These improvements have kept her and her family “happy with the A7 overall.”. It’s a decent choice particularly for smaller spaces such as apartments and compact single-story homes, as well as for homes that don’t have lots of extra devices, like smart-home gadgets and tablets, fighting for bandwidth. TP-Link is committed to delivering more affordable solutions that meet the increasing bandwidth demands in today’s homes. What you shouldn’t do is blindly buy either the cheapest router or the most expensive router you can find. Unless you have a large home better suited to mesh networking, the AX50 is a good choice, as it can provide a better network than what you get from routers more than a couple of years old or many networking kits rented from an internet provider. Parental controls, security, and performance are relatively easy to configure in the Tether smartphone app. We characterized speed by looking at the combination of performance when downloading a large file at short and long range. Laptops or phones that are 6 GHz compatible will be rare in the early days of 2021, but we think the new bands will be useful for wireless backhaul between a router and satellites (such as in a mesh-networking kit). Sort: Clear All. If the A7 works pretty well for you, but you have a stubborn dead zone it can’t reach, you can extend its range with compatible TP-Link OneMesh extenders. But TP-Link has improved the Archer A7 since we tested it in 2018, adding via frequent firmware updates features such as compatibility with TP-Link’s OneMesh extenders. The TP-Link Archer AX50 next to the Netgear RAX40. The biggest improvements in Wi-Fi 6 concern how routers handle simultaneous connections to multiple devices—an increasingly common cause of wireless problems in busy households. This router’s plastic body is a little shiny and kind of cheap feeling next to that of the Archer A20 or Asus’s routers, but you’re probably not going to be handling your router after you install it. A deep dive into why Wi-Fi kinda sucks, Wi-Fi gets quicker with 802.11ax, but buying early might offer few advantages. URL filters are particularly useful if you want to restrict web access at specific times. TP-Link Archer AX50 ⭐ review. Folks on a gigabit plan (a 1,000 Mbps connection) are more likely to be able to max out their connection speeds using any of the top routers. We also looked for routers from less well-known manufacturers with strong reviews from tech experts or potentially interesting features that set them apart. Sales & Expert advice … Whenever possible, we do check what kind of hardware a router uses—better processors and more memory often mean better performance—but the Archer A7 is a good example of why you can’t rely solely on these specifications. Like TP-Link routers, Asus routers include Amazon Alexa compatibility, so you can turn on a separate guest Wi-Fi network using your Echo smart speaker, for example. However, if you just need speedy Wi-Fi access in your home, the AX20 still delivers. Because these tests simulated real-world traffic, they did a better job of modeling real-world performance compared with a tool like iPerf, an artificial testing utility that moves data from one machine to another as fast as possible. In a small home or apartment with few devices online, it’s a solid option, and it’s the cheapest one we recommend. The TP-Link Archer AX50 next to the Netgear RAX40. Print Email. As soon as you set up your router, change its administrator password. On most cheap (or old) routers, you have to make two separate network names—such as “mynetwork2.4” and “mynetwork5”—and then decide which of your devices should join which network. For example, the AX20 doesn’t support link aggregation (linking two LAN ports for extra speed to a single device), and it has only a USB 2.0 port, rather than a speedy USB 3.0 port, for file sharing. AX30005 GHz: 2402 Mbps (802.11ax, HE160) 2.4 GHz: 574 Mbps (802.11ax) These routers promised more performance from added radios, antennas, extra ports, or a combination of those. We suggest considering either of the latter two models if you’re a networking whiz and you want to tweak your router’s radio strength, its channel selections, and the threshold where the band steering switches clients from 5 GHz to 2.4 GHz. If you find a NAS too intimidating or expensive but you want to take advantage of network-based storage anyway, the AX50 also has a USB 3.0 port for connecting a shared portable hard drive or SSD. Before joining Wirecutter, Joel Santo Domingo tested and wrote about PCs, networking, and personal tech at PCMag.com, PC Magazine, Lifewire, and HotHardware for more than 17 years. Just as in a laptop, the processor and memory inside a router affect its overall performance. A higher maximum Wi-Fi speed results in better performance. Your router won’t send you an email or automatically pop up an alert when a new firmware update is available. Asus RT-AX56U vs TP-Link Archer AX50. But don’t think these features are a replacement for talking with your kids: Toddlers and preschoolers are relatively complacent, but no one has more time, drive, or incentive to circumvent parental controls than a bored teenager. Volume is the quantity of three-dimensional space enclosed by the product's chassis or, in simpler terms, the space the product occupies. Apartments or small to medium-size houses with three or four people on the company ’ s still a choice. 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