I’m seriously not employed by TP-Link, I swear

It’s TP-Link, duh.

They burst onto the scene with quality routers, moving from the business to the personal sector, and then bam, they started to produce things that interact DIRECTLY with those routers — no hubs, no nonsense, just a pretty nice-looking app required.

You can have an old router — and by old, I mean early 2000s, so in this era, that’s like, double-old — and it will still work. In fact, they force you to use a lower-energy Wi-Fi spectrum…and no, this is not a bad thing. Do you want your smart devices spending all of your hard-earned kWh savings on 5-GHz transmission? I don’t.

So…how easy was the setup. My mom, who literally took an hour to understand how to login to my FTP server using WinSCP (which was already installed, configured, and even had the username and password saved….) could have followed the instructions and yet, even I, a former IT professional (in the sense that people paid me for doing IT) for a pretty large eco-system on the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s campus, didn’t feel insulted or condescended to by the easy to follow instructions and, even better, the fact that it didn’t require me to type a lot of CLI-based nonsense (for the record, I happen to love CLI-based nonsense).

These are smart light bulbs, plugs, etc and all they rely on is that you actually have a method of of connecting them. They don’t require a hub, their reported lifetimes are pretty darn long, and so far, I’m loving them.

The integration with Alexa was slightly more annoying — but that was all on Amazon and the over-packed Alexa app. The “kasa” app produced by TP-Link even told me how to navigate the Alexa app. Since when has a company, even when its in their consumers’ interests, actually been helpful with combining ecosystems? Rare, and not in the steak way.

I wrote this in about 5 minutes, which is longer than it took for me to set up my new smart devices and show them off to my extremely understanding girlfriend, who was happy with the way they worked.

So, readers, tell me: who do YOU like, and why in the home-automation game?

P.S. No, I’m not saying Google Home isn’t better than Alexa in a lot of ways…I’m just saying Alexa is actually working in many of the ways that people expect it to, and if Amazon manages to add some LSTM (long short term memory) to it, then the two will actually be able to compete — and I’m talking cagematch style.