Like all Wi-Fi systems, what you can do with the Plume might change over time via firmware updates. The Plume requires a lot of electrical sockets around the house to work. Essentially, after an hour or so it would reach a consistent state. I tested the system at home over seven days and found no improvement. Plume Design says that the system will optimize the data transmission between its pods automatically to deliver the best performance over time, specifically after about a week.
I tried a simple shared Access database via the Plume's Wi-Fi and the performance was excruciatingly slow. However, Wi-Fi can also be used for other local tasks, such as data sharing, network backups, networked security cameras and so on. That's true if streaming and using the internet is all you want. One might ask why I'd need faster Wi-Fi speed when 4K content - the heaviest task in streaming - only requires 25 Mbps. It seemed this was the "adaptive" notion of the system at work and automatically changed the speed in real time depending on the network traffic, which might or might not be beneficial to the user in the end. This speed fluctuation occurred even when I stayed at the same spot. A single pod can be as fast as 350 megabits per second, but with multiple pods, I generally got somewhere between 25 Mbps to 125 Mbps of sustained Wi-Fi speed in most rooms. While the range issue can be easily taken care of by getting more pods, Plume as a system, is frankly quite slow. Another thing is, if you have children or pets, the pods can easily be mistaken for toys, so be aware!
I had to use two power strips to install a set of six pods throughout the house. You also need an electrical wall socket for each pod, and that can get tricky considering how many things we want to plug in these days. In my testing in a small home of some 1,800 square feet, I indeed needed all six pods to have a Wi-Fi signal everywhere - something a standard Synology RT2600AC router, when placed in the middle of my home, could achieve all by itself.
And this is exactly the ideal range for each pod. In fact, with the idea that you have one pod per room, you then are never more than 10 or 15 feet away from a pod. This means each pod itself doesn't have to have great Wi-Fi range. The Plume system relies on number of pods to deliver coverage. *45 feet for the Plume, 75 feet for the rest.
Amped Wireless Ally Plus (single router) 608.2 267.9 Portal (single router) 543.3 237 Google Wifi (single router) 450.6 201.4 Eero (single router) 447.4 180.2 Netgear Orbi (single router) 416.2 229.6 Netgear Orbi (via one extender) 415.83 229.3 Linksys Velop (single router) 383.1 209.2 Plume Adaptive Wi-Fi (single unit) 330.6 139.4 Luma (single unit) 322.6 71.8 Almond 3 (single router) 315.8 220.6 Amped Wireless Ally Plus (via one extender) 295.7 176 Portal (via one extender) 244 84 Linksys Velop (via one extender) 222.3 198.6 Google Wifi (via one extender) 206.9 155.8 Eero (via one extender) 179.2 146.7 Almond 3 (via one extender) 159.1 110.1 Luma (via one extender) 124.2 80.9 Plume Adaptive Wi-Fi (as a system) 114.6 31.2