Google WiFi review

Features

The Google WiFi app also has some nifty features – not least parental (group) controls which let you simply group devices and suspend access at the touch of a button.

Everything is tied to your Google account so you can easily access settings from anywhere without logging in using remote access.

You can also set up a guest network and access Google Home devices. There’s even a good monitoring page which shows you what’s connected and how much bandwidth is being used by each device. You can also prioritise traffic to different devices.

However, it is worth noting that this is a separate network to your router and your router only detects it all as a single Network Device. As such, you’ll lose access to advanced features like VPNs that your router previously offered. You can still use the router’s WiFi for those features, though.

Conclusion

It’s worth noting that other similar products are starting to appear on the Australian market, including Linksys Velop which promises to do much the same thing – we’ll be testing that in the next few days.

For now though, Google’s Mesh WiFi is the first WiFi system that actually fills a home in the manner in which it’s supposed to. Forget routers and setting them up and extending the network, these things just plug in and work and offer the main features that most people need.

If you need advanced networking features, they’re still on your router but not available here. However, for the overwhelming majority of people, if you want to boost your WiFi, this is the obvious way to do it. A single node costs $199 and isn’t really worth buying on its own unless you REALLY want access to Google’s easy-to-use basic features or you need to add one to an existing mesh. At $499 (for the three pack) it’s not cheap, but compared to a top router and multiple extenders it’s reasonable value. [Update: we've since reviewed the rival (and practically identical) Linksys Velop mesh WiFi system which costs a whopping $800 making Google WiFi look positively cheap] Either way, for the first time in years, our house has stopped thinking about bloody WiFi working – it finally just works. WiFi just evolved and everything that came before it now looks outdated.