Home network requirement

AURALiC's Lightning Streaming is for home audio use. Please contact your network contractor if you are planning to use our streamer in office or corporation network environment with complicated network setup with VLAN, firewall policy. Those enterprise network will usually request special setup for our technology to work properly.

Network Readiness

The first factor to decide upon with your network will be to verify how you’ll connect your streamer to your home network/router. Your choices will be between Wi-Fi and Ethernet. For more information on choosing between these two methods, please see this article: WiFi or Ethernet

You’ll need to also check to ensure your router is of adequate quality for high-performance streaming. In general, finding a decent router isn’t a huge problem any more but you’ll want to steer clear of the low-quality routers sold or rented to you by your ISP (internet service provider), or you’ll at least want to verify they can handle high-performance streaming.

Router Quality

The ability to stream Netflix or play Pandora on your smart speaker is not necessarily an indication that your router is able to properly handle particular multicasting (SSDP) messages without dropouts, or if your router is blocking certain (IGMP/ICMP) data packets AURALiC streaming devices rely on to provide the best experience. Some routers (usually lower-performing models supplied by your Internet Service Provider) don’t handle this type of traffic due to their firmware, or, since this kind of UDP discovery data is more vulnerable, a weak WiFi connection will affect this even as your other data connections seem fine.

Here are a few old routers that work well and are not expensive:

• Netgear Nighthawk AC1900
• Netgear Nighthawk AC1750
• ASUS RT-AC68U
• Linksys EA6900 AC1900

For newer routers that support WiFi 6 standard, you may choose any model from Netgear or ASUS.

Things to avoid

• Avoid all (long discontinued) Apple Airport routers and extenders.
• Remote WiFi access points (WAPs) connected via ethernet to your router can work well, but avoid range extenders, or boosters, that connect wirelessly to your router.
• More recently developed mesh WiFi systems like Netgear Orbi and Amazon eero, while steadily improving, still yield mixed performance, so we recommend you proceed with caution when considering a mesh solution.
• Do not use Ethernet over Powerline (HomePlug / EoP) adapters. These will not work with our products. 
• Routers made by TP-Link and D-Link normally does not work well.