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At a glanceExpert`s Rating Pros Very quick to alert on smoke Easy to set up (assuming you have the infrastructure) Some users might find the additional features of value Cons Motion sensor isn’t particularly useful Slow to send mobile notifications about smoke situations Alerts are hard to silence Our Verdict The Place Any Space smoke detector is stuffed with features—and some of the even pricier models in the product line offer even more—but we’re not sure that justifies their high price tags. Price When Reviewed This value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefined Best Pricing Today Best Prices Today: Place Any Space Smart Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector Retailer Price Check Price comparison from over 24,000 stores worldwide Product Price Price comparison from Backmarket Best Prices Today: Check today’s prices When it comes to home safety and fire protection devices, should you have a different detector for each room, one that takes into consideration the typical activities that take place there? That’s the question Gentex seeks to answer with its Place series of safety devices, maintaining that your kitchen, the children’s nursery, and the garage each deserve purpose-built smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) detectors. It sounds logical, at least on paper, but the prices Gentex expects to fetch for its line of Wi-Fi-connected (hardwired for power and interconnected) Place smart home devices—some of which also feature integrated security cameras—could spike  the idea before it gets off the ground. The Place Any Space reacted to smoke faster than any other smoke alarm I can recall testing. Specifications As indicated above, Gentex doesn’t build just one Place detector, it offers four models, each designed with a specific room in mind, although they are all equipped with carbon monoxide detectors, temperature and humidity sensors, and smart nightlights. Each of these devices also has localized voice alerts and a low-frequency sounder that’s said to be more effective at waking deep sleepers and hearing-impaired individuals. The Any Place, reviewed here, is the most straightforward of the lot. It detects both smoke and carbon monoxide (CO) in addition to the other features listed above. The Kitchen model detects smoke and CO, and it adds natural gas detection (but not propane, which many rural homes use). The Garage model has a CO detector, an integrated camera, and an intercom, but it replaces the smoke detector with a heat detector to avoid false alarms. It doesn’t include air quality monitoring, but it detects and alerts to the presence of VOCs. The Nursery model delivers the most features of the four SKUs, incorporating a security camera, an intercom, air quality and VOCs (volatile organic compounds) monitoring, and a white noise generator as well as a smoke and CO detector. Once again, Place alarms must be hardwired for power, and they can be interconnected to each other. Each one gets backup power in the form of two pre-installed lithium AA batteries. The detectors are rated to last the industry standard 10 years; the backup batteries might require periodic replacement over that time. The devices connect to 2.4GHz Wi-Fi networks, and you’ll interact with them using the Place mobile app. Installation and setup The Place Any Place smoke and CO alarm must be hardwired to electrical power. Every model in the Place lineup can be interconnected for maximum safety.Christopher Null/Foundry As a hardwired product, you’ll need to install the Place Any Space Smart Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detector where you have access to basic two-wire house wiring (a ground wire is not required); plus, interconnect wiring if you plan to chain together multiple Place alarms. Building codes vary by region, but the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) in 1989 declared that newly constructed homes are required to have hardwired and interconnected smoke alarms on every level of the home and outside of sleeping areas. The alarm includes a small bracket plus the bolts and wire nuts needed to mount the alarm to an electrical box. A small clip-in wiring harness bridges your home’s bare wiring to the detector. All told, physical installation is not at all taxing, unless your electrical box is particularly crowded and/or hard to reach (as can happen when detectors are mounted on high ceilings). Once connected to power, the Place app is used to onboard the detector to your network. The app itself isn’t easy to find (use the QR code in the manual to avoid sifting through thousands of apps named with some variation of “place”), but once installed, it’s easy to complete the setup process. A Bluetooth connection auto-discovered my detector, after which I input a few credentials to bridge it to my Wi-Fi network. You will need to create an account (with a verified email address) to complete the process. Using the Place Any Space Smart Smoke + CO Alarm The Place Any Place smoke and CO alarm has localized voice alerts and a low-frequency sounder that’s said to be more effective at waking deep sleepers and hearing-impaired individuals.Christopher Null/Foundry Since it lacks the bells and whistles of the more room-centric smoke alarms that Place offers, the Place Any Space works largely like any other smart smoke detector. Testing with canned smoke caused the alarm to activate quickly, faster than I’ve encountered with any other smoke alarm I can recall testing. The unit is designed with a particularly low-frequency siren, which Place says improves audibility for those with hearing loss. It’s also extremely loud. While the unit purports to have two cautionary alert levels that the device goes through before the alarm sounds, I didn’t encounter these in my testing because the alarm sounded so rapidly. It took about 30 seconds for a push alert to be sent to my mobile phone, which seems very slow. Silencing the alarm is a different story. Even after the smoke cleared, the alarm kept sounding, and it took several presses of the test button (which is oddly touch-sensitive, not a physical button) to quiet the siren. The app can also be used to hush an alarm. However, even after silencing the alarm, the unit continued to chirp periodically, ostensibly an indicator that there was still smoke in the room. This continued for several minutes until I was ultimately forced to disable the alarm altogether by unplugging it from wall power and removing the batteries. The Place app is well done, but the smoke and CO alarm can overwhelm you with motion alerts.Christopher Null/Foundry I’m unsure if this is the intended operation of the alarm, but it was certainly maddening and unlike any other smoke alarm I’ve reviewed. Memo to Place: If someone presses the silence button or uses the function in the app, hush should mean hush—completely. The app includes perhaps minimally useful measurements of temperature and humidity, and it even tracks this data by day, week, and month. The nightlight feature (which can be activated either by low ambient light levels or motion detection) is a nice touch, and it can even be configured to illuminate in the color of your choice. Beyond this, the motion detection feature isn’t otherwise all that useful. Located in a high-traffic area, I found the motion sensor sent dozens of alerts per day to my phone, but there’s no context for these alerts and nothing much you can do with them, nor is there even a way to set them to activate only during certain hours. In the absence of a larger security-centric environment, I quickly got overwhelmed with the flood of unhelpful notifications. Should you buy the Place Any Space Smart Smoke + CO Alarm? With its per-room, do-it-all smoke detectors, Place seems to be hoping to take a position where its hardware becomes the centerpiece of your smart home. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the concept really works, as these devices just don’t do enough to merit having that responsibility. They’re also very, very expensive. The Any Space unit, at $139 (at press time, available only at Home Depot), is in the same realm as the $130 First Alert SC5, which connects directly to the powerful Google ecosystem. The additional units in the series are, however, outrageously expensive, running $250 (Kitchen), $300 (Garage), and $350 (Nursery). And remember that the Nursery model contains an embedded camera, an idea that doesn’t come across to me as a particularly smart idea, given concerns that visitors might feel they are being spied upon by a device with a hidden camera. If you have absolutely no other smart home gear, a Place smoke detector might make some level of sense. The per-room concept is interesting; but in its current incarnation (and price level), it just doesn’t work all that well. Ultimately, I expect that most users will be better off with simpler, less expensive devices, regardless of what room they’re putting it in. In other words: If you need a camera, get a camera. Read...

Ten years ago, the answer to the question of whether you should get fixed broadband or settle for mobile was simple: Yes, you should, as long as it is technically possible and not outrageously expensive. Mobile broadband was an emergency solution for summer cottages and houses in rural areas where the fiber network did not reach, and a backup system for those who needed constant connectivity even if the regular connection was down. Today, both 4G and 5G networks have been rolled out and cover large parts of the country. Operators selling mobile broadband promise speeds of up to 1Gbit/s — more than many fixed connections. Does this mean that you can just as easily choose mobile broadband and ignore fiber? We all know that mobile networks have different coverage in different places, and that speeds can vary widely. Sometimes you can barely download emails on your mobile phone, other times you can stream films and play fast online games like Fortnite. How can you decide for yourself if mobile broadband can meet your needs? To answer this question, I’ve enlisted the help of researchers Anna Brunström, professor at Karlstad University, and Mikael Gidlund, professor at Mid Sweden University. Tianji Buqi How it works Apart from the fact that both fixed fiber broadband and mobile broadband can achieve bandwidths of hundreds of megabits per second — and thus qualify as broadband — they are two fundamentally different technologies. The differences are fundamentally about the way the technologies are built: Fiber carries light through a physical cable, while 5G uses radio and has to compete for space in the air. “A practical but often underestimated difference is that fiber is delivered directly into the house, while mobile broadband first has to get through the outer walls before the router even makes contact,” says Mikael Gidlund. Anna Brunström, professor at Karlstad University.Karlstads universitet Anna Brunström says that fiber normally provides more stable speeds and more even latency (delay), as each customer has their own physical connection. With mobile broadband, all users share the total capacity of the mobile network. Therefore, mobile broadband is more affected by location, time, and load. Another difference is that mobile broadband often uses something called Carrier-Grade NAT, a feature that allows many subscribers to share a few public IPv4 addresses. Instead of your router getting a unique public address, it is often given a private address, while fiber packages often provide public addressing directly. This is important if you want to set up a server at home, for example. Mobile broadband, on the other hand, is more flexible and portable. It’s easy to get started and you can often take the subscription with you to different locations. Mikael Gidlund summarizes the differences between fixed and mobile broadband as follows: ParameterFixed fiber connectionMobile broadband (4G/5G)StabilityVery high and predictable. Capacity is in practice dedicated.Variable as capacity is shared by all users in the same cell. Walls, load and distance affect.DownloadingStable high speeds even in heavy local use.Can be very high in good coverage, but drops when many people use the cell at the same time.ChargingOften symmetric or close to symmetric — important for work, AI generation, cloud services, backup.Significantly lower than the download and heavily affected by load.LatencyConsistently low and smooth. For games and real-time services.Higher and more variable. Affected by signal strength, load and distance.FlexibilityFixed solution tied to the address.Very flexible — can be taken, moved, and used in multiple locations. Could mobile broadband be better? At addresses where fiber is not already deployed, the simplicity of mobile broadband may trump the technical advantages of fixed connection. The cost can also be significantly lower in situations where you would have to bear the cost of digging and laying the fiber cable to the house yourself. Mobile broadband is also easy to take with you or activate at a new address, which makes it convenient and can be cost-effective if you want to use one subscription in several locations, such as your home and your vacation home or camper van. For many users, mobile broadband is fully capable of meeting their needs, although speeds and latency can vary more than fiber. In places where fiber is not available, mobile broadband can also provide a significantly better user experience than fixed broadband based on older technologies such as ADSL,” says Anna Brunström. Mikael GidlundTina Stafrén/Mittuniversitetet Mikael Gidlund also points to flexibility as a major advantage of mobile broadband, saying that users who mainly download (for example, surfing and streaming films) will not notice the mobile network’s more limited upload speed as much as those who, for example, play games or are on video calls. How can you decide what’s right for your situation? With fiber, it’s really only the price and the internet operator’s customer service that affect how well the connection works. When you choose a subscription, you can basically count on getting the promised speed, and it will normally not vary significantly. With mobile broadband, it’s much trickier and the situation can be completely different even for two neighbors. Always start by thinking about your household needs. How dependent are you on a stable connection at all times? What kind of services do you use and how many simultaneous users can you expect? Is it mostly downloads or do you also need to upload large amounts of data? If you need a public IP address, check that it is possible to get one for the subscription you are considering,” says Anna Brunström. Mikael Gidlund says that the performance you will get with mobile broadband depends on factors such as the environment, load, the operator’s network you choose, and the type of construction the house is built with. He recommends that anyone thinking of choosing mobile broadband should look at four things: 1. How well the network works where you live Thiago Japyassu It is rarely possible to test a subscription in advance, but you can still get a relatively reliable idea of how the connection will behave. The most practical way is to use a mobile phone from the same operator you plan to use and carry out tests where the router will be placed. It is important to measure at different times of the day, especially in the evening when the load is normally highest,” says Mikael Gidlund. Speed tests such as Fast.com work well for this purpose, while coverage maps should only be seen as a rough guide and are often over-optimistic. 2. How the house is constructed Mikael Gidlund says the material of the outer walls has a big impact on the speed of the mobile network inside the house. Many new houses have windows with energy glass covered by a metal film, which greatly attenuates the signal strength. In a modern passive house, the mobile signal becomes weak. An external antenna may be needed.Jörg Blobelt (CC BY-SA 4.0) This is a technical problem that does not depend on the operator, but on the laws of physics: The higher the frequency, the more difficult it is for the signal to penetrate materials. The fastest 5G networks use these higher frequencies. One way to get round the house design is to get an external antenna. In addition to being placed outdoors where the signal is stronger, it can be directional and have signal boosters. In some cases, this may be the only way to get a satisfactory mobile broadband speed. 3. Choice of operator The rollout of 4G and 5G is far from evenly distributed. Larger cities often have good 5G coverage. But in smaller communities and sparsely populated areas, 4G still provides the most practical coverage, and 5G may not be available at all or may only reach certain parts of the locality. Differences between operators are significant. It is not uncommon for one operator to perform excellently in a particular location, while another performs significantly worse despite similar coverage maps. Therefore, the choice of operator should be considered at least as important as the choice between fiber and mobile broadband,” says Mikael Gidlund. 4. How many people share the capacity? Cottonbro Studio All users connected to a given cell (i.e. a mobile mast) must share its total capacity. The more users and the more they try to do, the less capacity there is for each user. This is particularly noticeable in the evenings when many people are streaming films, if there is an event going on in the area so that more people than usual are present, in places where unusually many people are using mobile broadband instead of fixed, and in large apartment blocks. In other words, if you’re alone in a country house that happens to be close to a mobile tower, have few neighbors, and mainly use the internet during the day, you’re likely to get a much better experience than if you mainly want to watch Netflix in the evenings and live in a large apartment block. Are ‘unlimited’ mobile broadband plans really unlimited? Jean van der Meulen Anna Brunström says that most unlimited plans will be perceived as unlimited in normal use. But there are limits you can hit. For example, mobile broadband does not normally include roaming the country. There are also often clauses in the contract that limit abnormal use. If you “hit the cap” on your subscription, you typically get a reduced speed until the period is reset or the opportunity to top up. Always read the small print. Mikael Gidlund says that operators often have rules for so-called “fair use.” Those who use a lot of data in a short time may have their speed reduced, either temporarily during peak periods or until the end of the payment period. Evgeny Opanasenko A third option Anna Brunström points out that fiber and mobile networks are not the only technologies available to get an internet connection. Another option that has become viable in recent years is satellite internet. The most common consumer solutions, such as Starlink, rely on satellites orbiting close to the Earth with typical speeds around 50-200Mbit/s and latency around 20-50ms, which is sufficient for streaming, video conferencing, and everyday browsing. On the positive side, mobile broadband and satellite are also complementary, as satellite can work less well in densely populated areas where there is usually good mobile coverage. Areas with poorer mobile coverage often work well with satellite. Related content 6 things Starlink does better than regular home internet Never, ever put these 6 devices near your Wi-Fi router Are 5G laptops worth it? 7 key facts you need to know Read...

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