Netgear has a new product, the M5 5G unlocked mobile hotspot. Netgear’s new Nighthawk M6 5G (MR6150) offers speeds up to 2.5Gbps on supported network plans, and when plugged in for home use, it has a range of 2,000 square feet.

The Nighthawk M6-5G supports 32 concurrent device connections, just like its predecessor. You can use the small LCD display to manage your connectivity options. The Nighthawk M6 5G also features Gigabit Ethernet, USB-C and USB-3 ports that will increase internet speed for all your favourite devices.

But technically speaking, the M6 5G is about 20% faster than the M5 5G. It also adds 160MHz capabilities, which provides a maximum 3.6Gbps device connectivity for select Wi-Fi 6 products.

Removing the M6 5G’s battery and plugging it into a wall activates “In-Home Performance Mode.” This boosts the router’s effective range to 2,000 square feet. That said, Netgear hasn’t revealed the M6 5G’s range when in mobile mode.

You can pre-order the Nighthawk M6 5G Mobile routers available for as low as $799 This is an unlocked phone, it doesn’t include any SIM cards or 5G plans.

Source: Netgear 

Google announced its all-new Nest WiFi Pro, 6E with leaks ahead of the October 6th hardware event. This powerful router costs $199 and comes in four new stylish colors. It will be available by October end.

While it’s more expensive than the previous model, as expected, Wi-Fi 6E is a vast improvement over the older generation, plus Google is offering 2-pack and 3-pack options with heavy price discounts.

Google Nest Wifi Prowith 6E is an improved mesh Wi Fi system that can deliver excellent internet speeds. It also has a signal strong enough to cover 2,200 sq.ft. To complete the set-up, larger homes may add additional Pros.

What is Wi-Fi 6E and should I upgrade to it? Wi-Fi 6E will significantly enhance your wireless internet experience at home. 6E improves the existing Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) standard, delivering improved speeds, lower latency, and better performance thanks to the 6 GHz spectrum.

The biggest difference is the 6 GHz spectrum isn’t as congested with devices, routers, and other things that can interfere with your Wi-Fi signal and performance. This is similar to driving along a busy highway instead of on congested, slow-moving city streets. It provides a direct route to an internet connection that is reliable and smooth.

Wi-Fi 6E offers speeds up to two times faster than Wi-Fi 6, and Google’s new Nest WiFi Pro will take full advantage of that. Google claims the Pro is built with intelligent software that can constantly analyze your network performance and optimize your connection. It’ll even jump to a different band to improve speeds. Prioritization software then automatically boosts high-bandwidth activity like gaming or video calls.

The new Google Nest WiFi Pro 6E comes in four stylish colors; Snow, Linen, Fog, and Lemongrass, and it doesn’t have ugly antennas and blinking lights. Basically, it’ll blend in with your decor instead of being an eye sore.

Additionally, Google confirmed its new router doubles as a Thread border router and will be a Matter hub when that platform finally arrives. The new router is easy to set up for buyers. improved Google Home app.

It Nest WiFi Pro is $199 for a single device, $299 for a 2-pack, or $399 for a 3-pack, covering up to 6,600 square feet. You can pre-order starting October 4th. Shipments will begin on October 27th.

Upgrading to a smart thermostat is great, but if you don’t use all the features, you’re leaving a ton of benefits on the table. Make sure you’re taking full advantage of these smart thermostat perks.

Your Thermostat Can’t Do Everything Automatically

A lot of people receive a smart thermostat as a part of their energy rebate or because it came along with newer properties with advanced HVAC systems.

If you didn’t go out of your way to research everything there is to know about smart thermostats and your particular model, you’ve likely overlooked a feature or three. You might have missed some features, even though you researched smart thermostats thoroughly.

You can also read our feature list here. Now is the perfect time to look at your smart thermostat and review its manual. This will allow you to identify the various features, and help you learn. how to These can be used.

Increasingly, many of these great features just happen auto-magically in the background once you’ve installed your thermostat, but many of them require you to either opt-in, toggle a setting, or otherwise enable the feature to realize the full benefits. Don’t assume that a feature is on by default just because it’s advertised as available on your particular smart thermostat.

Smart Scheduling

Two major ways that smart thermostats can make scheduling easier are: First, you can manually create a schedule or multiple schedules. it’s so much easier to do so with the app or web interface than it used to be with clunky old programmable thermostats.

There were many times when I used to hunch over an old-fashioned thermostat, clicking little buttons to create a program. With the app, it’s trivial to set a schedule and trivial to change the schedule if the need arises.

Many smart thermostats are smart enough to adapt to changing patterns in your house. The thermostat learns your schedule and adapts accordingly.

Keep reading to learn more about how you can make the smart thermostat work better and the smart scheduling function even better.

Allow Smart Home Integration

We’re slowly moving towards a future where all the different smart devices and sensors in our homes work together in a useful manner. Install the app to get the best out of your smart thermostat. Set up all necessary accounts and connect your thermostat to the smart home.

Doing so opens up a world of possibilities from the simple—like controlling your thermostat from a smart display in your kitchen—to the more advanced—like integrating your smart thermostat into more complex routines with IFTTT routines.

With the imminent rollout and standardization of Matter, smart thermostats will be a key component in this new ecosystem-of-sensors home.

Enjoy the Away Mode

It is very similar to smart scheduling. One of the downsides of set schedules and old-fashioned programmable thermostats is that, while they were an improvement over never adjusting the thermostat, they weren’t adaptive.

Smart thermostats are an adaptive system in which the temperature and humidity of your home can be adjusted based upon the presence or absence of people.

It might not seem like a big deal, but let’s take a simple example. Let’s say, with an old programmable thermostat, you set the temperatures for Saturday and Sunday to be very comfortable in the middle of the day because you anticipate being home on the weekend.

You would forget to turn on the thermostat each time you went somewhere Saturday afternoon. It’s unlikely. Your smart thermostat will adjust automatically if it senses that your home is empty. You don’t need to input anything.

Most thermostats with this feature have a motion sensor integrated into their front. Other thermostats will include smart sensors that provide better coverage (more details in a moment). It is possible to also use geofencing with your smartphone—the smart thermostat will use the presence of your phone to determine if the home is occupied or not.

Use Smart Fan Circulation and Humidity Adjustments

What the features are called varies from brand to brand, but the majority of smart thermostats have a pile of efficiency and comfort functions related to optimizing airflow and humidifying (or dehumidifying) your living space.

Look through the settings for options that run the fan for a period of time after every heating or cooling cycle to help circulate air and even out the temperature in your home.

There are also usually options to hit target dehumidification goals in the summer and humidification goals in the winter to keep your living space comfortable.

Don’t Forget Smart Sensors

Smart sensors aren’t a replacement for an actual multi-zone HVAC system, but they offer enough benefits that it’s worth looking into the smart sensor options for your particular thermostat.

Some sensors function as (and are directly marketed as) temperature and humidity sensors you add on to extend the reach of your thermostat. Several of the Ecobee smart thermostats You can ship with an additional sensor pick up extras To expand the system.

The Ecobee SmartSensors not only monitor the conditions of the room—which is handy if you want to make sure a particular room, like the baby’s nursery, stay comfortable—but also the occupancy of the home for smart home and away modes.

Other situations, however, sensors can be more restricted but still very useful. For example, if you have a Nest thermostat then every Nest smoke detector also serves as an occupancy sensor. If your thermostat is in a lesser-used room it’s incredibly useful to have a sensor somewhere else that gives a more accurate insight into whether or not anybody is home.

In my home, for example, the thermostat is on the wall of the living room and the living room simply isn’t part of the regular flow of traffic. But there’s a sensor near the stairs, a heavily trafficked area, which ensures the away/home state of the thermostat is much more accurate.

Turn On “Feels Like” Temperature Optimization

You might have noticed your favorite weather app or local news station using terms like “Feels Like” or “Real Feel” when describing weather conditions. Those “Feels Like” temperature readings use variables like the actual temperature, the humidity, the wind speed, and the dew point to give you an approximation of what the weather outside actually feels like instead of just the raw temperature reading.

Some smart thermostats have a similar feature, but it works, more or less, in reverse. With the thermostat function you tell it what you want the “Feels Like” to be and it works to adjust the internal temperature and humidity of your home to match your expectation. That way, you get the feeling of 72°F on a pleasant fall day instead of 72°F on a muggy summer day.

Enable Time of Use Power Saving

There are several different approaches to “time of use” power-saving models available with smart thermostats.

Some thermostats, like those in the Ecobee line, offer user-controlled time-of-use saving plans. You can enable a setting that will instruct your smart thermostat to work around the peak energy demands in your location.

For example, your thermostat might supercool your home at night to avoid running the AC when energy costs are at their peak in the middle of the day.

Other thermostats, Ecobee models included, can link to your local utility company for automatic time of use adjustments and even some savings. Many utility companies offer discounted rates or even cash-back rewards for these programs, so that’s worth looking into.

Check Out Energy and Usage Reports

Historically, it was really difficult to track data and statistics about your HVAC system and energy usage. Old thermostats either lacked any tracking metrics at all or, if they had them, you would need to go to the thermostat and poke through menus on a little LCD display to get some basic information of limited utility.

Smart thermostats, however, offer much more sophisticated feedback. Not only do they learn and adapt quietly in the background—you can also look at reports to see if your usage is going up or down. You can also more easily correlate that data with any changes you’ve made around your home.

For example, if you put insulated blackout curtains up or purchased new windowsYou can easily compare energy consumption between different seasons or the past and the current season.

And the reports usually do some basic analysis for you, like displaying the outside temperature and conditions against your energy usage to help you determine if the reason you ran the AC so hard that week was that it was unusually hot or because there’s some issue you need to investigate.

Make use of Reminders and Alarms

When it comes to identifying problems, smart thermostats do a better job than old models at assisting you.

Nest thermostats or thermostats with similar functions can monitor the outcomes of your thermostat and give you an alert if something is not expected. If the thermostat is calling on the AC and running it for X hours per day, for instance, and the temperature of the home is not changing as expected, you’ll get a notice that something is wrong.

Perhaps the issue can be easily resolved (as if your children left some of their toys). windows open,) or maybe it’s more serious (like the coolant line has a leak.)

It is possible to set up alerts for high- and low temperatures, humidity, as well as maintenance reminders. You might as well lean in hard on the whole “better living through technology” aspect of having a smart thermostat and use these features.

Enable Dealer Service Alerts

If your thermostat supports this feature, you’ll be able use it to send you alerts or general warnings.

A few thermostats allow for dealer integration. This allows you to link your thermostat with the HVAC company servicing your system. The system will notify you when there is an issue with your HVAC system and can automatically send the information to your dealer.

Instead of you trying to find the cause or calling a technician to look at the issue in person, they will be able to check the situation remotely. This makes it easier for them to resolve the issue. They can also alert you in advance if there are a number of issues or errors that could indicate a larger problem. An inexpensive repair or replacement is better than spending $1500 for a larger repair.

Slow Wi-Fi speeds can be a problem due to the extent to which people rely on it for work and entertainment. These are the most common reasons for Wi-Fi problems and how to fix them.

Assess Your General Network First

Before we dive into the common reasons your Wi-Fi performance is less than expected, let’s get a few things out of the way so you can better troubleshoot your Wi-Fi speed issues.

First, don’t rely on a smartphone (or a laptop using Wi-Fi) for your speed test. A smartphone can’t be used to speed test your internet connection.

Before you blame Wi-Fi for your troubles, make sure that your connection is running at optimum speed. This will help to identify any other issues such as a slow internet modem or ISP.

Second, Wi-Fi speeds are deceptive. The Wi-Fi speeds your hardware claims it can perform, in terms of advertising and labeling, are not the same as what it is capable of doing under actual-world conditions.

Even with a fiber connection that meets or exceeds the advertised speeds of your Wi-Fi router, you won’t get the advertised speed to your phone or laptop.

Instead of approaching your Wi-Fi problem from the standpoint of “Am I getting the full capacity of my internet connection to every device?” which is not how Wi-Fi works, approach it instead from the standpoint of “Am I getting expected performance based on my internet connection and the hardware I have?” and “Has my Wi-Fi experience recently degraded in quality?”

You can’t make a 5Mbps DSL connection faster with cutting-edge Wi-Fi hardware, and even with cutting-edge Wi-Fi hardware and a fiber connection, you’re not going to exceed the inherent limits of the Wi-Fi standard.

However, there are things you can do if you don’t get the desired performance.

Old Wi-Fi routers can impact performance

Everybody hates spending money, and it’s frustrating to replace functional, albeit underperforming, hardware. The reality is that Wi-Fi hardware has improved steadily over time.

If you’re still using an old router you picked up at Best Buy ten years ago or the lackluster Wi-Fi router built into the router/cable modem combo unit your ISP gave you, you’re not going to have a great time. Further, while some of the tips below might help you if you have an old Wi-Fi router, there’s really no replacement for biting the bullet and buying a new router.

Especially for folks with otherwise new hardware—newer smartphones, a new smart TV, etc.—it makes sense to upgrade as pairing newer devices with old hardware is hobbling their performance.

Significance of strength is weakened by poor routing

The only thing worse than having an old Wi-Fi router is parking your Wi-Fi router in a terrible location—and if you have both an old and poorly placed outer, you’re going to have a really bad time.

If you need bright task lighting in your living room, you don’t put your high-power LED work light down in the corner of the basement.

And by that same measure, if you want really strong Wi-Fi where you actually use your Wi-Fi devices—like your living room and bedroom—you don’t put the Wi-Fi router down in the basement with the washing machine.

You can easily move your Wi Fi router. You just need to ensure that the router is placed in a location where it will be most useful for your day.

Too many devices slow down hardware that is underpowered

One of the biggest advantages of newer Wi-Fi hardware isn’t just the improved speeds that come with each new Wi-Fi generation but an overall increase in power and the number of devices the Wi-Fi router can handle.

Even if you’re not chasing performance benchmarks to show off your new 2Gbps fiber line, you’ll benefit from a newer Wi-Fi router if you have a plethora of devices in your home.

We want to emphasize that it’s the number of devices and not the number of users that you want to focus on. Increasingly devices, even when they aren’t in use, have a fairly high bandwidth overhead and place demands on your network you might not expect.

Cloud-based security cameras use a lot of bandwidth, as do a variety of other smart home devices—you’d be surprised how many bandwidth vampires there are around your home. Many people think that heavy bandwidth consumption is a sign of a problem. However, many devices that are using bandwidth will also be using Wi-Fi.

Add up all the computers, tablets, smartphones, consoles, streaming devices, smart TVs, smart home accessories, and more found in a modern home, and you’re looking at a list that easily brushes up to or exceeds the capacity of older routers.

While we’re talking about too many devices on your Wi-Fi network, we’d encourage you think about taking devices off your Wi-Fi network. No, we don’t mean living a life with an Xbox or smart TV fully disconnected from the internet—we mean switching any devices you can over to Ethernet to free You can free up space for Wi-Fi devices that are still active.

Speed of cables and hardware that is older reduces

This one is really easy to overlook if you’re not much of a networking nerd. While the Wi-Fi router itself and the Wi-Fi capabilities of the endpoint devices like your smartphone or smart TV are a huge part of the Wi-Fi performance puzzle, you don’t want to neglect the simple physical bits that tie your network together.

If you have outdated Cat5 cables or an outdated 10/100 network switch mixed in with your network hardware you’re unwittingly hobbling your network speeds.

People with sub-100Mbps broadband may not be able to notice an old switch affecting their performance. But if they have better broadband than you, the cables and hardware could slow down their speed.

You can avoid this by making sure that the cables connecting different components of your network are at least Cat5E. Or better, Cat6. And if you’re using network switches upgrade them from 10/100 switches to gigabit switches. Unmanaged gigabit switches Cat6 patch cables These days, they are extremely cheap.

Channel Congestion Dings Wi-Fi Performance

Wi-Fi channel congest is caused by multiple Wi-Fi device using the same frequency (or channel) in the same area.

It can adversely affect your network if another person has a Wi-Fi router that is similar to yours, and you are close enough so their router broadcasts directly into your living area.

It is more common for devices in the 2.4Ghz spectrum than it is on the 5Ghz, however you need to be aware of this regardless of whether you live in an apartment building or densely populated neighborhood. You’ll need to identify which channels are the most congested and refer to the documentation for your particular router to change to less congested channels.

The Wi-Fi extenders increase reach, but decrease speed

If you’ve struggled with Wi-Fi issues like slow speeds or lackluster covered, there’s a good chance you’ve considered using a Wi-Fi extender and possibly have one in your home right now.

Wi-Fi extenders are popular, but they have an unfortunate reputation for poor network performance.

If properly used, they will increase your network’s reach, but they also can cause congestion and latency in the network, as well as reduced speed.

Temporarily unplug your Wi-Fi extension to rule out it being a cause of Wi-Fi network problems. If the extender has been disabled, you can check the performance of your Wi-Fi network with devices that are connected to it directly. Performance improvements may indicate that there is a problem, or possibly two, with your network.

First, your Wi-Fi extender may be poorly configured and deployed—use these tips and tricks to get better performance. The extender’s additional coverage and the added devices that you have connected to your network may cause more problems than the main router can handle.

In that case, it’s probably a good idea to just abandon the router + extender configuration and replace it with a more robust mesh network. You can upgrade to a mesh network by simultaneously updating your router and mating it to wireless extenders that are supercharged.

There’s no appliance in the kitchen that gets opened and closed in an impatient panic more often than the microwave. These doors are tough. That’s also why there’s no kitchen device more in need of the smart treatment.

It’s easy to make fun of kitchen products like refrigerators and toasters having smart capabilities. The features of many appliances are a delight to look at. don’t simplify anythingThis can lead to unnecessary bureaucracy, and even quasi-sophistication when it comes to performing simple tasks, such as the one I perform with my articles.

But think about how often we burn things in microwaves, or realize the burrito we heated up is slightly frozen and eat it anyway because it’s two in the morning (just me?). Think about how often we open and close the door to check if something’s done, and stare at the microwave impatiently as if it’s somehow going to heat the item up quicker, like a person who presses an elevator button repeatedly, thinking it’ll speed up the arrival.

Smart Microwaves Get to Know Their Customer

The only time I ever cook things properly in a microwave is when I’m melting action figures. So if there were a microwave that could somehow anticipate all the above impatience, wouldn’t you want one? Wouldn’t you want to buy me one? This is what I hope you are seeing.

Smart microwaves can be controlled remotely through your smart devices, offer voice commands to start and stop the cooking or constantly ask how much time is left, and often use sensor technology to monitor a food’s humidity and adjust cooking levels midcycle.

Use the Panasonic Smart Inverter Countertop Microwave Oven. It operates with Alexa and can handle over 100 voice commands (I have 70), so you can tell it to “Reheat my coffee” and then tell it again 40 minutes later because you forgot about the coffee. A “Genius Sensor” (their words, not mine) automatically adjusts cooking times and power by sensing heat and steam.

It acts like a microwave that knows you’re not always in the most rational state of mind when operating a microwave, and responds with, “Don’t worry, I got this.”

The GE Smart Countertop Microwave Oven has a scan to cook function. This allows you to scan the barcode of a food package so that the settings and cooking times are set up and ready for use. Toshiba Smart Microwave even lets you mute so you don’t have to hear that piercing beep when the macaroni is done. Do you hear me, laundry dryers

Smart is it worth the effort?

It’s silly to call microwaves time-savers. All microwaves are time-savers. But because they’re all so fast, it’s easy to ruin food in them or constantly have to reheat it, and we’re often distracted doing other things when we come home tired from work and accidentally put our shoes in the microwave.

With a smart microwave you can eliminate all the guesswork and get your shoes cooked perfectly.