I'd recommend Ubiquiti's UniFi. I installed three total units (one as base, two satellites). The setup spans 15,000sqft across two stories and split building (connected by breezeway). We get full speed on every corner and crevice. It has a great management interface. The cost was only 199. Well worth it.
I agree. I've have much success with Ubiquiti - everything from bridges to really solid wifi in the home.
And FWIW, they have recently started shipping a UniFi Mesh product called... UniFi Mesh. I haven't used it so can't really speak for it, but its marketing site is here: https://unifi-mesh.ubnt.com/
Ubiquiti works well in a low RF noise environment.
We have 1k+ unique SSIDs visible throughout our office and I was having horrific latency spikes, lost connections, etc. with top of the line Ubiquiti equipment. Trying tuning them every which way from sunday. No Dice.
Spent the money and switched to ruckus and instantly: perfect wifi. Never looked back.
I deploy a lot of Unifi APs and run them off a controller hosted in AWS which I fire up when I need to monitor or deploy.
Be aware with Unifi gear there is no onboard configuration or UI beyond busybox shell via SSH and a basic command line tool. They are intended to be deployed using the Unifi controller which once setup can be shut down, but will be required again to change passwords, etc.
Unifi is definitely at the top of my list for multiple AP deployments, I still prefer MikroTik for edge devices though.
> Be aware with Unifi gear there is no onboard configuration or UI beyond busybox shell via SSH and a basic command line tool. They are intended to be deployed using the Unifi controller which once setup can be shut down, but will be required again to change passwords, etc.
To clarify, this applies to the edge AP/repeaters. I know for sure every router I have purchased from Ubiquiti has had an onboard/hosted web management UI.
That said, you can install the UniFi management portal on a local machine and serve it on demand from a laptop. Or, as you (eltoozero) have done, host it remote.
And finally, you can also buy their "Cloud key" device which acts as a host for the web management portal.
Ah good to know! I would guess this is because the security gateway, cloud key, and APs are all part of the "UniFi" line so they are all meant to be managed by the cloud key/management portal. That said, I wonder if the UniFi switches similarly don't have on board management (it sounds like a no)...
Once nice thing is you can one run controller app in a docker image, useful if you have an unraid setup or similar. A lot cheaper than buying their little cloud key.
I run a handful of Unifi AP's, I've been running the control panel on a vm on my server for a while, but I really like your idea of running the controller on AWS.
I also love the MikroTik router with wifi I have back home though.
Running the controller is AWS is good for large installations, but as a Java app, it eats memory, which can be expensive on AWS. For smaller installs, it works fine to just run it as-necessary from a local machine.
Not quite, the phone app talks to a controller which configures the AP. You still need to run the controller (Java app) somewhere if you want to change settings or monitor the APs.
Also not quite, you can configure some basic settings with the phone app and without a controller. Not all features are available though with only the app. You need to reset the AP if you want to add it to a controller later on.
Another happy UniFi user here. I have an 18th century house which isn't large but has very thick internal walls, which makes it a tough environment for wifi. A couple of ceiling -mounted UAC-AC-Lites connected to an Edgerouter X gives me full speed everywhere.
Are your AC lites hard-lined into the router? And if not do you get speed degradation from the hops?
My house is 17th century bastide in France which was apparently built to repel canon or nuclear blasts -- my walls are a meter thick in some places and average over a half meter of pure stone. Wifi is a challenge and pulling cable is excruciating.
I agree completely. I went all in and I have 7x UniFi ap AC in my house (2 per floor over 3 floors and one in the guest house). They are all powered by the switch (power over Ethernet) making it super clean.
The software is fine by the big advantage is that it has meraki reliability without the licensing.
I have the UAP-AC-PRO and an Edge Router Lite and couldn't be happier. I tried way more expensive consumer routers (Nighthawk), using a pair of TP-Link Archer C7s (with one in AP mode), extenders, freaking everything. They all had problems that were incredibly painful.
The AC-PRO covers my entire house (2 story, 2500+ sqft new construction) and garage with no latency issues or dead spots. There's no handoff issues like having multiple APs/extenders, there's a faster throughput than I was getting with the Nighthawk, and the PoE made it a breeze to install centrally in the house.
I'm only upset that I waited so long to just give up on the purely 'consumer grade' crap.
I just bought one UAP-AC-PRO. The one pack comes with a PoE injector. The five pack does not. I highly recommend it after a week of use.
Also, the linked article is wrong. The iphone app is more than adequate for simple home setups (no crazy java pc installation required while you're up on a ladder / in the attic installing it). It wouldn't surprise me if they have a comparable android app. Didn't check.
Also Ubiquiti are launching a new mesh networking product this month.
The unifi ac pro's work awesome, consumer routers are kind of mickey mouse after these are deployed. Mounted them in a ceiling like a smoke alarm connected via ethernet, on the other end is an included poe injector unit or just use can use a switched hub with poe ports like ubiquiti edgerouter. The only thing I don't like is the management tool requiring java for the browser but it's pretty simple to figure out. Overall it's cheaper than these other mesh products.
If you need a router functionality, get there edgerouter but I'll tell you this, it's super powerful but not something easy to figure unless you have a deeper understanding of network protocols. Great stuff.
> The only thing I don't like is the management tool requiring java for the browser but it's pretty simple to figure out.
You don't need Java to work in the browser. The management tool runs on a Tomcat webserver. That requires Java. I don't know if you need to install Java to get that working, or if Java is included in the tool itself. But you don't need the Java plugin in your browser for the tool to work. To test this, disable or remove the plugin and see if the management tool keeps working!
Used to work for a WISP. Got to know Ubiquity through their rock solid backhaul radios. Was hyped when they released the Unifi. Utterly and totally agree. Three UAC-AC-Pros over two stories deployed here, homeplug AV1200 for their uplinks and local PoE. Controller running on my VM server. Being at other people's homes has become amusing, link outage when you close too many doors and no coverage in front of the house? I remember that, but not fondly.
The Archer C7 the article recommends is solid, too. At least when flashed to OpenWRT, stock firmware is horrible.
The AirFiber backhaul radios are good, but the rest of their product line is not very reliable IME. Cambium is much better performing and more reliable.
I am curious as to what issues you had with the AF5x. I've personally deployed about 50 of them with nothing but overwhelming success. The entire AirFiber line is some of the best equipment I've ever worked with.
Mostly interference, even by our own equip. We operated in an area that has multiple other WISPs and the last network step to our customers was entirely 5ghz, so almost all bands all across our network had at least some interference. And with the competition we could not ask to please not use 50mhz channels everywhere even when unnecessary.
I guess I should have said that right away. If interference or false DFS positives aren't an issue, they're excellent radios and with the 34dbi antenna dish UBNT offer you can potentially bridge unbelievable distances.
For LOS Backhauls I'd always go for the AF24HD unless the steep price is an issue. Then again, the license for 18ghz radios alone costs more in Germany and tbh I haven't seen any interference ever with 24ghz, even if it is a free band.
I think the false DFS hits are an FCC issue -- I've used radios from multiple vendors, and any that have been recently certified (Such as Mimosa, Ubiquiti Airmax AC) all have false DFS issues. The older lines(such as Rocket M series) do not. I've deployed over 100 Rocket M series and never once have seen a false DFS hit on them. I believe the FCC updated the trigger requirements for a DFS shutdown which greatly increased the possibility of a false positive.
Airfibers are our choice any time there is interference. They handle it better than any other radio we've tested. Have you found another vendor that can handle it better? Obviously there would be no comparison against a licensed setup.
As for the AF24, they're not an option in Florida for distances over 1 mile due to rain fade. They are great radios, but 24ghz is not a viable frequency if you need it to work when it's humid, foggy, or raining.
Na, I think we were mostly facing band congestion. Think an area of a few dozen square miles with three independent wireless providers all doing customer connections with 5ghz plus another country's border with other users of these bands again right next.
Probably unfair to blame it on the AF5X.
As for the weather, I would assume Southern Germany has as much in common with Florida as Switzerland with Hawaii. Snow is an issue but in LoS links it was never a big one. Only on 60/80 Gigahertz links, but those you can kill with a well placed wrapper of tinfoil anyway :)
Our DFS false positives were, since FCC reqs don't matter here, most likely due to congestion or Swiss mobile providers playing with nanocell setups or what not.
All in all I prefered Ubiquity over Mikrotik, Ruckus and Cambium. Mimosa I liked, too, but when it came down to it Ubiquity had the nicest features, the best build quality, the most accessible configuration and the best resulting links.
Not in the WISP biz anymore but I do enjoy talking shop. Did you try the Amplifi the article mentions yet? I have my Unifi setup at home and really don't think I will change it to something else, but I would love to try their first consumer product :)
I don't get much into the consumer side of things, so I haven't dealt with most of the brands mentioned in the article, but I have deployed 500+ Ubiquiti access points, some in a network with 5,000+ users, with mostly great results (just watch those bad firmware builds!).
As a rule of thumb, any time I see "mesh" I run far far away as it usually refers to a bunch of single-radio half-duplex access points and some sort of super "self-healing" magic. One second you get great speed, the next you have horrible speed. But most of the routers mentioned in the article are dual radio with a dedicated "backhaul" thus probably work much better than the mesh networks of the past.
On 24ghz I do have an 18km link running at 250mb/s FDX on a standard set of AF24, but the slightest atmopheric disturbance takes it out. Even my 3km link will drop in a heavy storm. I haven't even bothered with 60/80. I doubt they would make it across the street!
1000% this. I've given them my praise before on HN, but can't say it enough. These are best best things you can do for your network without spending tons of cash.
I have the latest Unifi system and a similar about of devices/hardware: the problems have been resolved, and a known fix is to disabled forced band steering. It all works great.
Oh, that's very sad. Was recently looking at these because my wife and I have been having connectivity issues with our old netgear router. Figured I'd just use it as an excuse to get permission to upgrade. Guess I'll hold off.
Google Wi-Fi seems to be using 802.11s "mesh networking" protocol, but I think that's still mainly targeted at in-home/in-building mesh networking. The mesh networking era we'll all expecting could be enabled by the upcoming 802.11ah, which works in the 900Mhz spectrum, and should offer higher ranges.
Although I think the target is only 2x of 2.4Ghz Wi-Fi N right now, which seems a little disappointing to me. I was expecting something along of 1KM range (I don't think Wi-Fi N actually reaches 500m in the real world).
It may be because the Wi-Fi Alliance is trying to make this an "IoT"-enabling technology as well, rather than allow us to connect to each other's smartphones and notebooks at good speeds and longer ranges.
Anandtech says there's quite a big push for 802.11ah from Wi-Fi silicon vendors.
They typically try to re-review or amend their reivews when things get released/updated.
The problem with waiting is: at what point do you stop waiting? Particularly when the vast majority of the time these release dates are pure speculation. If Google releases theirs next month, then word leaks that Amazon has one releasing shortly, should they then wait for that, too? And on and on ad infinitum? I'm sure that at any given moment in time there is _some_ company that is working on a competing product. I'd argue they are absolutely doing the right thing by reviewing what is available regardless of what is on the horizon, otherwise they'd be giving preference to whoever they are waiting on (Google in this case).
Are there any security/privacy concerns with this product? The paper on mapping people and identifying them in an interior space with a router that was on here not too long ago comes to mind...
Yes, it's 802.11a/b/g/n/ac. The -ac is "Wave 2," the newer version of the spec that supports wider channels and about twice the bandwidth of early -ac gear at near range.
I have the UniFi system. 3 story house. One AP each level centered. One AP in the external office (building attached to external garage). I use one UniFi PoE switch in the house and one in the office (2xCat6A between them). FreeNAS mini attached via 2x1G (4x4TB disc, 2x128G SSD as L2ARC & ZIL). UniFi CloudKey and UniFi Security Gateway. I am an engineer ;)
For my less technical friends I highly recommend them Eero system.
I'm surprised there's no system that features integrated Homeplug[1], so base stations pass data to each other over your power lines. This seems like an obvious solution.
A former employer tested out a number of residential Ethernet over power devices.
The results were mixed - they either work really well, or really badly. It seems that the home's wiring and appliances have an overwhelming effect on their efficacy. So, the recommendation is try before you buy if at all possible.
We have a multi-story townhome and tried powerline. When it worked it was very good; "when", unfortunately, was not nearly as often as we needed it to be.
We recently just got a Netgear Orbi and are pretty well satisfied. Turns out the base router/AP is better overall than the other single unit devices we've been using until now and the satellite does seem to make a significant difference in the far top floor room which had problems with both WiFi & Powerline. Lucky for that, too.... our next step was to run cable in the walls.
I've had an Orbi for some time now. What sold me was that it doesn't actually create a mesh network. Instead, it sets up a 1.7 gigabit wireless backhaul connection completely separate from the frequencies used by the client devices you connect. This avoids all of the interference (noisy clients disrupting the access points) and latency (hopping from one access point to another) pitfalls you often encounter when using a traditional mesh network or wireless extender.
The Orbi is basically the wireless equivalent of running wires through the walls.
Well it's still a mesh in the sense that the wireless APs are connected to each other wirelessly.
You can have a mesh network without wireless clients at all if you wanted. For example, you can connect two locations together via a mesh of access points by each end plugging into the ethernet port of an AP, then the mesh provides multi-task redundancy.
Agree completely. The price was not a welcome feature.
Having said that, we had reached the point where I was about to call cabling guys to come in and just get it over with... which would have been some multiple of the Orbi number. We had also had various range extenders and bridges, etc. over the years and frankly I wasn't expecting much of the Orbi either.... but we've been pleasantly surprised with how well it's worked. The only complaint I have is that it does seem its configuration UI (web based) is rather sluggish at times... but I rarely use that.
At this point I think I can fairly say that for us it's been worth the price.
Highly depends on the makeup of your electrical wiring. To get good performance:
- always plug directly into walls, never into extensions, or multi plugs.
- don't even try to jump phases, performance will be atrocious but...
- if you have to, there are phase converters that you can install into your mains
There's a huge performance gap between cheap and expensive homeplug kits, and protocol implementation varies miserably between manufacturers. Also lowest speed adapter determines network speed.
So ideally you want to buy Devolo or TP-Link Homeplug AV1200 kits with integrated power outlets, stick them into walls directly and you can absolutely get a solid Gigabit without running cable through walls.
I do absolutely agree that troubleshooting is a horrible pain however.
I think it's highly dependent on whether the signal has to jump a breaker or not. Anecdotally, I saw roughly 40 MB/s on the same breaker and 3 MB/s on a different breaker.
Uptime is a pretty low bar to clear, especially when comparing against ethernet. How consistent is the throughput and how bad is the latency under load?
So, I got a couple TP-Link devices a few months ago to try to extend internet to my garage (very old construction, separate building on the property) as wifi was having a tough time reaching there and I didn't want to mess with replacing the whole rest of the network and running some sort of mesh setup.
I currently am using a cheap docsis 3 modem (I believe it's a netgear), and an apple airport extreme for the main network, which is extended to the garage through a couple TP Link powerline networking adapters.
I haven't benchmarked the specific powerline performance, but I do know that if I hit up fast.com on my house wifi from my laptop, I get about 100-120 Mbps depending on the day and network conditions. (there's a lot of weird stuff with diff devices and diff routers that I'm eliding here but the Airport Extreme performs very well in my house compared to everything else I've tried)
in the garage, on ethernet to the TP Link powerline adapters, i get about 20 Mbps most of the time. It is pretty reliable, but it's a huge performance hit. Granted, I am using them in an extremely adverse arrangement: old wiring, running through lots of intervening hardware, through the ground, to my garage.
I'm actually happy with them, for my purposes, but they're really not fast.
My house is newer (2011), and I use the trendnets to carry a signal from one corner of the house to another WIFI AP. It is the best solution I found, as none of the meshes at the time worked very well. Speeds are very good, and I have never noticed it going down. I have noticed that if I don't use the AP for a couple days, it seems to go to sleep and can take a few seconds to reconnect.
I use a powerplug adapter (not HomePlug), that was the best wirecutter recommended one at the time. It works great for making a hardwired run to an additional wifi AP across the house.
from what I understand, with recent standards being formed around this kind of thing, manufacturers may push for things like TVs and IoT stuff to use it. It's gonna get messy very quickly. not to mention the increased potential for snooping :(
I used home plug to get IPTV to my set top box. It worked very well. The only time it seemed to have trouble was when I ran a noisy appliance (such as a shredder) near the same circuit. It would cause blocking minimally, and sometimes even drop the video entirely for a brief time.
Is there a DIY solution that can do this? With all features in DD-WRT or OpenWRT, I would have thought the community would have already solved this problem for cheap.
A long time ago, I set up a mesh with a bunch of WRT-54Gs and OpenWRT using olsrd for the routing protocol. It worked pretty well as far as I could tell, but I never setup a proper test to see if multi-hop routing was working well. (My setup was within a house, so basically all the nodes were in range of each other.)
For any large mesh, using a proper routing protocol is a good idea; the default behavior of ethernet it to construct a spanning tree and prune any links that would result in a cycle, which leads to suboptimal routing if you have more than two routers.
There's been a lot of interesting research in wireless routing. One of the more interesting ideas [1] is to use the probability of packet loss as part of the link cost metric, to discourage routers from always using the path with the fewest number of hops, which might be very unreliable.
It's been about a decade since I looked at any of this stuff, so I don't know what the state of the art is these days.
We're working on it at Meta Mesh Wireless Communities, a non-profit company putting together a mesh network in Pittsburgh as an educational and equipment-producing effort. Our AP150 is getting some attention and has been a cool platform for us to ship our mesh configuration.
The IETF Home Networking working group [0] has been working on the software side of this, standardizing things like HNCP [1] to allow for automatic configuration of a home network with multiple IPv6 routers. The Cerowrt [2] router firmware project included mesh networking using AHCP [3] and those packages made it upstream to OpenWRT. So there are quite a few ways to do this, and at least some of them have been pretty thoroughly tested in the wild.
The "DIY" solution is mentioned in the article. Buy a bunch of standard WAPs (the Ubiquiti UniFi range is popular) and wire them together with ethernet.
If you 1) don't have ethernet throughout the house, 2) don't have satellite internet, and 3) can spend a little more, I recommend a pair or more of MoCA adapters as backhaul for the APs. You'll likely get better performance than mesh networking.
Depends on how cheap you want to be. Use ethernet and disable all but one of the dhcp servers plugging the leaves LAN port to LAN port. Or just buy repeaters. I tend to have had bad experiences with cheap wifi routers with or without third party firmware.
DD-WRT/tomato/others do have mesh features but it depends on the radio chipset and other things.
I've tried doing this before and my devices "stick" to farther away access points as I walk across the house. Are there ways to solve this problem, and/or do the solutions mentioned in the article solve this problem?
No and probably not. The biggest issue with wifi is almost always the station/client. Clever units may send de-auth packets to try to get you to renegotiate with an AP with a stronger signal but nothing is guaranteed and some client stacks can be stubborn
The higher-end APs (like the aformentioned UniFi) do have a transparent roaming feature, where every AP broadcasts the same MAC, and the APs handle traffic handoff. No idea how well it works.
If you want a layer 2 mesh (like a switch over Wifi) use batman-adv and 802.11s - This works fine even on a 10$ TP-Link 841N. You likely want to have a model with 8mb flash and 64mb memory - otherwise there is not much stuff for other packages.
Use OpenWRT Chaos Calmer, that is the latest stable released and quite good documented at openwrt.org wiki.
There was a split and now most of the former OpenWRT devs build LEDE - but they don't have a release yet, however if you need support for newer routers or it's there. It's pretty close to the Linux kernel and most fixes (and also breakage) are timely there. http://www.lede-project.org
for routing:
There is olsrdv1 and the new and shiny OLSRv2 that uses IPv6 link-local addresses and has a new metric for optimizing links that takes a lot of stuff into account like packet loss, throughput and so on. https://olsrd.org
> Every other kit we tested relies on a smartphone app and cloud services for configuration, which means if your Internet goes down, your home network—partially or even entirely—goes down with it.
I am getting so tired of this. Why are engineers working for companies that build stuff like this? This is consumer hostile.
Watching a movie or listening to music stored on your NAS. Turning your "smart" light off and on. Using your remote (since even those are cloud connected now).
You know, everyday stuff, for which modern IoT equivalents somehow need internet connectivity to work.
But the app is required for configuration, not for actually using your wifi, right? Perhaps I'm wrong.. The overlap for needing to configure your network and the internet connection being down is probably very small, although not non-existant.
Was about to share this as well. They are 802.3af PoE compatible now too. Not terribly expensive compared to those listed in the article, especially when installing 70+ in a hotel.
Have anyone tried building a Mesh using ESP8266 and custom hardware for signal enhancement?
I am working on a similar project and is interested to know if anyone have had success with hardware addons like external antenna to build a reliable solution?
The chip capabilities are enough to run any low level to moderate load applications like monitoring, actuating and streaming. It is the hardware that I am doubtful about.
With only 96KB of data RAM, I don't see how the ESP8266 could be suitable for store-and-forward relaying of aggregated WiFi frames in a moderately busy channel environment where the device isn't guaranteed the immediate opportunity to retransmit what was just received. I don't think RF power would matter, because the computational resources just don't seem sufficient for the mesh to support more than one omnidirectional data stream passing through each node.
Yeah. I believe Espressif may be considering 802.11s mesh support for the newer and better-specced ESP32, but I expect that's probably going to be intended for low-bandwidth applications if it happen.
I had tried once building something like this mesh - a router with several wifi range extenders sold separately. In my case it was a setup in the apartment with lots of metal in concrete panels, so wireless reception is awful (50-100% signal loss after a single wall). Well it didn't work at all - REs started and worked ok and I did see high WiFi signal, but throughput was horrible - very low speed and regular pauses when no traffic at all was passing through REs. Settings, RE positioning, channels or bands didn't matter.
In the end I just used wired network with access points, more expensive but at least it works. I suggest that all these mesh kits should be bought only when return option is available because they may not work in some cases.
> It’s the only mesh kit we tested that is fully configurable and usable without an Internet connection, and it’s also the only one that provides the full, deep feature set that technical users expect from a high-end router, including plenty of Ethernet ports on both units.
I'm amazed... "and usable" implies some of these kits will go down if you lose your internet connection. Not just that they won't be configurable?
Built a wisp-mesh product a few years ago for a client, in the past mesh-wifi was really just for enterprise and city-wide projects, and never got widely deployed anywhere. Surprisingly it is getting into homes these days, assuming the covering area is large.
For me I'm using AP + a few extenders these days and they worked just fine and are much cheaper.
AirTies Air 4920. Google Wifi does much of the same, but the original is better (and 3x3 as opposed to Google's 2x2). Small access points that don't take up much space, very good client steering and band steering so you're always hooked up to the best AP without thinking about it.
Most wifi hardware supports being both AP and client at the same time. This way, I've extended my wifi signal for just 20 bucks
(Bought a netgear ex2700 and flashed openwrt. I made it join my existing wifi and create an AP with a distinct SSID on the same interface and channel)
In terms of ease of setup, I don't think any of these can beat Eero. And in spite of Netgear marketing dollars behind, Orbi, I hope EERO maintains the lead in this space, as they were the first one to push for mesh networking in consumer Wifi space.
Note that out of the box, Airport does two step wireless network extension, super easily.
It supports "extend your network" as hub spoke leaf model, with both wired-to-wireless bases (hubs) and wireless-to-wireless extenders / relays (spokes), and devices (leaves) will connect to strongest spokes or hubs as you roam.
You can have multiple wired-to-wired and wired-to-wireless bases on the same network each with its own wireless-to-wireless extenders or relays. This has worked and been solid (no reboots needed) for years.
Use the full size tower for hubs and airport expresses for spokes.
802.11ac wave 1 is 1.3Gbps theoretical max, Wave 2 is 2.3Gbps or so theoretical max. But that's half duplex. And it's shared amongst every station on the AP, so it'd be rare to see consistent gig speeds for a station anywhere other than a lab or perfect test setup.
do these things handle moving from one zone to another while something like facetime is running? this has always been an issue i haven't been able to solve.
"For our first round of testing mesh networking kits, our sole criterion was simple: Does it exist? In the future we may need to rule out mesh networking kits by speed, specs, or price, but for this go-round we tested all of the consumer mesh networking kits that were available at the time (not announced, not in crowdfunding, not preproduction). That group included the Eero, Luma, and Netgear Orbi offerings, as well as both the HD and standard versions of the AmpliFi kit. Google Wi-Fi, Amped Ally, and Plume will have to wait for next time."
Note that out of the box, Airport does two step wireless network extension: wired-to-wireless base and wireless-to-wireless extenders / relays. You can have multiple wired-to-wired and wired-to-wireless bases on the same network each with its own wireless-to-wireless extenders or relays. This has worked and been solid (no reboots needed) for years.
I think the affiliate model is far better than having ads everywhere on the site. The incentives are far clearer this way. By consistently making good recommendations, they will build a loyal audience, driving further affiliate sales.
Their product is their reputation for good reviews. Destroying that is clearly against their interests.
Not necessarily. Implicit bias is always a risk for these kinds of review sites.
For example, if vendors know that the site is reviewing their products, they can provide support or a higher level of service to the review and influence the rating.
Magazines like Consumer Reports go to great lengths to bake bias out of reviews, and avoid this sort of risk. But their process has its own problems, as it requires that the reviewers really deeply understand the product, or biases ratings towards customer satisfaction.
My own car (my trusty Honda Pilot with 300k miles) is an example. It featured a poorly handled transmission defect and recall, yet CR scored a very high expected reliability rating, due to historical owner satisfaction.
Caveat emptor applies as always but I agree with you the Wirecutter is a generally good review site.
> By consistently making good recommendations, they will build a loyal audience, driving further affiliate sales.
I mean, that's exactly how bias works. In fact, this is exactly what amazon is cracking down on right now, incentivized reviews.
If your revenue model is based on ads, you grow revenue by growing readership which is grown by writing quality content. However if you're revenue model is based on affiliate income, you increase revenue by selling more stuff.
> In fact, this is exactly what amazon is cracking down on right now, incentivized reviews.
Well... not exactly...
They're cracking down on incentivized reviews on amazon.com product pages. Those onsite reviews being a far stretch away from offsite recommendation blog posts that feature affiliate links, which aren't included in any of their product rating/review metrics.
There's a practical and ethical difference between implicit bias and pay for review.
The review for a particular product isn't an example of pay for play because the Wirecutter gets paid for anything they review that is sold on Amazon. The bias is the push towards Amazon vs Newegg or Walmart and assessments if price based on ephemeral Amazon pricing vs MSRP.
The Amazon crackdown as I understand is about corrupt vendors incentivizing good reviews for shit product.
It's tempting to be cynical about everything on the internet, I know, but I can vouch for Wirecutter's recommendations in 90-95% of cases. They pick decently qualified people for each review and generally go into a lot of detail so it would be difficult for them to recommend something that isn't genuinely good.
Yes, they make money from affiliate links, but they also provide accurate reviews, so why should you care? Do you honestly think it's only possible to write an accurate review if you're not being paid? It's not like they're being paid by the makers of the products, so there's no reason for them to be biased.
Yes, this. With programs like skimlinks providing affiliate links for pretty much every single retailer, I'm not even sure how they would review a product that they don't get a kickback from.
I guess I'm just generically distrustful of reviews in general. Companies can give bad reviews just like normal users give terrible reviews. I don't think I've ever seen a review system that you didn't have to take with a big grain of salt.
I'm not sure how you would create something like the wirecutter with out making money somewhere so I'm all ears for ideas on that.
With that in mind I like the affiliate link model because arguably they can choose any product (in their case the 'best' one) instead of cutting deals with the companies directly (i.e. introducing competition in who pays the most).
They don't always recommend products they make money off of. Plenty of their products (especially in the Sweethome version) are recommendations they won't make money off of.
They're probably the least biased reviewers out there at the moment and take it very seriously.
I see this as win-win-win. For wirecutter, they make money. For the manufacturer and retailer, they make sales. For me, I can get a short list of probably good products in crowded fields to make a decision and price compare, from a site that doesn't take days to load because of tons of ads.
Maybe I wont get the best USB power adapter for my car, but I'll be able to choose from a small menu of them, and will probably get something good. And I can skip reading through hundreds of amazon reviews, many of which are totally irrelevant.
They've earned a great reputation in spite of them.
One strategy would be to discount them somehow. If they give something a great review, don't trust it entirely, but remember it if you also see 5 other good reviews.
