AmpliFi – The unboxing

Well, I don’t normally get excited about wireless extension system, but there was something cool and futuristic about AmpliFi that certainly caught our interest at Coolsmartphone Towers. We covered the unit’s release not so long ago, and now we have one to review.

The box was huge and very impressive (I really like nice boxes – not at all weird!). Once I worked out how to get into the box (it was late, do not judge me!), there before me was the main unit, two extender wands and the power supply.

Setting it up

The first job; find the new unit a home. I currently have a very old, out-of-date Netgear router managing my front room’s internet due to my house design, therefore it was an idol swap for the AmpliFi hub.

The hub sprung into life once I connected it to the outside world (ethernet) and all my other internet animals in my front room. The little portal window was informative throughout the process, but I did need to download the AmpliFi application to set the configuration to my choosing. The whole process took about 5 minutes to configure and download the latest firmware to the hub, which was very painless.

The second step: find a home for the two wands. To make the review fair, one went into my office and the other in the bedroom. Both locations were a good distance away from the main hub. All I had to do is turn them on. Everything else was self-configured and again I had to use the app to update the firmware.

Once the network was complete, the internet dropped out and twice I had to reboot, but I put this down to teething problems with the firmware updates.

The app

The app is very informative and allows you to customise the hub and the wand individually. As such, I turned the LED lights off on the bedroom unit and turned off the sound on the hub – it was freaking out the cat! One nifty feature I particularly liked is that you can set up individual profiles or groups within your household, which is great for assigning kid’s devices.

Conclusion

I love the overall design, and how easy the kit was to set up. Yes, it isn’t the cheapest, but the quality is sublime. You can buy the hub on its own or as the entire MESH HD system at AmpliFiScan and Amazon.