Monitoring

The mobile app is also where you would customize the user experience and network monitoring of the Gryphon Tower router/mesh WiFi system. The options are the same irrespective of how many routers you have connected in your mesh system because the network from both radio sets uses the same credentials. The home page is a dashboard with a quick mention of the number of connected clients, which the company recommends doing one at a time, and seeing how many of them are managed or unmanaged. This effectively is part of their Internet security and parental controls feature wherein you assign the device a user and the settings associated with the user profile pass on to the device itself.


Of course, this also means there are options to add users and assign them to a pre-selection of profiles, or your own. Privacy and freedom, or the lack thereof, can as such be set on a per-user basis. Gryphon is targeting parents that are frustrated with the effects of social media and inappropriate content on children, so keep in mind that the tools provided here are just that, with the admin user the one deciding how they are used. These tools include the ability to view the browser history of users, content filtering, setting use times for Internet access, and suspending access altogether. There are integrated ad-blockers at the router level and malware filtering, which are appreciated.

These are part of their premium protection offerings, however, which come with free malware and ransomware protection for a year via ESET after the date of setup and cost $79 annually thereafter. This subscription also includes ad-blocking and what Gryphon describes as their patent-pending AI intrusion detection for IOT devices. There is a second paid subscription option in the form of Gryphon Homebound, which requires its own separate app and introduces remote management over these settings from anywhere in the world, data encryption, and the re-routing of all mobile traffic from the device with the installed app, through the Gryphon router and the Internet and back even if you are on another wireless network. This can be handy for those who often find themselves on public hotspots, for example, with there being a 90-day free trial and a monthly charge of $4.99 for up to five mobile devices thereafter. This is where the required account registration comes in because these subscriptions are tied to the account.


The Network menu allows for a real-time speed test for upload and download, checking the number of connected devices to the network, and restarting said network in case of an unrecognized client, as well as checking the status of the connected device safety and which devices get network prioritization for traffic (think QoS, but simplified). There is also a networks tab under the Settings menu, which allows for the more specific customization of the WiFi settings, used security protocols (WPA/WPA2 or WPA2/WPA3), WiFi radio control itself, LAN and WAN configuration, setting up a custom DNS, or even going with a dynamic DNS. Some of these features are for power users, and yet I found myself wanting more from the other options that were limited in what could be changed.


The rest of the settings are fairly self-explanatory, including the ability to turn off the white LEDs at night by setting a time range, adding mesh repeaters as we saw before, getting into their premium protection subscriptions to begin with, and choosing between four preset levels of malware protection, including none at all. You can block new devices from connecting to the WiFi network, and may even go into stealth mode so users blocked from accessing specific websites or the Internet as a whole do not get a notification about it. There are device and account-specific settings as expected, including customer support, adding another admin account, changing account credentials, and un-pairing the router for when you want to do a factory reset or part with it.


There is next to nothing available via the web browser itself, and 192.168.1.1 only gives you a status page for the specific device. If the device is managed, it also shows you the extent of access here. As such, you can also suspend Internet access on a per-device setting and not just in the user profiles.

There is a good amount of control here in general, especially as the Gryphon routers are targeting the average household over the networking power user, but the free options are still what we typically see offered by others as well, and having to pay a subscription fee for the USP here does leave a bitter taste in the mouth regardless of how you may feel about the cost being justified or not.