Regular consumer Wi-Fi routers have a set of standards and certain technology used to deliver wireless network connectivity. Meet Portal, a turbocharged Wi-Fi router that is said to have a different type of technology that wasn’t used in the regular routers.
Quite different in looks, Portal aims to deliver high speeds even at places where it is usually hard for regular routers to give a good speed even if there is proper coverage. There is support for 802.11AC WiFi but Portal is said to work with all the six channels of the 5GHz spectrum when compared to the current standard routers that can work with only two channels.
For those staying in the apartments, you know your Wi-Fi router isn’t still delivering well at times even though it is a top-end one and your network connectivity is all good. The reason for that is congestion, with the signals from the neighboring routers. Portal is going to work with the channel shifting and see that if one channel is getting crowded, it will hop onto the other one – working smartly unlike the standard routers that stay on the same channel all the time.
Terry Ngo, CEO and co-founder of Ignition Design Labs, the company behind this Portal router said that the antennas that stick out of the router are mostly useless. According to him, there is a total of nine antennas inside the Portal and alongside that is a total of 10 advanced radios. The demo in the pictures show that from a certain distance, the Portal router could allow playing 4K videos with ease but a Netgear one struggled to do that.
Setting up the router also is quite easy as you can do that right from a smartphone. The same setup interface helps in securing dynamic guest networks, give real-time notifications and also the remote management of the router. There is said to be an enterprise-grade security available with WPA/WPA2—PSK to begin with, and Parental Controls to manage web filtering and accessibility, double firewall protection, and an optional 2-factor authentication.
As for the ports, there are five Gigabit ethernet ports and two USB ports. There is a lot more to talk about this, and the router seriously seems like something that focuses on a part that not many other are doing currently. Also for those who want a wider range in larger homes, two units can be connected together to create a mesh network.
You aren’t so lucky to get the early bird price of $139 but $159 is what would right now give you this Portal router, which seems like quite a good price for what is being offered. Check out the campaign on Kickstarter.
While we talk about these projects from crowdsourcing websites, we cannot guarantee or vouch for their delivery or whether they would be successfully made or not, but they are among the coolest ideas people have got.
