What kind of OVO online community member are you?

Hehehe,

Well… Let’s just say that most routers aren’t as powerful as others. And some of them probably also make for good space heaters too. :)

Why put the heating on when you can just fire up your favourite streaming platform, enable Deep Packet Inspection on the router and relax while the router warms the room up. 

Since I’ll be paying for the electricity to run my network kit anyway, I might as well make use of it in creative ways.

@Tim_OVOthe ARM-Cortex processor, which @Blastoise186 refers to, is from the same family as those used in the vast majority of mobile phones throughout the world. They’re known for their high efficiency and low power consumption. You wouldn’t expect an ARM to require any forced-air from a fan to cool it!

ARM was a spin-off from Acorn Computers’ development of a Reduced Instruction Set Computer back in 1985. The company was sold to Softbank in 2016, who over-recruited engineers and ploughed liquid cash into it in the hope of getting a massive return from ARM chips powering the Internet of Things (IoT). The gamble failed and Softbank are now trying to sell it to US-based Nvidia.

ARM processors are possibly within our IHDs, although I haven’t dissected one yet to find out.

They would certainly be a serious contender for an Enhanced IHD which permitted the customer to configure preferences for EV charging and all manner of other domestic Control Devices which are driven from the Flex Platform.

This could effectively combine the functions of the IHD and the OVO App into a single controller with an intuitive interface that could be used by customers who are ‘technology-light’.

It’s a real shame to see ARM Holdings ownership heading beyond these shores. A waste of British ingenuity - just at a time when the UK Government wants to promote a technology-centred post-Brexit economy.

I have no idea why @Blastoise186 wants to pay for electricity to run his growing population of internet-connected devices. He could just hang a solar-panel out of the window and keep a 12v battery topped up!

Hehehe,

Well, that is all true. But there’s a good reason why I can’t really put a solar panel outside my window. My flat faces the wrong direction and a solar panel probably wouldn’t pick up enough sunlight to work properly.

And I won’t just have one ARM CPU in my network kit either. Pretty much all Ubiquiti UniFi kit runs on the ARM architecture and I’m getting quite a lot of it.

I don’t know if I forgot to mention this, but my UniFi Dream Machine is basically a Linux server with a very powerful Wi-Fi radio attached to it and all the other kit could be described as being compute nodes for number crunching. Well that, and maybe tearing packets apart via Deep Packet Inspection! 

In a nutshell, I’m spending maybe just under £1,000 to get enough kit to blast Wi-Fi through an entire two or three storey house… Packed into a one bedroom flat! Just because I can.

But I can also argue that it's more power efficient than some other options! Because somehow, using Ethernet as a backbone for the mesh network probably means the radios on these things won’t be blasting out as much as if I’d used a wireless mesh.

In summary: Completely over engineered, total tech geek kit and absolutely unnecessary for a one bedroom flat. But that’s not going to stop me!