What's new

Experience with Almond+ by Securifi

  • SNBForums Code of Conduct

    SNBForums is a community for everyone, no matter what their level of experience.

    Please be tolerant and patient of others, especially newcomers. We are all here to share and learn!

    The rules are simple: Be patient, be nice, be helpful or be gone!

I had mine come in the mail about a week ago. I have just managed to upgrade its firmware to the latest release. Looks great, is running its own simple software on top of openwrt which you can reveal via webui if you choose to.

However, I wish their simpler ui had more options as I found myself having to go to openwrt for common tasks like disabling DHCP server.

802.11ac speeds were (subjectively) very good.

Looking forward to actually buying some home automation devices and connecting it to the Almond+.
 
I did a search for securifi on the forum and this was the only thread on the Almond+. Does anyone else have one? It is on sale right now for $200 rather than $300. I like that it has both ZWave and ZigBee support but Amazon reviews make it sound like the home automation part of it isn't really done. I was thinking about making this my main router and switching my current ASUS 68U to an AP.
 
Besides the Zwave and ZigBee support, their product page ( http://www.securifi.com/almondplus ) says it supports up to a 5000 sq ft home. I have an old home and wireless signals don't travel well here (2 story, 2200 sq ft). I can't imagine the Almond+ would have that much better range compared to what I have now but it is hard to tell since there isn't much for discussions or reviews of this router on SMB.
 
at about 3,000 sq. ft. or most multi-story homes, you'll need one or more WiFi access points to get good TWO-WAY coverage (to/from client devices which are low powered).
 
at about 3,000 sq. ft. or most multi-story homes, you'll need one or more WiFi access points to get good TWO-WAY coverage (to/from client devices which are low powered).

To get good dual-band coverage - I have 1600 square feet, and I have two AP's active...
 
YMMV is the prenial problem. My parent's house has fairly good coverage at 3 stories and around 4,000sq-ft total from a single Airport extreme. There is an airport express in the basement to cover the one small area that is more or less a dead spot in both bands. That is it. 5GHz of course doesn't cover the whole thing, but 2.4GHz does really well for almost the whole house. New house, large rooms fairly open floor plan.

That said, my 2,500sq-ft single story + basement house has a best mediocre coverage with a single router, so I run a router and an AP to cover the whole thing really well in both 2.4 and 5GHz. Old house, not an open floor plan plus things like a big masonry chimney "blocking" things up in the microwave spectrum.

With some pretty extensive testing from the best to the worst router/APs, the difference in actual coverage is relatively minor. Of course the difference in SPEED at various locations can be pretty large from one to another, even the same number of streams and the same standard (IE 11n). So I guess in a sense that does change how decently things are covered. I did recently move my Archer C8 to the rough center of my house to check and it does actually cover the entire house pretty well on 2.4GHz which my WDR3600 wasn't able to do, with roughly 50% or so better throughput at edges which does push some stuff from marginal to decent performance, but C8+WDR3600 still covers the entire house much better. With the WDR3600 the worst spots would be around 2.5MB/sec with it semi centrally located (which is a CRAP spot to try to locate it for a number of reasons), with the C8 the worst spots are around 4MB/sec, this is with a single stream 11n client running at 40MHz. With the 2 basestation setup spread across the house, the worst spot is 9MB/sec for a single stream client on 11n 40MHz 2.4GHz. Laptop went from the worst spot being about 5MB/sec with the WDR3600 to 8.5MB/sec with the C8, with the two basestation setup it is roughly 16.5MB/sec.
 
Open floor plans = fewer walls.
Newer homes tend to use more RF friendly flooring materials in a multi-story home - versus the older 3/4 in. real plywood subfloors.

Your point that cover is not just the existence of signal from the WiFi access device. The client devices usually have less transmitter power and that's the constraint as most of us know.

But really, few people understand the relationship between signal strength and WiFi speed - two-way, and that trying to push up speed so the user observes a faster connection data rate - leads to a higher frame/packet error rate. This results in much lower net throughput due to retransmissions for error correction.

The IEEE and WiFi alliance don't enforce a policy on "signal + interference + noise" ratio versus attempted connection rates. Marketing folks can drive engineering to push too far.
 
Last edited:
Open floor plans = fewer walls.
Newer homes tend to use more RF friendly flooring materials in a multi-story home - versus the older 3/4 in. real plywood subfloors.

Your point that cover is not just the existence of signal from the WiFi access device. The client devices usually have less transmitter power and that's the constraint as most of us know.

But really, few people understand the relationship between signal strength and WiFi speed - two-way, and that trying to push up speed so the user observes a faster connection data rate - leads to a higher frame/packet error rate. This results in much lower net throughput due to retransmissions for error correction.

The IEEE and WiFi alliance don't enforce a policy on "signal + interference + noise" ratio versus attempted connection rates. Marketing folks can drive engineering to push too far.

That is a good point too. My floors are 3/4" ply over 2x10's and 5/8" oak floors with some nice BIG flooring nails through them (the old square nails). My parents house from the construction I have seen is 19/32" OSB, which is a bit less dense and more RF friendly than actual 3/4" plywood, with a mix of carpet over it and engineered joists (which are generally thinner than 2x10"s) and the bit of hardwood that there is, is also 5/8" oak, but it uses standard flooring staples (which are a lot smaller, so I'd assume less RF scattering).

Though they also have HVAC duct work through some of their walls and floors and I have none (attic AC unit and ceiling vents with nothing run to the basement).
 

Sign Up For SNBForums Daily Digest

Get an update of what's new every day delivered to your mailbox. Sign up here!
Top