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Two ethernet ports and a power connection are located inside a two-inch-deep well inside the bottom of the unit. Cables emerge from the notch in the corner.Ī single multi-color LED on top reports the Velop’s status, and there’s a silver Linksys logo printed on its solid face. The Linksys Velo offers generous ventilation for its quad-core ARM CPU, 512MB of DDR3 memory, and 4GB of flash storage. I suspect a lot of these routers will still end up in closets, but the access points might see the light of day. Be that as it may, everyone who buys an understated mesh router will still need to plug it into their ugly old broadband gateway. But that’s typical of mesh routers-manufacturers are doing their best to design network devices that consumers won’t object to placing out in the open. With its six antennas hidden in the top of its enclosure, and its cables emerging from a cutout in one corner, the Velop looks more like a room air freshener than a router. The Velop’s off-white vertical enclosure is perforated with ventilation holes on the left side, the back, and the top. The router automatically steers clients to the most appropriate network, and each automatically chooses a different channel for its backhaul duties (i.e., data traveling from client devices back to the router). One of the 5GHz networks utilizes the lower channels on that band (36 and up) while the other uses the upper channels (149 and up). And like the Orbi, the Velop is a tri-band router with three 2×2 radios (two uplink and two downlink) operating three independent networks on the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands. The Velop’s slightly rounded columnar form factor hews closer to Netgear’s Orbi (next on my review to-do list) than the puck-shaped devices from Eero (benchmarked, but not officially reviewed yet) and Google (Google Wi-Fi has been fully reviewed).