SO I’ve been using Google Wifi for a couple of months now and wanted to sort of update my initial review.
I picked up the Google Wifi two-pack from the Google Store back at the beginning of December. Overall I was very pleased, at least initially. Setup is easy and without getting into benchmarks or testing it’s pretty fast. Prior to using the mesh network I had two different wifi access points and an extender and still had problems getting a decent signal in some areas of my property. This seems to have been solved by switching to Google Wifi so I was pretty happy.
While the Pro’s up until the last week or so have outweighed the Cons I ran into some issues almost immediately that I have had to work around. For the most part I use static IP addresses on my network. My Home Automation PC, My CCTV server, the BBS computer, not to mention all of my IR controllers and cameras all have static IPs in the 192.168.1 range. Unfortunately Google FORCES you to use a range of 192.168.86. That’s a major problem as I’m not going to change 50+ items, batch files, python scripts, etc.
When I first installed the Wifi network I had my switches and router connected through them. I ended up having to change that so that my Internet connection goes through my router and wired switches ran the Google Wifi hubs from those. That basically means that I had to create two separate networks in the same house. A pain in the ass because I had to expand my subnet mask in order to let devices on each network “see” each other.
Once I had all that set up every seemed peachy until earlier in the week. Google apparently had some sort of issue earlier in the week that effected Google Wifi and OnHub devices and took a great deal of them offline. You aren’t able to manually specify updates, that is controlled 100% by Google. Unfortunately something they’ve done fucked up a large portion of them. There’s no way to backup network settings and people everywhere had to factory reset their hubs and add them back in. It doesn’t take long but it’s still stupid.
Since then my wifi hub that sits in the master bedroom has had to be factory reset twice more. Three times in the past week is a bit much. Every couple of days it just starts flashing red. When I did a search as to what the flashing red light means over at the Google Support site it just says
Wifi point has an issue. | If your Wifi point continues to pulse red, please contact us. |
What the fuck? That doesn’t sound good. Anyway, I have sent Google Support and email and hopefully will hear back from them soon.
Leave a Reply