Amazon Puts Money Behind Luma

[thiggins]

Amazon's backing could give Luma a big boost in its market share battle with eero.

Read on SmallNetBuilder

 

[rmiller1959]

I've been following both the eero and Luma initiatives for a while, and the plethora of positive reviews of the eero led me to pre-order the Luma router multi-pack plus one for my three-level house with the Wi-Fi holes in the basement and master bedroom. They were half the price of the eero, and I figured the eero at least demonstrated that the home mesh networking proof of concept works. Luma has time to learn from eero's mistakes, if there are any, and the company looks like it's got some experienced and reputable tech leadership. This investment by Amazon gives me greater confidence in my decision. I have to wait until June to actually receive the product, and I'm sure there's something sketchy about them collecting people's money for so long and being somewhat cagey about the delivery times. I'm assuming they applied the funds toward product development or something, but that's pure speculation on my part. I'm in no rush, though. My current setup works OK for now.

 

[stevech]

Open Mesh - hardware/software meshing on 2.4GHz WiFi for access.
Been ar0und for some time now.
Supported by CloudTrax (cloud server based mesh management - multiple vendors)

I wonder how Open Mesh .com (not .org) is doing?

http://www.open-mesh.com/

 

[jupiterfish]

i also have a pre-order waiting but this amazon partnership scares me. the amount of personal information these luma models collect in the hands of a company like amazon that for sure has an interest in the data. this is quite concerning from a security standpoint. these routers take screenshots of browser activity, and deploy more than normal tracking abilities compared to that of your ISP.

Am i the only one that thinks this is a bad idea to team up with amazon?

 

[L&LD]

Am i the only one that thinks this is a bad idea to team up with amazon?

Bad idea if teamed up with amazon or not, imo.

 

[sfx2000]

Am i the only one that thinks this is a bad idea to team up with amazon?

Hehe, ask Netflix - I'm sure they have a few choice words right about now..

 

[LoneWolf]

I've been following both the eero and Luma initiatives for a while, and the plethora of positive reviews of the eero led me to pre-order the Luma router multi-pack plus one for my three-level house with the Wi-Fi holes in the basement and master bedroom. They were half the price of the eero, and I figured the eero at least demonstrated that the home mesh networking proof of concept works. Luma has time to learn from eero's mistakes, if there are any, and the company looks like it's got some experienced and reputable tech leadership. This investment by Amazon gives me greater confidence in my decision. I have to wait until June to actually receive the product, and I'm sure there's something sketchy about them collecting people's money for so long and being somewhat cagey about the delivery times. I'm assuming they applied the funds toward product development or something, but that's pure speculation on my part. I'm in no rush, though. My current setup works OK for now.

Let me get this --you read up on all of the positive reports of a product --so you ordered a totally different product?

With no disrespect, ordering Luma because Eero seems to work for people is like ordering a Linksys wireles router because you heard good things about an ASUS one, proving that "this wireless thing really works". The radios could be totally different vendors. The software underneath is almost certainly vastly different. Just because one mesh product basically works does not mean another won't fail miserably.

Truthfully, mesh is not about performance --it's about convenience. A well-setup wireless network is best done with wired access points in a cluster. Each access point has a guaranteed hard link to the best upstream connection (assuming you did your wiring and switching right), and doesn't halve the connection performance because it's having to work with a previous upstream wireless network. Now, there's a place for something like Eero, because there are people who either want to (or need to) take the simple way out and not run a few cables in their house or leased apartment. However, it would seem to me that your reasoning for buying Luma has flaws, and if you saw people were happy with Eero, you should buy Eero; and if you wanted to save money, you would want to wait for the eventual Luma reviews to see if the product actually measures up to what Luma delivers. Sometimes half-price means half-quality, or some other tradeoff like (speculation, not assertion here) all of your search metadata over wireless being filtered through Amazon.

 

[L&LD]

LoneWolf, great points.

You really cut through to what was important and relevant.

 

[LoneWolf]

LoneWolf, great points.

You really cut through to what was important and relevant.

What can I say? The nonsense in my life is low when it comes to networks.

(Now, drinking with my buddies or hanging with my wife is a different story).

Oh, and one other note --while it's not my #1 priority, those Luma access points are kind of ugly. I mean, if you were going to tile them together and make a room that looks like the prisoner room on the aircraft in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., maybe, but they're large, clunky-looking, and oddly shaped. I much prefer the look of Ubiquiti, Eero, or OpenMesh (which, by the way is an off-the-shelf WAP that multiple vendors including Watchguard use; the difference is in the underlying firmware/software, which can be quite significant depending on your dev team).

 

[sfx2000]

Truthfully, mesh is not about performance --it's about convenience. A well-setup wireless network is best done with wired access points in a cluster. Each access point has a guaranteed hard link to the best upstream connection (assuming you did your wiring and switching right), and doesn't halve the connection performance because it's having to work with a previous upstream wireless network. Now, there's a place for something like Eero, because there are people who either want to (or need to) take the simple way out and not run a few cables in their house or leased apartment

I posted some insight in another thread that might help this conversation... I was involved with a startup that was looking deep into Mesh for small scale deployments....

http://www.snbforums.com/threads/ho...his-summer-from-eero.22549/page-3#post-189912