Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Devices are getting smarter these days. It started with the iPhone (smart phone) and has expanded to things like doorbells, speakers, light bulbs, thermostats, etc. And now, with the introduction of the Gryphon router, comes one of the first high speed smart WIFI routers. The Gryphon is a triband mesh router similar to Netgear’s Orbi. For these newer mesh routers, they usually sell it in “packs” of two or more. You place these routers throughout your home (ie upstairs and downstairs) to create a “mesh” network so that there are no dead WIFI spots in your home. However, for my 3000+ sq home, I only needed a single Gryphon and was able to still have full WIFI coverage throughout my home. Kudos to the Gryphon engineering team for doing a great job in their router design. The Gryphon router has built in parental controls. This is a game changer. I have 3 kids (high school, middle school, and elementary school) and each kid has multiple devices. For my previous parental control setup, I needed to install a third party parental control (Qustodio) app on each of my kid’s devices. This was a pain to do. On top of that, Qustodio sometimes did not work (to block a particular app(s)) or my kids would find ways to disable it. With Gryphon, there is no parental control app to install and there is no way to disable it! Setup is easy and quick using the Gryphon app. You simply create a user profile for each of your kids (Gryphon has recommended guidelines for each age group) and assign their devices (laptops, tablets, phones) to their user profile. It has worked so well that I have uninstalled Qustodio from all my kids devices except for their mobile phones since I still need to monitor them when they are away from home. Gryphon has a new feature called “Always Home” coming out soon which will re-route all wireless (ie 3G/4G/LTE) network traffic back to the Gryphon router for content filtering. This will allow me to go to a 100% Gryphon parental control solution. I’m definitely looking forward to this feature. The other day, I discovered another cool feature. My kids love watching youTube videos but it is disabled during their “homework” time. They found a “work around” by asking to borrow my laptop for doing their “homework”. I found them secretly watching youTube videos and chatting with friends. What to do? I now simply reassign my laptop to their user profile whenever they need to borrow it. BOOM! The Gryphon uses patent pending machine learning AI to continually improve upon their content filtering. This means that as more and more families use it, the filtering will get better. The Gryphon also has built in intrusion and malware detection. This means that all my IOT (internet of things) such as TVs, printers, and cameras are protected. I feel that this feature is equally as important as the parental controls. Malware, phishing, and hacking are on the rise and Gryphon will keep your devices safe. Again, the key thing here is that no third party apps need to be installed to get this protection. What other solutions are out there? I briefly looked into the Disney Circle but that solution uses “arp-spoofing” or “arp-poisoning” to monitor your WIFI network traffic. To me, this feels a bit hacky and will probably slow down your internet connection. Our family has been using the Gryphon router for the last several weeks and it has been working fantastic for us. It’s easy to use, great whole-house WIFI coverage, and all my devices are protected and monitored. I would definitely recommend this product to all families with kids. I would also recommend this to anyone looking to protect their home networks.