Vilo Mesh Wi-Fi System Review: Affordability Is King
Vilo Mesh Wi-Fi System Review: Complete Wi-Fi Connectivity for Only $ 60?
RRP $ 60.00
"Compared to the competition, you can save 90% of the costs with Vilo by sacrificing only 30% of the speed."
advantages
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Affordable price
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Easy setup with an intuitive app
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Lots of ethernet ports for a wired connection
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Compact, attractive design that is expandable
disadvantage
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No Wi-Fi 6 support
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Some speed and connection issues
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No WPA3 support
Mesh routers are a great option for your home WiFi needs, but the prices of these systems often make them inaccessible to many households. Vilo wants to turn the home mesh WiFi market upside down with an affordable proprietary system.
At just $ 20 for a single router or $ 60 for a three-pack that combines to cover a home up to 4,500 square feet, Vilo promises to have up to 120 devices at a time for a fraction of the cost to connect competing devices.
It's roughly a fifth the cost of the competing Linksys Velop Mesh Wi-Fi system, so Vilo obviously had to make some compromises. But it cuts in all the right places, balancing performance and features at its extremely attractive price point.
Jump to: Design | Specifications and Features | Establishment | Performance | Our opinion
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Vilo mesh routers can be purchased as a pack of 1 – ideal for smaller rooms and offices – or as a larger pack of 3 to cover larger houses. Each unit, called a node, is identical and interchangeable, so it can be used either as a satellite or as the main router directly connected to the modem.
The Vilo units appear much higher quality than they are, and nothing about the Vilo's build quality would give away its $ 20 price tag. In fact, the minimalist square canister design – and the non-glossy white surface of the device – reminds me of the higher quality Velop mesh system from Linksys. The Velop, by comparison, costs a whopping $ 229 to $ 300 for a three-pack.
Like the Velop, the Vilo is very light and its compact design – 5.9 x 2.7 x 2.7 inches – no bigger than a large can of iced tea. The simple design of this device blends in perfectly with your furniture and home decor.
Unlike traditional Wi-Fi routers, mesh systems don't come with graceful, protruding antennas that resemble alien-like tentacles. The goal of these systems is that the more stylish design means that you'll want to place these devices throughout your living space to provide better WiFi coverage, rather than hiding the mesh system and obscuring its signal behind furniture and devices.
On the front of each vilo you will find a recessed round button that allows you to quickly disable the network connection to that particular node. as well as an LED display for the network status. When the Vilo starts, the LED will be red, but will change to solid blue when you are connected to the internet and the system is ready. A blinking blue light indicates patchy internet coverage, while an amber light indicates the device is ready to be paired and set up.
If you're sensitive to light or don't want Vilo's LED to interfere with the ambient lighting in your home, you can cover the LED hole with white tape for a cleaner aesthetic.
Each device has three Ethernet ports on the back to accommodate wired connections if required. Ethernet ports on satellite devices can be useful for gamers who may need a reliable connection and have their modem or main mesh router in another room, or for connecting IoT devices in remote corners of your home. The ports here won't deliver the same speeds as you'd expect when connecting directly to your modem, but they can help maintain a more stable connection for critical applications.
The ethernet ports on satellite units are a welcome change from my older Amazon Eero system that didn't have support for wired ethernet connections on satellites. In general, I use the Ethernet ports on my satellite nodes to connect my game console, an IoT home hub with no built-in Wi-Fi, and my desktop PC.
Specifications and functions
For just $ 20 per unit, you won't find support for the latest Wi-Fi 6 or Wi-Fi 6E specs on the Vilo. Still, with dual-band 802.11ac on board, you get the same Wi-Fi 5 support found on something like the higher-end Linksys Velop AC2200 mesh system. Unlike Vilo, Linksys offers a premium version of its Velop system with Wi-Fi 6 support.
The main difference is that for $ 229, the Velop has a tri-band antenna for better coverage and reliability, while the cheaper Vilo uses a dual-band antenna. At a significantly lower price, you still benefit from MU-MIMO connections, beamforming and band steering with the Vilo. The belt control can be configured via the Vilo Living app, which is available for both iOS and Android. The app's dashboard provides you with additional information about your mesh network, such as: B. Your Wi-Fi signal strength, the current firmware version and your choice of encryption method.
To set up your home WiFi network, you need to use the app. Every Vilo device comes with a QR code on the bottom. As soon as you have registered and logged into the app, you will be asked to scan the QR code of the main device first – this is connected directly to the router. If you buy a multipack, subsequent satellites will be detected automatically after you connect them. While Vilo offers a three-pack configuration, you can purchase additional nodes and pair them with your system if your home requires it. Like competing mesh systems, the app gives you a lot of control and information about your home network in a non-intimidating way.
Another benefit of the app is that parents can control the network to plan downtime when individual devices are locked. If you have young children, this is an extra layer of the digital wellness apps built into many modern phones and can help establish healthy internet habits.
You can also block specific websites, create a guest network that visitors with a separate password can use, and remotely restart your mesh system if there is any glitch. And if data is your interest, you can also view a usage report to see how much data each device is using. For guest networks, you can use Vilo to set up temporary networks with an expiration time or permanent, so that you can flexibly change your password and your settings to ensure security.
Put up
I tested a three-pack of the Vilo system on my parents' premises, which is bigger than my smaller apartment and a better indicator of how the units work together as a mesh network. In my smaller room, a modem with a unit would have been enough.
For the test environment, I replaced the existing Eero Pro 6 network at home with the Vilo network. I put one unit in the upstairs bedroom at the back of the house, one in the living room downstairs in front of the house, and one in the garage.
Due to the layout of the house, the garage has always been a Wi-Fi dead zone, and in the past my parents have placed repeaters or a mesh node in the garage to connect their garage door opener and ring. to control cameras. Since every device must be connected to the mains, it must be located near an electrical outlet.
power
Like a network of cell towers, the mesh system would determine which node has the best connection and switch your device to the strongest node as you move around the room. It all happens seamlessly, and in theory you should get the best WiFi reception without having to switch to a different network every time you enter a different coverage zone.
To test the Vilo's performance, I wanted to see if there were any drops in speed and differences in coverage reliability as I moved around the room. I know my parents have 300Mbps symmetrical speeds from their local Internet Service Provider (ISP), and when I connect my iPhone directly to the router-modem combo provided by the ISP, I get speeds in that range.
The bandwidth ranges from the lowest speed of 280Mbps to the highest speed of 325Mbps. The Vilo device supports a maximum of 867 Mbit / s in the 5 GHz band and up to 500 Mbit / s in the 2.4 GHz band.
Vilo says that each device has four internal antennas and can serve multiple users with MU-MIMO, which makes it reliable for different devices connected at the same time. Beamforming is also used to route the signals from the nodes to the devices, and band steering automatically sets each device to either the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz band.
If necessary, you can deactivate the band control in the Vilo app for devices that require a specific connection to a 2.4 GHz band. I disabled the band controls for the test and instead forced Vilo to rely on the 5 GHz band for our tests so that the ISP speeds would not be limited by the lower band.
During speed tests at various locations around the house, I found that the Vilo network was on average 30% slower than the Eero Pro 6, averaging just over 350 Mbps across multiple locations in the house. Still, a three-pack of the Eero Pro costs $ 6,599 for a three-pack.
This means you can save 90% on costs by only sacrificing 30% on speed, making the Vilo a serious winner for most average households.
It wasn't all bad, however. In the living room, which is connected to the main node – the unit that is directly connected to the modem – the speeds are higher on average at around 400 Mbit / s. When moving to the opposite end of the house, where only the main node was running, the speeds fluctuated by almost 200 Mbit / s.
When a satellite was used in the same location in the house, the speeds were around 250 Mbps. In the garage, with its infamous Wi-Fi dead zone, speeds were around 75Mbps during my speed test – that's 15% of the 500Mbps my ISP promised.
Compared to the Eero Pro 6 system, the drop in speed was not as drastic as with the Vilo. In the living room, the Eero Pro 6 reached almost 450 Mbit / s, so it is slightly faster than the Vilo in this setting. Outside of the main node, however, when moving to the other end of the house, speeds were much faster than the Vilo at an average of 320 Mbps. In the same location with a satellite unit, speeds were on average more than 100Mbps faster, at 370Mbps. And in the garage, the Eero was still delivering almost 150Mbps on the dedicated node for that room.
The biggest criticism of the Vilo is that the handover between different nodes does not work as well as on competing systems. This is a problem if you start your connection at one node on one end of the house and then move to another point in the house that should have been served by another node for optimal speed and coverage.
This doesn't happen often, but I noticed when I was pulling out of the garden – where I had good WiFi coverage on my phone when connected to the node from the upstairs bedroom – to the front of the house, which should have been should be served from the main node in the living room. After my migration, not only did my WiFi reception collapse – which indicated that I was connected to a more distant node – but also my speeds drastically due to the weaker reception.
While this isn't a common problem for most families – you really work on your laptop or tablet in one place – it is an issue when you FaceTiming or video calling with people while walking around the house.
Speeds are only part of the story when it comes to Wi-Fi networks. In general, I found the Vilo system very reliable in use. In the month that I used the Vilo network – both on my parents' test site and in my apartment – the network had to be restarted twice.
The first time was after a software update that caused a bug that prevented one of the satellites from being detected and the second time when devices connected to Vilo's network could not access the internet.
While this may seem frustrating, the glitches are easier to miss with the lower price of Vilo. Compared to my older Wi-Fi 5 Eero system, the Amazon branded network works much more reliably today, but when I first started I had the same glitches twice or three times a year and mostly after software updates.
Our opinion
If you don't already have a mesh home network, the Vilo system should be at the top of the list. While Vilo compromises on more modern features – the system lacks an option for Wi-Fi 6 support and it comes with a dual-band antenna instead of a tri-band antenna for even more robust coverage – its affordable starting price of $ 20 for one single router unit or $ 60 for a three-pack make Vilo great value for those looking to switch to a home Wi-Fi mesh system.
Are there alternatives?
Vilo's bigger competitors include Amazon's Eero, Logitech's Velop, and Google's Nest Wi-Fi. And while Wi-Fi 6 is supported on some of the more expensive models like the Eero 6 or Velop AX4200 Wi-Fi 6 system, you pay a premium for that technology. Right now, Wi-Fi 6 has not yet fully caught on, and even if your current smartphone or laptop supports it, most households in the US don't have the broadband speeds to use Wi-Fi 6.
According to Ookla's Speedtest.net, most households in the country have an average of 192 Mbps for fixed line broadband. Vilo's Wi-Fi 5 network supports up to 867 Mbps, which most broadband plans at sub-gigabit speeds should handle competently.
In addition to mesh networks, Vilo also competes with conventional WiFi routers, especially when they are coupled with range extenders.
How long it will take?
Vilo offers a one year limited warranty to cover all hardware defects. And unlike smartphones, Wi-Fi units are often stationary, so they're not prone to accidental damage. With a smart device like a mesh router, you also get years of support with software updates that run in the background and ensure that your Vilo network lasts for years. In general, the Vilo network should hold you up until you upgrade to home broadband speeds greater than 1 Gbps.
Should you buy it?
If you do not need a Wi-Fi 6 and do not yet have a Mesh WLAN system, you should definitely consider upgrading to the Vilo-Mesh. The device offers a stylish, good-looking appearance, but it does make some compromises in terms of speed. But at $ 60 for an entire home network, the speed losses don't matter much to prudent buyers as long as the system works as advertised and you can get reliable reception in the farthest corners of your home.
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