Aside from announcing the Galaxy S8
and S8+, the new Gear VR and Gear 360, and the DeX dock for the phones, it's
also found time to unveil its own mesh Wi-Fi solution.
It's called Samsung Connect Home Smart Wi-Fi System,
and like all of its competitors you will be able to purchase either one device
or a pack of three. Where Samsung's devices get a lot more interesting is that
each one is also a SmartThings hub. So if you're into the whole IoT trend and
have or would like to grab some stuff that works with Samsung's IoT system
(which is SmartThings), then you won't need to purchase a (usually rather
pricey) hub for those IoT devices too if you have a Connect Home router.
That's an interesting sales proposition for a very
specific niche of people who care about IoT at this point, but it is something
we haven't seen from other mesh Wi-Fi routers before. On the networking side of
the equation, Samsung's new device has a claimed range of 1,500 feet, which
unsurprisingly is similar to what you get from a Google Wifi.
The Samsung Connect Home has 2x2 Wi-Fi 802.11ac
support (with throughput of up to 866 Mbps), and it comes with 512MB of RAM and
4GB of storage. Powering it up is a quad-core 710 MHz processor, which is
swapped out for a 1.7 GHz dual-core chip in the higher-end Connect Home Pro -
and this model also supports 4x4 802.11ac for "AC2600" rated speed
(that's a maximum throughput of 1.7Gbps). The coverage is the same for the Pro
though.
Unfortunately pricing information hasn't been made
public, nor a release date for the system. The price will be very important
since the Connect Home has plenty of competitors that are already available.
