This was mostly an emergency purchase -- as I guess so many other routers are. However, this is the first emergency router purchase I've made where I didn't regret it at all. First and foremost: that pricetag is beyond amazing for what it offers. Most that do this much are roughly double this price. Second, it does seem to be fairly able to hold a good strong signal provided that your network adapter is good. If I had to find a nitpick, the use of only two antennas does mean that it's mostly only good for devices that are pretty close to parallel to its placement, but then having more antennas only helps if you can actually angle them to add more planes (and depending on how load is divided it may not really help anyway.) Unfortunately it's hard to test its maximum speed claims because most network adapters are USB and USB 2.0 is of course limited to a theoretical 480Mbps (and in real life a sustained transfer is less than that.) It's surprisingly hard to get PCI-E (or even PCI) adapters that aren't just horrible and they also cost quite a lot more. So the theoretical > 800Mbps this offers won't even apply to a lot of its customers. I can say that a WiFi to Ethernet transfer is quite fast though and online games seem to hold stable without any problems (I definitely saw the difference with a lower quality setup versus something better in gaming. A too high error rate causes all sorts of lag and problems.)
The firmware is fairly advanced. I see a few more advanced features like VPN support missing in this versus a very rare few more advanced systems (but I do see support for two dynamic DNS services,) but overall I'm very impressed with its capabilities. They don't go as overboard as many do these days in bloat in their design, keeping it more minimal and simple (but not ugly by any means.) If I'm nitpicking I would say that it's kind of sad that there is no properly working third party support (DD-WRT, Open Tomato, etc etc) for this particular model, but this is, unfortunately, not the router's fault nor any fault in the manufacturer's designs. (It comes down to the fact that the chipsets are locked behind such proprietary designs that actually supporting them without paying for some very expensive NDAs that then won't let you distribute open source software anyway pretty much ensures that third parties must reverse engineer -- and since the chipsets change frequently even among the same companies there are just too many to reverse engineer them all.) Maybe someday though? But I wouldn't count on it. And that's why it's so very important that the built-in software can do all but the most advanced of things. It even supports IPv6 control (not only can it use IPv6 and has some useful options for it, but it lets you turn it off. For whatever reason I seem to be having a host of problems lately with all my Linux devices trying to use it and I guess my ISP doesn't support it or something causing everything to just time out until I disable it. Now I can just turn it off on the router. My last router would not do this so I had to manually disable it on each such device.)
Simply put, it does what it does much better than it should for its pricerange. There aren't many that will at all compete at this pricerange. You can do more if you go to higher priceranges, but not by much (as I said, adding more antennas doesn't necessarily help -- it depends on a number of factors -- and higher speeds only help at all if the hardware connecting can even use them and few devices will benefit from more.)
| Wireless Type | 802.11a/b/g/n/ac |
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