I guess the most common use cases for this router didn't justify a higher WAN link speed.I don't think many people have a WAN link of 2 or more Gbps. To integrate one would bring higher costs and power consumption.
While true for the majority, there are more and more gigabit+ ISP options coming every day. It would be a shame to be limited by your router - assuming you get the speed you pay for. I just assume that most people that currently have gigabit service are only getting around 900Mbps in reality - 10% less than advertised due to physical constraints.
The price is something I didn't expect with what this router has. I have a Securifi Almond Router, it's a router and wireless extender in one. Highly recommended because of it's speed and easy setup. Found one here: http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-routers/
The biggest problem is that there are no 10Gbe integrated NIC cards. And a card is $300 bucks and requires a PCIe x8 lane to work.
Right now it is too expensive to try and make a consumer router that supports 10Gbe. The cheapest decent switch, not even a full on router, that I could find was $300 bucks. Add in all the features like 802.11ac, 4x4, USB/eSATA and other features you want and it would easily be a $600+ cost router.
for something over 1gbps might want to check out the Ubiquiti ERLite-3... I think its actually 3gbps ethernet port. I have no use for such a high amount, i went here http://www.pricenfees.com/best-modem-router-combo.... and found the TP-Link W8980 to be more than enough as far as speed is concerned.
Your phone gets 50 megaBITS per second download speeds over LTE, not megabytes. Your 50 megabits per second download is only 6.25 megabytes. 1 gigabit/sec WAN is equal to 1000 megaBITS or 125 megabytes so no, a 1 gbps WAN port is not in any danger of being maxed out by an LTE connection.
To be fair, the abbreviations of these terms are quite confusing since the difference between bit and byte - when abbreviated - depends on the capitalization of a single character. And lots of time the convention isn't even followed when people write about it. These terms seem almost perversely formulated to trip people up.
It's really mind boggling why so many people want a 10Gbit WAN port on this thing, when wireless AC does not come close to saturating even 1Gbps pipe. People who run more than 1Gbps ISP pipes to their homes, will either need to use wires or multiple wireless clients and routers to take advantage of that WAN bandwidth.
There is no wireless-ac client that would fill a 1 gigabit pipe. The real life data transfer rate of wireless-ac with a high end 2 or 3-stream MIMO client would be somewhere between 200 and 600Mbps assuming you sit next to the router with your client device. The only possible way this router could come close to filling a 1gigabit WAN pipe, is with two high end MU-MIMO clients (at least two streams each) each possibly in the same room with the router.
obviously the 10 mbps port for WAN would have to come with 10 mbps LAN ports Also, those AC routers most certainly can saturate a 1gbps pipe. even if a single device was really limited to a mere 600mbps like you said, people have more than one device in their house accessing the internet at once.
The most common justification for this router is to be able to use MU-MIMO. Since MU-MIMO clients don't exist at all, except perhaps for this router itself running in bridged client mode, the highest performance clients are going to see 3x3 level speeds, which is yesterdays news, and far below 1Gbps.
If you need 10gig on a router you're in a high end enterprise environment and should really be looking at industrial grade stuff with much higher i/o bandwidth than something like this is gonna provide.
That's not necessarily true, now that Comcast is rolling out 2gb/s service. Though that's as much about Comcast fleecing the non-tech savvy with marketing as it is an effort to push the boundaries and bring 10gig costs down.
Nbase-T is coming, hopefully pretty soon. That will give us 2.5 and 5 Gbit over cat5e and cat6. Sure, you need new hardware to support it. Will be interesting to see how fast it will/can push the consumers to buy new stuf fto get faster home neworks and also push the service providers to provide faster options.
Who would use a commercial router for more than 1gbps WAN? Build an inexpensive PC and drop in two 10gbe cards for $35 each and load on your favourite router software, done.
I have a router which I can say a great deal for me since it has beamforming technology means that it'll direct more power in the direction of your devices to get them the signal power they need. Got that at http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-routers/
Open source firmware or bust. Way too many vulnerabilities in routers (whether on purpose or because they don't care to update them quickly). At least allow the community to fix them for you and audit their software.
My R7000 runs DDWRT and OpenWRT. Sure it's not quite the bleeding edge, but it's plenty fast for my heavy use. My uplink is 100 mbit, and I have a laptop, 2 desktops, 2 smart phones, tablet, and roku that are used regularly. It's been fast, stable, and I get a wifi connection even when I'm a few houses away. Not sure what I'd use the incremental performance for.
True, but at least you can update open source routers regularly. My router received maybe five firmware updates from the manufacturer, then they came out with a newer high end model a year later and dropped mine like a rock. So now I've got a router that still fits my needs, but has a couple of known vulnerabilities in it. I'd rather not spend a couple hundred a year replacing routers that have nothing wrong with them but outdated firmware.
Linksys E8350 and Netgear R7500 already use IPQ8064+QCA9880. Could it be that this new router is the first one with the new QCA9980 radio instead of QCA9880? That would make more sense with the 4x4:4 setup.
USB 3.0 on the router? Did they solve the interference problem? I have a very bad experience using the USB 3.0 port causing a lot of interference: bad signal quality and continuously dropping connections.
The interference is very implementation specific. I have not been able to generate any noticable interference with my TP-Link Archer C8 with it's USB3 port with a couple of different USB3 devices. I have seen other's were even inactive USB3 devices connectioned to the router neutered 2.4GHz.
$280 for router with 1 Gbps WAN port, that means I can't max out my downlink and uplink if I have 1 Gbps Internet connection (1 Gbps down + 1 Gbps up). They should have included 10 Gbps WAN port.
AND the 1733 rate is the PHY rate. The MAC rate is a half to two thirds that, depending on the precise aggregation capabilities that are implemented. Of all the things to whine about, this one is pretty low down the list.
In order to get max performance from one of the AC routers, you have to have a very specific setup. For example, you absolutely have to be using the 5Ghz side, you must enable wide channels (160 for Wave 2 I believe), and you probably have to do some bit rate tuning, such as making 48Mbps Mandatory and 54Mbps supported just to get all the B-radio legacy beacons to stop being used by clients for associating. Remember also that any W-Fi network is (1) only as fast as the slowest client, and (2) is HALF Duplex to only one client at a time, and (3) is Collision Aware (CA) not Collision Detecting (CD), and (4) is a shared medium that you can only slice up for so many clients. In other words these numbers used by manufacturers are all marketing crap, and anyone who buys a router based on the speeds given probably bought Pentium 4's based solely on clock speed differences.
CorelogicCom - What you write is mostly true for wifi, but an router also gives you the possibility to conenct using ethernet cables and in that case you get gigabit in both directions.
As wtallis wrote, 1Gb is full duplay, the only scenario where half dupley can or would ever be used with Gigabit is if it were connected to an hub. But for switches, full duplex is the only supported mode according to gigabit specifications. You have 1 gigabit in each direction if you have an gigabit card.
Seriously, what planet you live on? 99.99% of consumers do not have even 1gigabit WAN. This router is not for talking to the WAN at that speed. This is for LAN/WLAN devices communicating with each other to access the NAS, streaming media, etc and to finally to get rid of the remaining cords.
So, what platform is the BEST as far as being an AP now? I am running 2 N300 AP's at home now (one for 2.4Ghz and one for 5Ghz) and I'd like to upgrade them to newer tech sometime, but there are so many different platforms now, it's hard to know what to get. Is this one the best? (QCA9980 radio)?
Also, are there any pure AP's with these modern radios? I use pfSense for routing and so I don't need any of the routing capability or the USB or eSATA crap on these things, I just want a pure AP. I mean I could use one of these routers as an AP but it would be nice to be able to save some cash by getting just an AP, but most of the ones I see are older tech, and not these modern radios.
If you want the best AP - choose one from Ubiquiti Networks - perfect balance of performance and cost. Ruckus APs will probably win the benchmarks, but the APs are really costly.
You will need to wait a few months for this tech to move up to the enterprise APs from the likes of UBNT, Ruckus etc.
At home I tried many Soho brands and their top models such as Linksys, s-Link, NetGear but didn't quite do the trick. Also gave it a shot using semi-pro products of Ubiquity and Engenius.
In the end, after not being satisfied, tried Cisco and Ruckus - I (currently) very much love Ruckus wirelessAP's what a breath of fresh air :)
I know it does cost a lot comparetively, but once you tried e.g. Ruckus R300 you will experience what I'm trying to say ;)
Yeah, I have had some Ubiquity gear in the past, it's always been quite good, but as mentioned, nothing with the latest gen chipsets yet. Oh well, will have to see what come out.
i've tried huawei, tp-link, linksys and d-link routers before as access points by disabling DHCP for my home wifi solution over last four and half years. then i tried mikrotik and have been really satisfied since.
OTOH my office uses ubiquiti, their software interface is nice and we never faced signal issues with them. but they are expensive for home/personal use IMO.
Any router faster than AC1750 standard is a waste of money. (3x3 streams at 5GHz, and 3x3 at 2.4GHz). In fact, arguably, since most high end PCs come only with 2x2 adapter, you might as well get an AC1200 or AC1300 router. Any router supporting standards higher than AC1750 or AC1900 is much faster than what typical client hardware supports, and the only way to go beyond that is to use MU-MIMO (like this router supports), but there is still no client support for MU-MIMO at all. So I'd personally get a cheap AC1200 router, like tp-link C5, use for a couple of years, then buy a higher end machinery once MU-MIMO clients become common.
I don't trust a Linksys router any further than I can throw one. Even that's a bit too far. I wasted over an hour on the phone with their tech support and all they kept doing was making me clone my mac address to the stupid router. Turns out their router had a WAN port that was too stupid to get an IP address.
But that strikes me as really misleading. The average consumer sees "1700 Mbps" and they think that's the speed they'll get. PHY rate is utterly irrelevant to them.
Duh, let me tell you that 90% of all wireless marketing is utter scam. Just recall how they advertized Wireless-N being capable of 300Mbit on each band while in reality, most consumer devices, even high end PCs end up coming with a neutered single stream 2.4GHz-only single-band wireless-n card, giving you about 20% improvement over the old G-standard, and link rate about four times less than the adverized N300, or N600, even at PHY rate.
Arguably, you won't even get a half of that. The highest end PCs come with a 3x3 wireless AC card, which maxes out at "1300mbit", but in reality you get like a third of what's advertized. The advantage of the MU-MIMO router like this one, is that now you can have two clients talking to the router simultaneously, splitting the four streams between themselves, two to each, and that is arguably an improvement. The only issue is that there is no MU-MIMO client hardware on the market right now. Personally, I'd keep the current routers, then buy a MU-MIMO router like two years from now, when their price will be half of the current.
I really hate wifi, a lot. Ive always bought high end routers, dont tons of research, and its still not even close to approaching how good a basic 100basetx switch was 10 years ago. Its definitely gotten better, but it seems like we're still 3-5 years from wifi being able to seriously supplant a wired setup.
I honestly wish building codes would be updated to make them put ethernet in every room in a house. It would add very little to the cost of building a home and wired will always be superior to wireless. Not to mention the lack of security concerns.
It's like you are still in the 20th century kicking and screaming as they drag you into the modern age. Look, I'm with you on the wired thing. You don't have to sell anyone on that here @ AT. The problem is that the desktop is not people's primary means of accessing the network any longer. It's laptops, tablets and phones. Like it or not it's these devices that the masses are using. They are not tied down to a desk. No, they are on the couch in the living room, laying on the floor in their bedroom, propped up on their kitchen counter or sitting outside in the backyard.
I've got four of my computers hard-wired with Cat6 to my switch. However, we have two tablets and two smartphones. Throw in guests and their devices and it's a must to have a good wireless network. Now, do you hate wi-fi when you are at a business or do you insist that they uncoil some Cat5 from their spool?
I'm with you, if it doesn't move - desktop computers, set-top boxes, etc. - I run a cable. But I've got tablets, smartphones, work laptop, that need WiFi. 11n works just fine for me. I have done a few large enterprise WiFi implementations using Aruba (a/b/g/n) gear and can see where ac will be useful in the enterprise (once MU-MIMO is working for most clients) but don't see a lot of advantage for home use unless you've got a media server dishing out multiple streams or have (and use) a 1Gbps or better pipe from your ISP.
You are misunderstanding me, i didnt say wifi is useless and everything should be wired. I simply stated wifi has a ways to go before it can be a serious alternative to wired for most situations.
Absolutely in a commercial building where the spaces tend to be open it tends to work a lot better. But in a home environment its sketchy as hell. I can literally go from one from to another room 15 feet away and lose 60% of the signal. I've had people have connectivitiy issues sitting literally 10 feet away from our Ubiquiti (which has been great overall) because there are 15 thousand (slight exaggeration) other wifi networks on the same wavelength and it just makes things sketchy in a household. Again, this is anecdotal based off my own personal experience.
I was probably too harsh in saying i hate wifi. I dont hate it, i just hate that it seems like its 85% of the way there.
I should also clarify the building code statements. IMO there is no reason they can't slap a pair of RJ45 ports next to one of the sockets in each room when they're building a house. Its really minor when they're building it because a couple lines of cat5e/6 would add maybe $500-1000 to the overall cost of a new home. And it makes life so much easier, you plug your desktops in, your HTPC's in. Hell if the ports arent behind a couch or something, you can plug your laptop in too, depending on what you plan on doing with it.
In a public place like a starbucks, obviously wired is just plain stupid. Wifi IMO is best suited for those types of situations.
Indeed. The best I have seen with AC, is about 200-300Mbit transfer rate, but that's direct from client to the router. So that pipe width is shared by all clients, once you copy a file from one machine to another, you're effectively not much faster than a 100Mbit ethernet.. The MU-MIMO routers will fix some of that, since MU-MIMO will allow a four stream router to talk simultaneously to say two two-stream clients, but that's still years away since practically no hardware on the market supports MU-MIMO.
And i should have clarified also i was referring more to file transfers, not just watching youtube, or netflix or something like that on a tablet.
But if i want to use wifi say to transfer some of my steam data that i already downloaded to my laptop, i might as well start building a ship in a bottle because ill be finished with that well before that 10gig game download transfers from my desktop to my laptop via wifi.
Having a lot of Wi-Fi problems with a school enabled with tablets, I learned a lot about the AC standard.
If this quickly gets cheaper compared to a dual 5ghz radio, then I'm interested. Otherwise, a dual 5ghz Wi-Fi router is the way to go for multiple devices as the 5Ghz band is decently wide for such WiFI device. I haven't seen any device capable of 160 Mhz bandwidth. Using 80Mhz should allow two channels available in the band. You should have little problems with interference with other routers as the 5Ghz gets weak pretty easily with obstructions.
Yet, all these high-end devices are particularly useful if you have at least 9 or more devices in range.
There is absolutely no reason to get a MU-MIMO router right now, since clients do not support this technology yet. It will make sense 2-3 years down the road, and I hope the prices will drop by then.
Can anyone please tell me the difference between Netgear X4, Netgear X6, Apple AirPort, and this Linksys EA8500 (apart from the MU-MIMO feature enabled)? Why would one pick X6 over X4 or vice versa? It is very difficult to understand what the differences between them are.
This one is most like the existing Linksys WRT1900ac. And can be considered it's replacement. Although we don't know for sure (because it's not released yet). It seems to have same cores and other internals hardware etc. Except for the radios. Which they have changed out.
* The WRT1900 currently supports manufacturer firmware, OpenWRT and DD-WRT. But not Tomato.
Problem is: all Wave2 radios are Quallcomm new chipset. And therefore closed source driver = probably no wireless in the open firmwares support.
This applies even more so to the X4 (R7500) because not only has that 'brand new' Qualcomm Wave2 radios. But actually the CPU SoC is Qalcomm too. So it's only got official Netgear firmware on it. Which is basically terrible. And that is why to avoid the X4 for a very long time (probably years). Despite it being the fastest / technically most superior hardware than any of these routers.
X6 - No point don't bother. All the extra antennas are a waste of money.
Apple Airport - is very good AC wifi. And a good product. But no open firmware support whatsoever. So you are at the mercy of Apple's firmware updates etc.
Netgear R7000 Nighthawk. Is best supported for open firmwares. All of them right now straight away. Including Tomato too. Therefore, the R7000 is the one to buy ATM. It also gives excellent Wifi ac performance. Cheaper / reduced in price a bit now. So is best value for money. And mature well tested product - lots of knowledge / quirks are well known.
WRT1200ac - not released yet. But will have same open firmware support as the WRT1900ac. It's just fewer radios. These are also technically a VERY good product but sorry not 1st choice when you can't run tomato on it.
In router space - the hardware moves very quickly. Software moves very slowly. So all the newest and last years router are not well supported in open software. Until several years away. And it is worse with companies like qualcomm who really want to protect their IP / new innovations from being copied their competitors. = no open source drivers. But they will often help release stuff later on, once they obselete it with even newer products. So if anything, these new MIMO products are good. Because it means that the previous ones it replaces (like Linksys WRT1900) can become more well supported now in the open source lands.
Just curious about your strong preference for Tomato because I've never used it. Does Tomato do some things significantly better than DD-WRT; or is it just a case of sticking with what you tried first because it does everything you need it to do. (Why I've never tried anything but DD-WRT.)
Tomato is most similar to DD-WRT features. So most user may use either DD-WRT or Tomato. But the reason it's good to have both is a freedom to switch. Since unfortunately these days DD-WRT has gotten a bit complex for it's own boots. And new commits breaking features without knowing. A lot of that is because DD-WRT support so many different hardware.
Wheras Tomato only work on relatively fewer routers. This means that the tomato developers are in a situation where they can test and re-test their firmware more thouroughly on those fewer products. Hence it is more stable / less broken features / confusion hassle trying to make settings work that cannot because there is some unknown bug.
But DD-WRT is not a bad firmware at all. Especially if it happens to be all working, for the precise commit that you decided to install.
Another feature of tomato is Jacky's 'advanced Tomato v2'. Which is just a fancy ajax Web 2.0 interface bolted on top of Shibby regular enhanced tomato firmware. Which graphically, for the WebGUI puts all other router firmwares to shame. Of course, that's just a bonus.
Tomato also seems best choice for QoS. If that is important to you.
This is why I say 'just get the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk'... because than you don't have to worry or decide which firmware you like best. You can try all of them, and then finally settle on which one you prefer. Including the manufacturer. So if 'no tomato' = fewer options. Not the ideal situation.
I would mention ASUS. But their product has a slower CPU than the R7000 Nighthawk. Which is a disadvantage for certain CPU - heavy features. Such as VPN server, etc. Also their USB 3 port is not shielded correctly and it interfers with the Wifi signal. Also their Asus Merlin CFW Firmware - I'm not so easily impressed as others as since it's mostly a manufacturer firmware (meaning basic and lacking certain advanced features of DD-WRT or tomato).
I disagree with the X6 comment. It is actually more useful than all the MU-MIMO routers you can buy because MU-MIMO needs client support which is almost none except for some new Acer laptops I've heard.
The X6 is basically two 5Ghz WiFi routers which explains the number of visible antennas. If you have multiple devices connected to the router of around one dozen, then there's a benefit. The reason to have two routers is to segregate the devices sharing a single WiFi signal. In a highway, we have multiple lanes for multiple speeds. In the X6 or other Tri-Band routers, they put the fast WIFI devices on one signal, the other on the medium speed, while the slowest on the 2.4 Ghz.
However there was good reason for my comment. It is twofold. 1) R8000 is not so well supported for open firmwares as the R7000. 2) For the extra cost of the R8000. You can either buy about 2x R7000. Or 1x R7000 + 1x Wireless repeater. Which combined effectively gives you the only extra benefit of more X6 radios. Yet without X6 you have the better open firmwares support plus also the freedom to position the 2 hotspot in different locations to one another. Rather than being stuck in the same single physical device.
Well, the key improvement of the wireless-n and wireless-ac standards over the old g standard is that they allow several simultaneous streams of data (each stream much faster than the old wireless-g), even over the "narrow" 20MHz channel. (The other improvement is that you can use wide channels). However, the issue is that 2x2 MIMO (2 steams) is only now becoming standard, and 3-stream adapters are installed on very high end laptops (like MacBook Pro), while at the same time there are many routers on the market with 2-3-4 stream MIMO. Well, it turns out that with the old (now current MIMO) the router takes turns talking to each client device instead of talking to them at once. So a three-stream router talking to one-stream device, can't talk to another one or two-stream device at the same time. The MU-MIMO (multiuser MIMO) fixes that. Arguably, that's quite an improvement. But it's not worth buying a MU-MIMO router right now, because MU-MIMO client hardware practically does not exist. I'd way a couple of years until I have MU-MIMO capable phones, tablets, and PCs before I buy a router with MU-MIMO.
$280 is rather steep for a device that doesn't have either a fixed 10GbE port or a SFP/SFP+ port. You can pick up MicroTik switches with at least one 10GbE port for just under $200 these days.
You are really confused if you think that not having 10Gbit switch is a limitation, much less the biggest limitation of this router. Considering that the wireless-ac does not sustain or only barely approaches real world data transfer rates near 1Gbps (that would be with a MU-MIMO clients, which don't even exist), 10Gbps WAN port on this router would be a complete waste of resources.
I would want the 10GbE port on the LAN side for a file server or as an uplink to a workgroup switch. Saturating a 1Gbps port is easy these days with several wired clients. Having a SFP port on the WAN side could allow this router to directly connect to a FttH/FttP network using either active or passive optical Ethernet, which is increasingly common these days. Asking that the 10GbE port be a SFP+ port might be a bit much for a sub-$300 device, but it isn't without reason. I am seeing people increasingly skip CAT6a and CAT7 copper for OM4 multimode fiber for long runs. 10GbE over legacy CAT6 is limited to around 170ft/50m, over CAT5e is limited to around 130ft/30m, more or less depending on cable quality and the presence of adjacent cables. Please don't ever call me confused again.
Linksys is not going to lose its sleep over a couple of nerds on anandtech who may _think_ they would _possibly_ need a 10Gbit WAN port at the time when 1gigabit remains an unattainable luxury to most households. Even if 2Gbps broadband becomes available all over the country next year as some ISP promise, I don't see households tripping over each other trying to get that service. What's that bandwidth for? A 4k video streaming needs what, 20-50Mbps of bandwidth. So a 1Gbps WAN connection will give you more than a dozen 4k streams already. I can see most people certainly wanting 100Mbps broadband, and many willing to pay a small premium for 1Gbps, but ISPs will have a hard time building a case for mass adoption of even 2Gbps broadband unless it cost a 5-10 buck premium over 1Gbps.
And, I am sure there may be some kind of premium product in the works right now with 10Gbps ports, but this router I am sure will be sold for $199 on amazon a year from now. The key signature of this product is MU-MIMO wireless-ac networking, which will become more commonplace faster than even gigabit broadband.
Your second response is confusing. You're arguing against the merits of 10GbE on the WAN (untrusted) side, yet my previous post advocated for 10GbE on the LAN (trusted) side, preferably using a SFP+ port. I did advocate for a SFP port on the WAN side, but SFP ports only support 1GbE GBIC modules.
Why do you keep thinking that I want 10GbE on the WAN side? I don't.
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jeffkibuule - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Only 1gbps WAN?close - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I guess the most common use cases for this router didn't justify a higher WAN link speed.I don't think many people have a WAN link of 2 or more Gbps. To integrate one would bring higher costs and power consumption.nathanddrews - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
While true for the majority, there are more and more gigabit+ ISP options coming every day. It would be a shame to be limited by your router - assuming you get the speed you pay for. I just assume that most people that currently have gigabit service are only getting around 900Mbps in reality - 10% less than advertised due to physical constraints.Flunk - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I don't think I've seen any home LAN equipment with > 1GBps Ethernet ports. You have to move up the chain to get those.Uplink10 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
You are paying $280 which is alredy moving up the chain of money class, shouldn't hardware be too moving up the chain?DanNeely - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
10GB networking gear makes top of the line AC routers look cheap. :(matt_hall - Monday, November 9, 2015 - link
The price is something I didn't expect with what this router has. I have a Securifi Almond Router, it's a router and wireless extender in one. Highly recommended because of it's speed and easy setup. Found one here: http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-routers/minijedimaster - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
The fact that you think $280 is anywhere near "up the chain" shows how little you know about enterprise class networking equipment.jimmy$mitty - Thursday, May 14, 2015 - link
The biggest problem is that there are no 10Gbe integrated NIC cards. And a card is $300 bucks and requires a PCIe x8 lane to work.Right now it is too expensive to try and make a consumer router that supports 10Gbe. The cheapest decent switch, not even a full on router, that I could find was $300 bucks. Add in all the features like 802.11ac, 4x4, USB/eSATA and other features you want and it would easily be a $600+ cost router.
nathanddrews - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I never said otherwise?javachip - Monday, August 31, 2015 - link
for something over 1gbps might want to check out the Ubiquiti ERLite-3... I think its actually 3gbps ethernet port. I have no use for such a high amount, i went here http://www.pricenfees.com/best-modem-router-combo.... and found the TP-Link W8980 to be more than enough as far as speed is concerned.Morawka - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
1 gbps is only 100 Mbmy phone does 50 Mb a sec over LTE
ddarko - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Your phone gets 50 megaBITS per second download speeds over LTE, not megabytes. Your 50 megabits per second download is only 6.25 megabytes. 1 gigabit/sec WAN is equal to 1000 megaBITS or 125 megabytes so no, a 1 gbps WAN port is not in any danger of being maxed out by an LTE connection.Kutark - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
2015 and we sitll have to clarify this stuff lol. /sigh.ddarko - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
To be fair, the abbreviations of these terms are quite confusing since the difference between bit and byte - when abbreviated - depends on the capitalization of a single character. And lots of time the convention isn't even followed when people write about it. These terms seem almost perversely formulated to trip people up.UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
It's really mind boggling why so many people want a 10Gbit WAN port on this thing, when wireless AC does not come close to saturating even 1Gbps pipe. People who run more than 1Gbps ISP pipes to their homes, will either need to use wires or multiple wireless clients and routers to take advantage of that WAN bandwidth.There is no wireless-ac client that would fill a 1 gigabit pipe. The real life data transfer rate of wireless-ac with a high end 2 or 3-stream MIMO client would be somewhere between 200 and 600Mbps assuming you sit next to the router with your client device. The only possible way this router could come close to filling a 1gigabit WAN pipe, is with two high end MU-MIMO clients (at least two streams each) each possibly in the same room with the router.
taltamir - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
obviously the 10 mbps port for WAN would have to come with 10 mbps LAN portsAlso, those AC routers most certainly can saturate a 1gbps pipe. even if a single device was really limited to a mere 600mbps like you said, people have more than one device in their house accessing the internet at once.
taltamir - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
PS. there is also the possibility to turn off DHCP on it and use it as an access point, which means a 10gbps would be very usefulUtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
The most common justification for this router is to be able to use MU-MIMO. Since MU-MIMO clients don't exist at all, except perhaps for this router itself running in bridged client mode, the highest performance clients are going to see 3x3 level speeds, which is yesterdays news, and far below 1Gbps.Kutark - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
If you need 10gig on a router you're in a high end enterprise environment and should really be looking at industrial grade stuff with much higher i/o bandwidth than something like this is gonna provide.everdark81 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
That's not necessarily true, now that Comcast is rolling out 2gb/s service. Though that's as much about Comcast fleecing the non-tech savvy with marketing as it is an effort to push the boundaries and bring 10gig costs down.Samus - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
Please provide a link that offers any service beyond 1Gbps to any residence in the United States.IF you manage to actually find one, DO they provide (or even support) a media converter that is beyond a full duplex 1Gbps copper uplink?
This router, lacking the 10Gbps WAN, is easily future-proof for 5 years. Things aren't changing anytime soon.
If you have a service beyond 1Gbps, why are you looking at a Linksys router for your wireless thrills?
All of these comments cluelessly trolling this thing just piss me off.
hanssonrickard - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
Nbase-T is coming, hopefully pretty soon. That will give us 2.5 and 5 Gbit over cat5e and cat6.Sure, you need new hardware to support it.
Will be interesting to see how fast it will/can push the consumers to buy new stuf fto get faster home neworks and also push the service providers to provide faster options.
taltamir - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
Here you go, it took me 10 seconds on google to find ithttp://www.gizmag.com/fastest-home-internet-access...
10gbps ISP for home users
taltamir - Saturday, May 23, 2015 - link
oh, and here is for the UKhttp://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-commun...
they started with gbps but also are rolling out 10gbps
and here is another one:
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/03/gigac...
UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
What planet do you live on? What do you need 10gbps WAN port? What's the point?toysareforboys - Saturday, May 16, 2015 - link
Who would use a commercial router for more than 1gbps WAN? Build an inexpensive PC and drop in two 10gbe cards for $35 each and load on your favourite router software, done.joeymore - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
I have a router which I can say a great deal for me since it has beamforming technology means that it'll direct more power in the direction of your devices to get them the signal power they need. Got that at http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-routers/Krysto - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Open source firmware or bust. Way too many vulnerabilities in routers (whether on purpose or because they don't care to update them quickly). At least allow the community to fix them for you and audit their software.spikebike - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
My R7000 runs DDWRT and OpenWRT. Sure it's not quite the bleeding edge, but it's plenty fast for my heavy use. My uplink is 100 mbit, and I have a laptop, 2 desktops, 2 smart phones, tablet, and roku that are used regularly. It's been fast, stable, and I get a wifi connection even when I'm a few houses away. Not sure what I'd use the incremental performance for.RichieHH - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Oh please. OSS is just as vulnerable if not more so when people start shipping replumbed firmwares around.Flunk - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
It's better if your device manufacturer stopped supporting your device years ago like a lot of them have.Mr Perfect - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
True, but at least you can update open source routers regularly. My router received maybe five firmware updates from the manufacturer, then they came out with a newer high end model a year later and dropped mine like a rock. So now I've got a router that still fits my needs, but has a couple of known vulnerabilities in it. I'd rather not spend a couple hundred a year replacing routers that have nothing wrong with them but outdated firmware.arnd - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Linksys E8350 and Netgear R7500 already use IPQ8064+QCA9880. Could it be that this new router is the first one with the new QCA9980 radio instead of QCA9880? That would make more sense with the 4x4:4 setup.ganeshts - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Thanks for catching that typo - It is 9980. Btw, R7500 is QSR1000 from Quantenna (at least for the 5 GHz radio).Memo.Ray - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
USB 3.0 on the router? Did they solve the interference problem? I have a very bad experience using the USB 3.0 port causing a lot of interference: bad signal quality and continuously dropping connections.azazel1024 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
The interference is very implementation specific. I have not been able to generate any noticable interference with my TP-Link Archer C8 with it's USB3 port with a couple of different USB3 devices. I have seen other's were even inactive USB3 devices connectioned to the router neutered 2.4GHz.Uplink10 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
$280 for router with 1 Gbps WAN port, that means I can't max out my downlink and uplink if I have 1 Gbps Internet connection (1 Gbps down + 1 Gbps up). They should have included 10 Gbps WAN port.wtallis - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Gigabit Ethernet is full-duplex, meaning it supports simultaneous transmit and receive at 1Gbps. You won't be held back by the Ethernet port.name99 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
AND the 1733 rate is the PHY rate.The MAC rate is a half to two thirds that, depending on the precise aggregation capabilities that are implemented. Of all the things to whine about, this one is pretty low down the list.
Uplink10 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
If that is true it is O.K., but I am still unsure about that.CoreLogicCom - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
In order to get max performance from one of the AC routers, you have to have a very specific setup. For example, you absolutely have to be using the 5Ghz side, you must enable wide channels (160 for Wave 2 I believe), and you probably have to do some bit rate tuning, such as making 48Mbps Mandatory and 54Mbps supported just to get all the B-radio legacy beacons to stop being used by clients for associating. Remember also that any W-Fi network is (1) only as fast as the slowest client, and (2) is HALF Duplex to only one client at a time, and (3) is Collision Aware (CA) not Collision Detecting (CD), and (4) is a shared medium that you can only slice up for so many clients. In other words these numbers used by manufacturers are all marketing crap, and anyone who buys a router based on the speeds given probably bought Pentium 4's based solely on clock speed differences.hanssonrickard - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
CorelogicCom - What you write is mostly true for wifi, but an router also gives you the possibility to conenct using ethernet cables and in that case you get gigabit in both directions.tuxRoller - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
What are you uncertain about?That gigabit ethernet is full duplex (it is, since 801.3x)?
It's a pretty simple fact.
hanssonrickard - Sunday, May 10, 2015 - link
As wtallis wrote, 1Gb is full duplay, the only scenario where half dupley can or would ever be used with Gigabit is if it were connected to an hub. But for switches, full duplex is the only supported mode according to gigabit specifications.You have 1 gigabit in each direction if you have an gigabit card.
UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Seriously, what planet you live on? 99.99% of consumers do not have even 1gigabit WAN. This router is not for talking to the WAN at that speed. This is for LAN/WLAN devices communicating with each other to access the NAS, streaming media, etc and to finally to get rid of the remaining cords.extide - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
So, what platform is the BEST as far as being an AP now? I am running 2 N300 AP's at home now (one for 2.4Ghz and one for 5Ghz) and I'd like to upgrade them to newer tech sometime, but there are so many different platforms now, it's hard to know what to get. Is this one the best? (QCA9980 radio)?Also, are there any pure AP's with these modern radios? I use pfSense for routing and so I don't need any of the routing capability or the USB or eSATA crap on these things, I just want a pure AP. I mean I could use one of these routers as an AP but it would be nice to be able to save some cash by getting just an AP, but most of the ones I see are older tech, and not these modern radios.
Suggestions?
kyuu - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
The best "pure" access points for home use that I'm aware of are things like these:http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-802-11ac-Access-Poin...
http://www.amazon.com/D-Link-Wireless-Gigabit-Exte...
These don't use the absolute latest and greatest AC radios, though.
ganeshts - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
If you want the best AP - choose one from Ubiquiti Networks - perfect balance of performance and cost. Ruckus APs will probably win the benchmarks, but the APs are really costly.You will need to wait a few months for this tech to move up to the enterprise APs from the likes of UBNT, Ruckus etc.
Sjaam - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Hi there,At home I tried many Soho brands and their top models such as Linksys, s-Link, NetGear but didn't quite do the trick. Also gave it a shot using semi-pro products of Ubiquity and Engenius.
In the end, after not being satisfied, tried Cisco and Ruckus - I (currently) very much love Ruckus wirelessAP's what a breath of fresh air :)
I know it does cost a lot comparetively, but once you tried e.g. Ruckus R300 you will experience what I'm trying to say ;)
extide - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Yeah, I have had some Ubiquity gear in the past, it's always been quite good, but as mentioned, nothing with the latest gen chipsets yet. Oh well, will have to see what come out.9th - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
i've tried huawei, tp-link, linksys and d-link routers before as access points by disabling DHCP for my home wifi solution over last four and half years. then i tried mikrotik and have been really satisfied since.OTOH my office uses ubiquiti, their software interface is nice and we never faced signal issues with them. but they are expensive for home/personal use IMO.
UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Any router faster than AC1750 standard is a waste of money. (3x3 streams at 5GHz, and 3x3 at 2.4GHz). In fact, arguably, since most high end PCs come only with 2x2 adapter, you might as well get an AC1200 or AC1300 router. Any router supporting standards higher than AC1750 or AC1900 is much faster than what typical client hardware supports, and the only way to go beyond that is to use MU-MIMO (like this router supports), but there is still no client support for MU-MIMO at all. So I'd personally get a cheap AC1200 router, like tp-link C5, use for a couple of years, then buy a higher end machinery once MU-MIMO clients become common.Take a look at smallnetbuilder.
knightspawn1138 - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I don't trust a Linksys router any further than I can throw one. Even that's a bit too far. I wasted over an hour on the phone with their tech support and all they kept doing was making me clone my mac address to the stupid router. Turns out their router had a WAN port that was too stupid to get an IP address.Zak - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I'll be more excited about an affordable 10gigabit home switch and interfaces:(sonicmerlin - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
Why are they allowed to market these as "1700 mbps" when even in ideal conditions you won't get more than half that?extide - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
That's the PHY rate, ALL networking gear has ALWAYS been advertised based on the PHY rate.sonicmerlin - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
But that strikes me as really misleading. The average consumer sees "1700 Mbps" and they think that's the speed they'll get. PHY rate is utterly irrelevant to them.UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Duh, let me tell you that 90% of all wireless marketing is utter scam. Just recall how they advertized Wireless-N being capable of 300Mbit on each band while in reality, most consumer devices, even high end PCs end up coming with a neutered single stream 2.4GHz-only single-band wireless-n card, giving you about 20% improvement over the old G-standard, and link rate about four times less than the adverized N300, or N600, even at PHY rate.UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Arguably, you won't even get a half of that. The highest end PCs come with a 3x3 wireless AC card, which maxes out at "1300mbit", but in reality you get like a third of what's advertized. The advantage of the MU-MIMO router like this one, is that now you can have two clients talking to the router simultaneously, splitting the four streams between themselves, two to each, and that is arguably an improvement. The only issue is that there is no MU-MIMO client hardware on the market right now. Personally, I'd keep the current routers, then buy a MU-MIMO router like two years from now, when their price will be half of the current.Kutark - Thursday, May 7, 2015 - link
I really hate wifi, a lot. Ive always bought high end routers, dont tons of research, and its still not even close to approaching how good a basic 100basetx switch was 10 years ago. Its definitely gotten better, but it seems like we're still 3-5 years from wifi being able to seriously supplant a wired setup.I honestly wish building codes would be updated to make them put ethernet in every room in a house. It would add very little to the cost of building a home and wired will always be superior to wireless. Not to mention the lack of security concerns.
bigboxes - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
It's like you are still in the 20th century kicking and screaming as they drag you into the modern age. Look, I'm with you on the wired thing. You don't have to sell anyone on that here @ AT. The problem is that the desktop is not people's primary means of accessing the network any longer. It's laptops, tablets and phones. Like it or not it's these devices that the masses are using. They are not tied down to a desk. No, they are on the couch in the living room, laying on the floor in their bedroom, propped up on their kitchen counter or sitting outside in the backyard.I've got four of my computers hard-wired with Cat6 to my switch. However, we have two tablets and two smartphones. Throw in guests and their devices and it's a must to have a good wireless network. Now, do you hate wi-fi when you are at a business or do you insist that they uncoil some Cat5 from their spool?
hjmassey - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
I'm with you, if it doesn't move - desktop computers, set-top boxes, etc. - I run a cable. But I've got tablets, smartphones, work laptop, that need WiFi. 11n works just fine for me. I have done a few large enterprise WiFi implementations using Aruba (a/b/g/n) gear and can see where ac will be useful in the enterprise (once MU-MIMO is working for most clients) but don't see a lot of advantage for home use unless you've got a media server dishing out multiple streams or have (and use) a 1Gbps or better pipe from your ISP.Kutark - Sunday, May 17, 2015 - link
You are misunderstanding me, i didnt say wifi is useless and everything should be wired. I simply stated wifi has a ways to go before it can be a serious alternative to wired for most situations.Absolutely in a commercial building where the spaces tend to be open it tends to work a lot better. But in a home environment its sketchy as hell. I can literally go from one from to another room 15 feet away and lose 60% of the signal. I've had people have connectivitiy issues sitting literally 10 feet away from our Ubiquiti (which has been great overall) because there are 15 thousand (slight exaggeration) other wifi networks on the same wavelength and it just makes things sketchy in a household. Again, this is anecdotal based off my own personal experience.
I was probably too harsh in saying i hate wifi. I dont hate it, i just hate that it seems like its 85% of the way there.
Kutark - Sunday, May 17, 2015 - link
I should also clarify the building code statements. IMO there is no reason they can't slap a pair of RJ45 ports next to one of the sockets in each room when they're building a house. Its really minor when they're building it because a couple lines of cat5e/6 would add maybe $500-1000 to the overall cost of a new home. And it makes life so much easier, you plug your desktops in, your HTPC's in. Hell if the ports arent behind a couch or something, you can plug your laptop in too, depending on what you plan on doing with it.In a public place like a starbucks, obviously wired is just plain stupid. Wifi IMO is best suited for those types of situations.
UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Indeed. The best I have seen with AC, is about 200-300Mbit transfer rate, but that's direct from client to the router. So that pipe width is shared by all clients, once you copy a file from one machine to another, you're effectively not much faster than a 100Mbit ethernet.. The MU-MIMO routers will fix some of that, since MU-MIMO will allow a four stream router to talk simultaneously to say two two-stream clients, but that's still years away since practically no hardware on the market supports MU-MIMO.Kutark - Sunday, May 17, 2015 - link
And i should have clarified also i was referring more to file transfers, not just watching youtube, or netflix or something like that on a tablet.But if i want to use wifi say to transfer some of my steam data that i already downloaded to my laptop, i might as well start building a ship in a bottle because ill be finished with that well before that 10gig game download transfers from my desktop to my laptop via wifi.
zodiacfml - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Having a lot of Wi-Fi problems with a school enabled with tablets, I learned a lot about the AC standard.If this quickly gets cheaper compared to a dual 5ghz radio, then I'm interested. Otherwise, a dual 5ghz Wi-Fi router is the way to go for multiple devices as the 5Ghz band is decently wide for such WiFI device. I haven't seen any device capable of 160 Mhz bandwidth. Using 80Mhz should allow two channels available in the band. You should have little problems with interference with other routers as the 5Ghz gets weak pretty easily with obstructions.
Yet, all these high-end devices are particularly useful if you have at least 9 or more devices in range.
UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
There is absolutely no reason to get a MU-MIMO router right now, since clients do not support this technology yet. It will make sense 2-3 years down the road, and I hope the prices will drop by then.stun - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Can anyone please tell me the difference between Netgear X4, Netgear X6, Apple AirPort, and this Linksys EA8500 (apart from the MU-MIMO feature enabled)? Why would one pick X6 over X4 or vice versa? It is very difficult to understand what the differences between them are.dreamcat4 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
stun. I can tell you some of it:* Linksys EA8500
This one is most like the existing Linksys WRT1900ac. And can be considered it's replacement. Although we don't know for sure (because it's not released yet). It seems to have same cores and other internals hardware etc. Except for the radios. Which they have changed out.
* The WRT1900 currently supports manufacturer firmware, OpenWRT and DD-WRT. But not Tomato.
Problem is: all Wave2 radios are Quallcomm new chipset. And therefore closed source driver = probably no wireless in the open firmwares support.
This applies even more so to the X4 (R7500) because not only has that 'brand new' Qualcomm Wave2 radios. But actually the CPU SoC is Qalcomm too. So it's only got official Netgear firmware on it. Which is basically terrible. And that is why to avoid the X4 for a very long time (probably years). Despite it being the fastest / technically most superior hardware than any of these routers.
X6 - No point don't bother. All the extra antennas are a waste of money.
Apple Airport - is very good AC wifi. And a good product. But no open firmware support whatsoever. So you are at the mercy of Apple's firmware updates etc.
Netgear R7000 Nighthawk. Is best supported for open firmwares. All of them right now straight away. Including Tomato too. Therefore, the R7000 is the one to buy ATM. It also gives excellent Wifi ac performance. Cheaper / reduced in price a bit now. So is best value for money. And mature well tested product - lots of knowledge / quirks are well known.
WRT1200ac - not released yet. But will have same open firmware support as the WRT1900ac. It's just fewer radios. These are also technically a VERY good product but sorry not 1st choice when you can't run tomato on it.
In router space - the hardware moves very quickly. Software moves very slowly. So all the newest and last years router are not well supported in open software. Until several years away. And it is worse with companies like qualcomm who really want to protect their IP / new innovations from being copied their competitors. = no open source drivers. But they will often help release stuff later on, once they obselete it with even newer products. So if anything, these new MIMO products are good. Because it means that the previous ones it replaces (like Linksys WRT1900) can become more well supported now in the open source lands.
DanNeely - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Just curious about your strong preference for Tomato because I've never used it. Does Tomato do some things significantly better than DD-WRT; or is it just a case of sticking with what you tried first because it does everything you need it to do. (Why I've never tried anything but DD-WRT.)dreamcat4 - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
Tomato is most similar to DD-WRT features. So most user may use either DD-WRT or Tomato. But the reason it's good to have both is a freedom to switch. Since unfortunately these days DD-WRT has gotten a bit complex for it's own boots. And new commits breaking features without knowing. A lot of that is because DD-WRT support so many different hardware.Wheras Tomato only work on relatively fewer routers. This means that the tomato developers are in a situation where they can test and re-test their firmware more thouroughly on those fewer products. Hence it is more stable / less broken features / confusion hassle trying to make settings work that cannot because there is some unknown bug.
But DD-WRT is not a bad firmware at all. Especially if it happens to be all working, for the precise commit that you decided to install.
Another feature of tomato is Jacky's 'advanced Tomato v2'. Which is just a fancy ajax Web 2.0 interface bolted on top of Shibby regular enhanced tomato firmware. Which graphically, for the WebGUI puts all other router firmwares to shame. Of course, that's just a bonus.
Tomato also seems best choice for QoS. If that is important to you.
This is why I say 'just get the Netgear R7000 Nighthawk'... because than you don't have to worry or decide which firmware you like best. You can try all of them, and then finally settle on which one you prefer. Including the manufacturer. So if 'no tomato' = fewer options. Not the ideal situation.
I would mention ASUS. But their product has a slower CPU than the R7000 Nighthawk. Which is a disadvantage for certain CPU - heavy features. Such as VPN server, etc. Also their USB 3 port is not shielded correctly and it interfers with the Wifi signal. Also their Asus Merlin CFW Firmware - I'm not so easily impressed as others as since it's mostly a manufacturer firmware (meaning basic and lacking certain advanced features of DD-WRT or tomato).
zodiacfml - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
I disagree with the X6 comment. It is actually more useful than all the MU-MIMO routers you can buy because MU-MIMO needs client support which is almost none except for some new Acer laptops I've heard.The X6 is basically two 5Ghz WiFi routers which explains the number of visible antennas.
If you have multiple devices connected to the router of around one dozen, then there's a benefit. The reason to have two routers is to segregate the devices sharing a single WiFi signal.
In a highway, we have multiple lanes for multiple speeds. In the X6 or other Tri-Band routers, they put the fast WIFI devices on one signal, the other on the medium speed, while the slowest on the 2.4 Ghz.
dreamcat4 - Saturday, May 9, 2015 - link
That is a good point.However there was good reason for my comment. It is twofold. 1) R8000 is not so well supported for open firmwares as the R7000. 2) For the extra cost of the R8000. You can either buy about 2x R7000. Or 1x R7000 + 1x Wireless repeater. Which combined effectively gives you the only extra benefit of more X6 radios. Yet without X6 you have the better open firmwares support plus also the freedom to position the 2 hotspot in different locations to one another. Rather than being stuck in the same single physical device.
geekfool - Friday, May 8, 2015 - link
omg just tell us what the heck mu mimo is.UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Well, the key improvement of the wireless-n and wireless-ac standards over the old g standard is that they allow several simultaneous streams of data (each stream much faster than the old wireless-g), even over the "narrow" 20MHz channel. (The other improvement is that you can use wide channels). However, the issue is that 2x2 MIMO (2 steams) is only now becoming standard, and 3-stream adapters are installed on very high end laptops (like MacBook Pro), while at the same time there are many routers on the market with 2-3-4 stream MIMO. Well, it turns out that with the old (now current MIMO) the router takes turns talking to each client device instead of talking to them at once. So a three-stream router talking to one-stream device, can't talk to another one or two-stream device at the same time. The MU-MIMO (multiuser MIMO) fixes that. Arguably, that's quite an improvement. But it's not worth buying a MU-MIMO router right now, because MU-MIMO client hardware practically does not exist. I'd way a couple of years until I have MU-MIMO capable phones, tablets, and PCs before I buy a router with MU-MIMO.Lucky Stripes 99 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
$280 is rather steep for a device that doesn't have either a fixed 10GbE port or a SFP/SFP+ port. You can pick up MicroTik switches with at least one 10GbE port for just under $200 these days.UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
You are really confused if you think that not having 10Gbit switch is a limitation, much less the biggest limitation of this router. Considering that the wireless-ac does not sustain or only barely approaches real world data transfer rates near 1Gbps (that would be with a MU-MIMO clients, which don't even exist), 10Gbps WAN port on this router would be a complete waste of resources.Lucky Stripes 99 - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
I would want the 10GbE port on the LAN side for a file server or as an uplink to a workgroup switch. Saturating a 1Gbps port is easy these days with several wired clients.Having a SFP port on the WAN side could allow this router to directly connect to a FttH/FttP network using either active or passive optical Ethernet, which is increasingly common these days.
Asking that the 10GbE port be a SFP+ port might be a bit much for a sub-$300 device, but it isn't without reason. I am seeing people increasingly skip CAT6a and CAT7 copper for OM4 multimode fiber for long runs. 10GbE over legacy CAT6 is limited to around 170ft/50m, over CAT5e is limited to around 130ft/30m, more or less depending on cable quality and the presence of adjacent cables.
Please don't ever call me confused again.
UtilityMax - Tuesday, May 12, 2015 - link
Linksys is not going to lose its sleep over a couple of nerds on anandtech who may _think_ they would _possibly_ need a 10Gbit WAN port at the time when 1gigabit remains an unattainable luxury to most households. Even if 2Gbps broadband becomes available all over the country next year as some ISP promise, I don't see households tripping over each other trying to get that service. What's that bandwidth for? A 4k video streaming needs what, 20-50Mbps of bandwidth. So a 1Gbps WAN connection will give you more than a dozen 4k streams already. I can see most people certainly wanting 100Mbps broadband, and many willing to pay a small premium for 1Gbps, but ISPs will have a hard time building a case for mass adoption of even 2Gbps broadband unless it cost a 5-10 buck premium over 1Gbps.And, I am sure there may be some kind of premium product in the works right now with 10Gbps ports, but this router I am sure will be sold for $199 on amazon a year from now. The key signature of this product is MU-MIMO wireless-ac networking, which will become more commonplace faster than even gigabit broadband.
Lucky Stripes 99 - Wednesday, May 13, 2015 - link
Your second response is confusing. You're arguing against the merits of 10GbE on the WAN (untrusted) side, yet my previous post advocated for 10GbE on the LAN (trusted) side, preferably using a SFP+ port. I did advocate for a SFP port on the WAN side, but SFP ports only support 1GbE GBIC modules.Why do you keep thinking that I want 10GbE on the WAN side? I don't.
joeymore - Saturday, November 7, 2015 - link
If you already have an existing router but are not happy with its range, check http://www.consumerrunner.com/top-10-best-routers/ and see how you extend network range wirelessly!