Author: Pete Pachal / Source: Mashable

If you’re still using a regular router, the Plume SuperPods will be a big upgrade… as long as you’re willing to subscribe to your own WiFi.
In case you’ve been living in a wireless bubble, mesh WiFi is where it’s at.
Over the past few years, mesh WiFi routers have jumped from promising products to the go-to router type for anyone who knows better.
Sure, if you live in a small apartment, chances are whatever router you got from your cable or phone company will work fine. But for anyone with even a modest amount of square footage, mesh routers can fill in any wireless dead zones you might have, bathing every last square foot of your house in reliable WiFi.The basic idea is there’s power in numbers. No matter how good a single router may be, a sole wireless access point means your WiFi connectivity will suffer when you get further away from it. But a mesh scatters multiple WiFi “pods” throughout your house, meaning your devices don’t have to work as hard to maintain a robust connection.
The mesh WiFi space was pioneered by the likes of Eero, but there are now several mesh routers on the market, including models from Netgear and Google. One of them is Plume, whose distinctive silver hexagonal pods, which come six in a pack, are almost the definition of austere.

Image: Pete Pachal/Mashable
Plume recently debuted a new type of pod called SuperPods. The SuperPods are larger than the silver first-gen pods, with better features, and they come with just three in a pack, for $199. Plume says that these three pods do as good a job if not better at creating a mesh WiFi network than the old silver ones.
I wanted to see if that was true so I asked Plume to lend me a pack of the new pods. I’m actually a Plume customer already — a first-generation set of pods serves as my house’s WiFi network, so I was in a good position to judge whether the SuperPods were up to the task.
The adventures of SuperPod
As WiFi routers go, Plume’s pods are pretty cool-looking. They’re basically hexagonal prisms, with one side smaller than the other so they’re easy to grip. The have a matte-silver metallic finish, a power plug on the small side, an Ethernet port on bottom, and the teeniest, tiniest LED on the front.
While the first-gen pods were about the size of a clementine, the SuperPods are more like a proper orange. The ones I got were a “Plum” purple finish, but you can get them in Walnut or Champagne finish, too. Their larger size makes them slightly more inconvenient for some power outlets, depending on what else you’re plugging in there, of course.

Image: Pete Pachal/Mashable
The SuperPods are better than the first-generation pods in a few ways. You may have heard of dual-band WiFi, which is basically the standard now for most devices and makes for faster connections than single-band. SuperPods are tri-band, which allows for even better speed and increased range. Where the first-gen pods have one Ethernet port, the SuperPods have two, letting you easily connect wired-only gear.

Image: Pete Pachal/Mashable
The Plume app makes setting up a network easy. One of the good things about having startups like Plume “disrupt” the WiFi space is that it’s turned the setup process into a friendly, mobile-first experience. The app walks you through the whole process, from plugging in your first pod, which connects to your modem, to connecting your gear.
My favorite part of the app has to be viewing the pods in my network on a cool diagram, which shows them as big white dots, and the devices connected to them as tiny circles orbiting those dots, almost like electrons. You can check on your network and its connectivity anytime, from anywhere.
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Since I had a Plume network already, things were even easier. You…
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