I bought this router because I was researching what the best home routers are. This one came up as a possibility. My requirements are that the router never needs to be rebooted, and run all my various electronic wireless “clients” as the industry refers to them.
Buying a new router can be difficult due to all the advertising hype the manufacturers put out and the extreme details that testers go to in order to separate one router from another. The manufacturers try to convince us that we need router features that none of the “clients” (home electronic devices) are capable of using. The idea is that we need to “Future Proof” by buying now what may become available in another year or two. One manufacturer recently put out quite an ad explaining how sad it is that most people still have a wireless n router in the age of wireless ac. The fact that most people do not have wireless ac was not mentioned.
The problem with buying what the clients cannot use is that routers seem to fail after a few years of use. Or if the entire router does not fail, it is common for one of the bands to fail. Instead of having both a 2.4g and a 5.0g you end up with just one of them working. So buying a $250 to $300 router now to take advantage of something in a few years really does not make sense. Also it mean purchasing all new and the latest and greats laptops, phones, and tablets in order to use these new features. Most of us purchase new items one at a time and not all at once. We gradually move into it over a period of years. There are many wireless g devices out there and they still work great. And many hotspots in your local town are using wireless g routers because they are cheap to buy and still work great in physically small spaces. Don’t get me wrong, I very much support moving up from old wireless g routers. Especially if you have newer devices in your home. Ac has great speed and the beamforming technology is really nice.
So how does the TP-Link fit into all of this? As a home user (actually I run my business out of my home also) I wanted 100% up time and I wanted something to run all my 8 to 10 wireless devices with no issues. My experience has been that most routers that are going to fail or constantly reboot do it pretty much from the beginning. This router replaced a Cisco Linksys E3000 that has worked great for 4.5 years. I really did not need to replace it but I had reached the point of 3 wireless ac devices with a fourth coming so decided to do so.
The TP-Link has great range. I have the router upstairs 70 feet from my bedroom which is downstairs. The signal goes through two walls and a roof at a strong slant in order to get to the far reaches of the bedroom. I placed my Samsung S5 (wireless ac) an iPad 2 (wireless ac) a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 (wireless ac) a 4.5 year old Lenovo laptop (wireless n) a LG 10 inch tablet (wireless n) and a 5 to six year old Mac (wireless g) all in the room. I lined them up and played YouTube videos on all of them at the same time. Everything played flawlessly with no skips, jumps or hesitation. So, that kind of performance with no downtime so far is a much as most of us will need. All of the other tweaks and IT guy stuff that the testers talk about will not impact most home users. We just want something with good range that works all the time. This router accomplishes that. Two to three years from now when electronic devises have all the wiz bang stuff and I start buying those devices, then I will buy the routers that will support it. In the meantime this router will fulfill the needs of most home users and do it well at a reasonable cost.
UPDATE AS OF JUNE 29. The router has been up for several weeks now without a single hiccup. It is working great. My speeds in the house run around 150 Mbps for wireless N and around 450 Mbps to 600 Mbps for my wireless AC devices. HOWEVER, remember that these high speeds are meaningless if your internet connection is slower. Your fastest speed can never exceed what your internet service provider gives you. So if you have internet service that is 10 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up then the high speeds recorded on your devices are meaningless. They only will benefit you if you have an internal system where maybe you have all your movies and music stored on an internal drive and you access that from your wireless devices. Then the high router speeds work. But when you connect to the internet you can never get more than what your provider gives you and if you have multiple devices connecting then that number gets divided up even more. So those with slow DSL or low end cable modem are not benefiting from a fast router. Those who have 300 down and 20 up from a fast cable modem can receive some benefit. But you will never get more than that cable modem offers. So do not get too enthralled with the fast router speeds. They may be of little or no benefit to you. But they make for great advertising for the router makers.
| Wireless Type | 802.11ac |
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