BLUF: Amplifi Alien is a beast, in looks and performance.
I’ve been in love with my Amplifi HD Gamer’s Edition mesh. The Wi-Fi coverage, gorgeous LED screen showing network metrics, and simple web and iOS interfaces to manage the devices–everything was great. However, as I wrote in my review, the Internet speeds were often less than 1/4th my ISP bandwidth. At the same time, my ISP — Spectrum — had been very unreliable with consistent outages every few weeks and slow speeds on every device, this where comes Amplifi Alien.
Here’s the tl;dr:
- Gorgeous screen with fun content being displayed
- Very easy to setup
- If you’re comfortable spending the money, get x2 individual Alient routers ($758 vs $699 for the kit) — more LAN ports but also, what’s better than 1 Alien router? 2 Alien routers!
- Very expensive to begin with and very expensive to scale since you will have to buy another $400 (incl. taxes) Amplifi Alien main router to extend this
- The mesh satellite comes with ONLY 1 ethernet port, like why just 1 port in a such huge tower?
- The Amplifi HD cannot be connected in a wireless mesh to extend this
- Performance is significantly better than the Amplifi HD mesh kit
