HomePass by Plume®

Works great; I have six units scattered throughout the house; mobile devices (laptop, chrome books, iPad, and phones) all of them seamlessly transfer from one pod to another. Also, I have fixed devices such as a wifi enabled thermostat and wifi enabled audio visual equipment. I just did not realize that my set up required turning off the wifi on my router-that was easy but had to explore the settings on the router. I just set up plume with the same SSID and password as the router and devices started communicating via the plume with out any issues. I have two pods connected to the router via cat6 cables , the other four pods are just plugged in wall sockets around the house; the cloud at plume monitors all the connections ( ?on a weekly basis??) and using this app I can see how plume has reconfigured the pods to talk to each other as the kids come and go. I live in suburbs and can see multiple SSIDs belonging to my neighbors. I am pleased with my purchase. Just started seeing what the updated app can do. I have no connection with the website arstechnica--they have two good articles on how plume works. UPDATED on October 3, 2018: I really like the new version of the app on my iPhone-I feel the app is more intuitive.

I have been using 2 of these devices for about 3 weeks and love them. Prior to me having Plume, I had a good dual band WiFi router. Sometimes had issues streaming from 2 tv’s and getting signal into one of the back rooms at the extreme of the house, not any more. Even with the first pod, the 5g range was much greater when I connected the second, I have WiFi throughout my whole house and into back and front yard. The Plume app makes it the simplest setup I’ve come across. The first time I plugged mine in it did take a long while for the app to find it, about 6-8 mins. so be patient. Plugged in the second, found it straight away, they updated then I just followed the onscreen instructions for naming my network and I was good to go. No more streaming issues. The app is very intuitive as far as looking at what devices are connected and checking bandwidth etc. love the fact you can name each pod individually also. I would recommend Plume to anyone, especially if you’re unsure of technology/WiFi etc.

The Plume ecosystem of pods and app make for the best WiFi system I’ve ever found. Gone are the days of resetting the router in a crowded building - Plume adapts. Gone are the dead zones in old houses and buildings - just add a pod and Plume makes it work. Gone are “squatters” who aren’t even in your building - you can see all the devices on the network and freeze out individual devices. If you’re a business and need to provide WiFi for customers, you can isolate your business devices from the general public just by specifying which password has access to which device. You can also enable content, ad, and IoT protection/filtering for a full suite of home and business protections. Plume is everything WiFi was promised to be 20 years ago, now, and better.

Obviously, if you have a Plume WiFi set-up you need this app, and if you don't, you don't. That said, I'm giving my thoughts here in the hopes they may be useful to someone considering Plume. Generally the app works well, is clearly laid out, and other than a few odd choices is intuitive enough. It does not feel like a native iOS app though, and the navigation stack seems quirky if you're expecting the usual iOS drill-down approach. There is no iPad app (guys, this app is being used for heavy lifting, throw us a bone here), so you're going to be stuck doing all your network tweaking on your phone. Fortunately for most users, heavy tweaking should not be required. It's a shame there's no way to set the icons for devices: I have a HomeKit switch that shows up as a laptop, and I cannot change that. Also, while Plume grabs ZeroConf (Bonjour) names from devices so most devices on your network will be nicely named in the devices list, HomeKit devices show up with little to no differentiation. It'd be nice if the app could be updated to mine the HomeKit catalog for device names.

The plume pucks work really well for expanding my WiFi network. The sub-net is easy to install and setup is automatically accompanied through their software. I run WiFi cameras that needed better connectivity than my network had and Plume covered that issue perfectly. The only reason I didn’t give them a five star rating was the automatic configuration seemed to reconfigure from all “excellent” to a suboptimal configuration. This started after a few months of stable great coverage. It seems to have settled down over the last month or so. All the app lacked connection to the sub-net on and off for a few months. The sub-net was working all the time but the app couldn’t connect. This issues seemed to have been corrected. Overall I’m very satisfied with Plume. And the customer service is top notch!