that Netflix is a lot more stable now. We have much better coverage in our backyard. Plus, Steph can have a wired internet connection when she uses her laptop in our kitchen because the extender has two gigabit ethernet ports on it. Plus, there's four more on the router itself back in my office. Other extenders often create a separate network. So you have to connect to a different network in each part of the house, which is super annoying. But this router and extender automatically forms a single mesh network. So there's just seamless roaming between them. So thanks to Netgear for sponsoring Colton Streams. Not cutting out all the time. Very valuable. Kaltane on Twitch, okay? Go check it out. Subscribe to PewDiePie. Excuse me. I'm sorry. That's dead meat. Guys, so thanks for watching. If you just like this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join.