GRYPHON GUARDIAN Mesh WiFi Router, upto 5000sqft, Advance Security & Parental Control, Hack Protection w/AI-Intrusion Detection & Malware Protection, AC1200 Dual-Band Mesh Wireless System, 3 Pack

This wifi routers is very nice, I can finally use at least 100 devices and more, without using the basic router of my internet provider! It blocks malwares, security threats and you can take it everywhere without having to re-install your devices everytime! Very quick for the technical support! Doesn’t wifi 6 yet, but I couldn’t live without it anymore!

Although the router and repeaters have an easy installation, the app makes all the features other than the very basic WiFi connection unusable. The app crashes going onto tabs and this is random, it could be on the devices tab or it might change to the users tab meaning you cannot access specific paid for features. Would not recommend. Gryphon please fix this, or allow for an web browser admin page so that settings can be changed via that instead of the app

This is a fantastic product, with fantastic software that comes with it. But it comes with a 3 x 3 inch note card in the box, that tells you to load software on your mobile phone in order to learn how to install it. The software won’t let you past step 1 until it gets a handshake with the unit, so you can’t scroll forward to understand the installation before you begin (and its instructions past page 1 could be summarized, “just plug it in and wait for the light to stop blinking”). There are a couple of long talking-head YouTube videos that say essentially the same thing, “Plug it in". Um, so what does the red blinking light mean? Red steady light? White blinking light? White steady? There are many up-front questions that an adult would want to know by reading a user manual, including how to use the software (which is very good, but which will take you a journey of tech-adolescent discovery, many hours long, to figure out what it does). But the manual does not exist. So, here is your manual, below (written April 2020, so it could change). I am totally unqualified to write this manual. The fact that you are coming back to this review to use as your manual is pathetic, and deserves a two-star knockdown. But I just knocked it down one star because I don’t want to penalize genius engineers for their clueless Apple-wannabee marketing department. 1) Installation. The base unit is strong enough to drive the inside of a medium/small house, with download speeds of between 50 and 150 mbps on my typical devices, and 5-30 mbps 3 rooms and 1 story away from the base unit. So don’t buy the mesh (only buy one Gryphon Guardian unit) if you don’t have a big house or don’t care if the outer rooms go down into the single digit mbps. Set up the first (base) unit and get it working before plugging in the others. The Gryphon Guardian units are all identical hardware, but the base sets itself up differently than the second and third units, which automatically set themselves up as mesh/repeater units when you install them. The units only have three plugs: “Power” “Internet” and “LAN”. The power cord plugs into the wall, which is required for all three units, but the mesh repeater units do not have anything else plugged in to them. No need to connect an ethernet cable between the host and mesh units, since they communicate wirelessly, but I assume you could connect them if you wanted to. Think of the “Internet” ethernet socket as “Input” and the “LAN” socket as "output". It comes with a 2-foot long ethernet cable, for you to plug the base Gryphon unit in to your Internet Modem (not used for the mesh/repeater units). In my case, I have a fiber optic modem, then a separate AT&T modem/router/WiFi unit that works with the copper ethernet cable that comes out of the fiber modem. You will need to keep your AT&T (or whatever) modem/router/WiFi, even though you are replacing the WiFi with this Gryphon, because you need the modem part of the AT&T (or whatever) unit that you currently have. It would be good to dig up your AT&T modem/router/WiFi documentation now before you buy the Gryphon (or call AT&T), because if you can’t figure out how to turn off the WiFi on your old router while the rest of it is turned on, then your kiddos will still be able to access the internet unfiltered. Of course, if they can reach the back of your old modem, they can still plug in an ethernet cable and access the internet through the cable, unfiltered. If you don't think they are smart enough to figure that out, guess again. I had to keep my AT&T unit for another reason: I have VOIP phone service (land-line style phone) that ties into a standard POTS phone cable coming out of the AT&T modem. No problem, I could not throw out the AT&T modem anyway, so this AT&T VOIP hookup stayed unchanged. On the back of your AT&T (or whatever) internet modem are output ports that probably say “LAN”. Connect the ethernet cable from the “LAN” port on your AT&T (or whatever) modem into the “Internet” port on the Gryphon. You should have installed the software on our smartphone by now, and it will begin to give you instructions. It takes a photo of the smart code on the bottom of your Gryphon so you don’t have to type in any serial numbers for the handshake. But if it can’t get a handshake with the Grypon WiFi at this point, you are stuck on the first page of the instructions. Sorry. Just start turning things on and off randomly. 20 frustrating minutes later, as you wonder what the different blinking lights mean, it will probably work. Apparently what I did wrong, was to plug the ethernet cable from my Fiber Optic modem directly into the back of the Gryphon (and then plug the correct one in later, but by that time the Gryphon was confused). When you first turn on the Gryphon, it communicates with the WiFi on your smart phone using a WiFi identifier that you must see and choose from your Smartphone WiFi connection, which has the word “Security” in its name. But apparently if you mess up the first step, the security WiFi choice goes away, but it gives you two other choices with a very similar name that you will foolishly try, over and over, before you realize that you must shut everything down and start the installation process over. OK, maybe I am stupid, but that is why I like to read through installation manuals before I start the installation process. The only time you will make a WiFi handshake with the Grypon using this “security” Grypon WiFi name, is when you are setting it up. But if you don’t see it as a WiFi choice from your smart phone, you can’t set it up. 2) What do the blinking lights mean? The Gyphon has one LED on the base that can blink and change between red and white. Your goal is a WHITE STEADY light. Until you see the white steady light, don’t even bother trying to connect a device to see if it will work on the internet. The sequences of lights, and my BLIND GUESS of what they mean, is: Red Steady: You fed power to the unit and it booted up. Red Blinking: The unit can’t get an Ethernet handshake with your internet modem. White Blinking: You are getting close. (Maybe you have a WiFi connection but not internet. Your guess is as good as mine.) White Steady: SUCCESS!! This boot-up process, even if it works, takes several minutes while you wait for the lights to cycle through their sequence. And any time you make a basic change to the system through the software, it will take the same amount of time to reset and restart, so don’t do it while your family is waiting. 3) WiFi Name and Password. Once you get a white steady light from the Base Unit, you can dive into the software, cussing the marketing people who tried to be arrogant like Apple (“BAH! Only idiots need user manuals!”) but they don’t have the chops to pull it off. It is very easy to change the visible name of your WiFi and the password using the smart phone software. You can set up a separate visitor WiFi name and password to give to household guests, which you can change from time to time for security reasons. The “Guest” WiFi will show up as a single person/user in the software so you would not want to use the Guest network if you want to control individual guest access at different access levels (e.g., some guests are kids and some are adults). If you use the same name and password as the old WiFi you are replacing, as soon as you power up the Gryphon all of your family’s devices will handshake with the new Gryphon unit and your family won’t even know you replaced the WiFi (until you start tightening down the access a few days later, heh heh). You can ask them if their speeds increased, and they will gush with praise for the new WiFi. I have one of my devices, a Sony smart DVD, hard-wired to the Gryphon unit with an Ethernet cable (connected to the LAN port), and it works fine. But each Gryphon Guardian only has one LAN port so most of your devices must connect wirelessly. 4) Setting up mesh/repeater units: Power them on and use the smartphone software to take a photo of the smart code on the bottom. That’s it. No cables to connect. Move them around in the house until they all show up as “green” on the Network page of your phone software; yellow will work but it will be slower. The software automatically hard-codes them as hub-and spoke units that are paired to the base unit (not to eachother). There is a software setting where you can set it to “automatic” or pair them to a different repeater unit, which I assume would allow you to daisy-chain them in a very long line that could go on for a city block. But of course this “repeater” function has to be a slower than hub-and-spoke, which is preferable if you are in a mostly square house. When you change this choice in the software, it shuts down and restarts the network without warning, raising loud objections from your family as they wait many minutes for it to reboot. 5) Access Levels. Normally, when a new device signs on to your network, your smart phone software will ask you which person in your family the device belongs to, so you can assign it to them and it will default to their level of access. But if you use your old WiFi password, all of the devices will come online at once and you will need to go in to the software to assign devices to the person who uses them. This is easy to do. You can also change the name of the device, after you figure out what it is, so it will be easier to recognize it later. During setup, the software will ask you if each of your individual users are “elementary” “high school” “adult” or “unrestricted”. This affects what websites they are allowed to visit. You can make these changes from your smart phone and it will change their access instantly… in seconds. I presume that Gyphon has a huge library of websites that are appropriate for various levels. The “Adult” level is more of a “Professional Adult” level—in other words, it still filters out web sites that would not be appropriate in a professional workplace environment. Only the “Unrestricted” setting allows all websites. You get the picture. In addition to the “level” for each person, you can also toggle “Youtube / Safesearch” on, which does two things: It turns off the “user comments” on YouTube, and it turns “Safesearch” on for Google and Bing (and blocks use of other search engines such as Yahoo search because it does not have a safe search function). This is my only complaint about the software: It should allow you to control YouTube and Safesearch separately. My kids really like seeing user comments on their favorite YouTube sites, which I think is OK, but that means their internet searches are also unrestricted. BUT this is not as bad as it sounds, because even if they get a search result for a bad website, if they click on that website they can not load it up because you have chosen the “High School” or even “Adult” option for them (not “Unrestricted”). Any level below "Unrestricted" blocks bad websites even if you have not toggled-on the “Safesearch”. You can toggle “track website” visited, or not. My own policy is not to track adults in my house, but to track all kids. If tracking is turned on, it only shows what site was visited, not what they did at the site. And it lists the sites that were blocked in a separate list. You can also toggle on or off the ability to go through a VPN, which otherwise would be a way to get around restrictions for a tech savvy user. 6) Malware. I have only had this installed one week, and it already flagged some malware on the computer (a MAC!!!) of a teenage guest using our Guest Network. It was malware that takes over your Google search engine for marketing purposes, not really causing damage. This Malware blocker is a subscription service that you get free the first year and then you can choose to pay for it after that. I’m already sold. There is also a companion software system that you can install on your kids smart phones, which will route all of their internet connections back through your Gryphon system even when they are away form home, allowing you to control all their access through Gryphon. I haven’t tried this companion software yet. In summary, this is a great system, with a non-existent user manual. After you have sunk endless hours wandering cluelessly like an avatar in a computer game, you will love it. UPDATE Fall 2021: After using this for about a year, I experienced intermittent performance for some computers, unless I was very close to a Gryphon unit. I discovered that there were so many neighbor devices using the same WiFi band, that interference was crowding the radio frequency. However, this unit also comes with a 5g radio frequency band; you have to set it up separately. It does not automatically swap between bands whene one is crowded. You must name and recognize the 5g band and handshake with it, as though it was a completey separate WiFi system. So, my low speed devices I left on the slower band, and my higher speed priority devices I put on the 5g system. I occaionally see speeds in excess of 200 mbps on the 5g side. They also recently "updated" the iPhone software. True to form, for a worse than useless marketing department, they apparently just changed the shape of icons and moved things around, so existing users have to learn the system again. But I did not see any real functional changes to the software.

This product is not the best performing router, it is not the most configurable, the wireless isn't the farthest reaching.....in short this product doesn't really do the best at anything except maybe simplicity. If you want basic protection for your family devices this should work well for you, so long as you know what you are getting yourself into. I will say, if you want a browser interface to work from then just check the Gryphon off your list and go find something else. You can ONLY configure this from a mobile device through the app, that's the only way, and I have no idea why. The set up is the most time consuming, as you would expect. The mobile app walks you through setting up each Gryphon device. After all of your devices are in place you set up users, set up schedules for each user, then assign devices to each user. You have basic control over what those users can get to on the internet. You will get a list of where the user has tried to go on the web, and if something is blocked you don't want blocked you can allow it. Likewise, you can block sites you don't want visited. This block/allow function is specifically for websites. There is also 'app' support, where you can block or allow specific apps, but that list is so small that I'm not even sure why they bothered to add that feature. That is definitely the biggest complaint I've had with Gryphon. My daughter got an Oculus for Christmas. Gryphon HATES Oculus. It bocks the Oculus even if the user is in 'play' time on the schedule. Oculus is an app, but it is not one of the apps in the short list of Gryphon controlled apps. It does not show up in the blocked list, it doesn't show up anywhere, it just flat doesn't allow it to work! In order to use Oculus you have to move whatever device it is connect to into the 'unmanaged' devices within Gryphon, then it immediately works. I worked with the support team, which I found to be very good, and there is nothing that can be done about this behavior at this time. It is annoying, but overall it works well for blocking her from the dangerous stuff on the web, so I'm willing to put up with a few headaches. In closing, if you want a router and access points that you can set up within a few hours without knowing very much (that includes setting up the users, the schedules (homework, play, sleep, etc), and adding/naming all of your devices, then this will probably work for you. The hardest part is probably trying to match the MAC addresses that show up in the Gryphon phone app to the devices on your network. Once you get past that it's not hard too keep up with.

Update 3: Apparently I had a defective unit. It is supposedly a very rare issue. We have gotten it fixed now, and I am again happy with the device. The features are great and with 4 kids, I don’t think I could live without the control this provides (being able to let one kid work on homework online only while another is done with homework and given full access while a third is on bedtime mode, and a fourth has the internet temporarily turned off so she’ll help with some chores). It is truly fantastic when it works. Hope it continues to work without issue. Update 2: My Gryphon just stopped letting me log in. I am trying to contact customer service to no avail. The app just wants me to reinstall all the routers from scratch!?!? When this system works, it’s good, but when it doesn’t, it is painful to deal with. Update: I have a computer that I turned off at the Gryphon control center. When I turned it back on, it didn’t come back on. The computer says it has no internet, and when I troubleshoot, it says “The remote device or resource won’t accept the connection”. All my other computers and devices are working fine, but I can’t figure out for the life of me why one computer won’t get on the internet. Previously: I rarely write reviews but after reading some of the negative reviews here, I feel like I need to tell people this is a pretty good device. I don’t think it’s the best mesh network out there, but the parental control apps are excellent. We have found it to be very helpful and are ever so slowly tightening the wrench, so to speak. The internet speed did take a slight move down on the computers. I don’t know if it’s the fact the parental controls slow it slightly, but I’m guessing that’s it. We have a 100mbit connection, 4 kids that might be on an iPad and tv or computer concurrently with one streaming or FaceTiming. I also will be watching TV in the other room and on my computer or phone. It works perfectly fine for me although the repeater speed test is only showing 30-40 megs down but a low ping. Not sure if that’s the mesh router or some other issue. But overall, I would give this mesh network an A. It did what we want and I think is better than Circle. For parental controls, this hands down gets a A++ from me. It’s worth it if that’s why you want it. Oh, and I bought the Gryphon Guardian and not the Gryphon towers. It covers my 6600 sf / 2 story house just fine.