It’s a commonly held belief that the next big shift in smart home technology will be convergence — for good reason. Once you’ve added smart lighting, security and multi-room audio to your home, you may find your router is buried under a mass of proprietary communications hubs.
Multi-device controllers like Wink and SmartThings (now owned by Samsung) have helped to reduce the clutter. Samsung Connect Home takes convergence one step further by bringing together whole home Wi-Fi with a SmartThings controller. It’s an obvious progression, but one that has taken some time to reach the marketplace.
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With SmartThings, Samsung has acquired great experience and execution in smart home control. It makes a lot of sense to take that proposition to the masses by packaging it in a router. But with little heritage in home networking, Samsung will need to be on form to compete with leading whole home Wi-Fi systems like NETGEAR Orbi , Linksys Velop and Google WiFi in a crowded marketplace.
Head over to Digital Trends to read my review of Samsung Connect Home. The headline: Convenience comes with compromise…
2 comments
I read the review at Digital Trends, but I’m a little confused about wireless backhaul. The mesh units have Ethernet jacks, and there’s a chart on Ethernet speeds, but it’s not clear if that is supposed to give a baseline for the Ethernet network or supposed to represent wireless speeds over mesh units with Ethernet backhaul.
Hi Ron,
That’s a baseline for Ethernet speeds when a client is directly attached to the router. As I mention in the review, wireless speeds for clients do improve 2-3 times when utilising Ethernet backhaul, but mesh speeds aren’t the best.