I rarely rate products as five star. This one earned that rating.
I have been struggling for about a week to find a good solution for a recent switch from Frontier FIOS to Spectrum Cable. Frontier allowed and enabled Moca, which allows networked devices to use the Cable as the network delivery medium. We use Tivo cable tuners and DVRs, which have to have access to the network to communicate with one another. One room out of five in my home that had a TV in it, did not have a network jack. I was using the Moca on cable to fill that gap. That went away when I switched over to Spectrum.
I tried a couple of really nice wireless network adaptors, but both of the others that I tried created subnets for the device they were meant to service. This puts those devices on a separate network that passes internet through your main network. This did not work for the Tivo network tuners as they rely on all of their devices being in the same subnet. They apparently cannot be manually configured to find the other Tivo's using network addressing for the other boxes. So this remote box ended up isolated. I had to have something easy to use and configure that would give me an ethernet port that was on the same subnet, and act as a true bridge device. This unit did that, and was so easy to use that I wish I had tried it first.
It is worth noting that this is a Tivo Mini, which relies on the network to watch everything, as when watching TV it uses the tuner built into a Tivo DVR in another machine. It has to have a high speed network to support streaming the TV shows, or to use any Internet based video service. This is also a high def TV, so its bandwidth requirements are high.
Setup was very easy, just plug it into the network port of a pc, follow the instructions to hook it into your wireless network, and you are done. The range for me is about 50 feet. No issues with that at all. I plugged the configured unit into my remote Tivo, ta da, it worked! And it worked flawlessly.
I do wish it had 5G wireless and not just 2.5G. That would allow for faster communication with my other Tivos. But it does support Wireless N, and that really does help a lot. My wife, who uses this Tivo tuner, really didn't notice any lowering of the network rate, and I was able to get somewhere in the neighborhood of 50mbs to 100mbs. So certainly no slacker even with 25G wireless.
My home network is all GigE (1000mps), so I still want to get a network jack installed in that room. But this will bridge the gap really nicely until I can arrange to have that done.
| Wireless Type | 802.11bgn |
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