TP LINK AX11000
The turbo-charged version of our favourite high-speed router. But with a price tag to match.
Back in March, TP-Link impressed the pants off us with its first Wi-Fi 6 router, the Archer AX6000. It’s been our favourite wireless router ever since thanks to its high reliability, ease of manageability, speed and range. Now here’s its suped-up, gaming-oriented big brother which almost literally dials everything up to 11; but is it killer or overkill?
The extra 5000 in the Archer AX11000’s moniker derives from its extra 5GHz band: there are now two 4,804Mbps 5GHz bands plus a 1,148 2.4GHz band. This combines to provide a theoretical 10Gbps throughput but, this being Wi-Fi, how does it fare in the real world?
We tested in a threestorey Sydney townhouse using our new testing methodology which sends large video files from a Synology DS1019+ NAS to a Wi-Fi-6-equipped Dell XPS 15 OLED laptop at close range, one floor up and two floors up – all while simultaneously streaming 4K video to a TV plus Youtube to two, old, Android tablets. We tested both 5GHz bands and compared the speed to the Archer AX6000.
From the ground up the AX6000 scored: 481, 274 and 192Mbps. The AX11000’s 5GHz Gaming band scored, 575, 319, and 205Mbps while the standard 5G band scored 638, 287 and 180Mb/s. So, up close it’s 20-33 per cent faster, one floor up it’s five-to-16 per cent faster while two floors up it’s between four per cent faster and 10 per cent slower. Perhaps most notably for the two-floors-up test, our PC, which connects to the NAS over powerlines, scored 199Mbps so at least one of the wireless tests was faster on the AX11000. All of these are blistering speeds for any domestic routers: the AX11000 is streets ahead of the pack in first place but the AX6000 hot on its heels in second place.
Speeds are helped along with a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU plus three additional coprocessors. TP-Link also boasts about its Game Accelerator technology to keep latencies at a minimum. While we didn’t notice any speed improvements (more significant bottlenecks lie on the WAN), the peace-ofmind factor provided by the top-of-the-line components may be important to competitive gamers – especially if they have bandwidth-hungry housemates. Meanwhile there are two USB 3.0 ports (Type-A and Type-C), a useful eight Gigabit Ethernet ports plus a WAN port which supports business-grade 2.5Gbps connections.
The device itself is an imposing beast and all antennae are fixed pointing upwards. Set-up is simple thanks to TP-Link’s Tether app which gets you up and running quickly while easily providing access to the most important features over the LAN and across the internet. Advanced configurations need to be performed in a web browser. As with other AX routers, network security from Trend Micro is built in and there are some decent parental controls. It supports Alexa voice control plus IFTTT-compatible smart home devices too.
At $649 it’s incredibly expensive and only extreme users will notice any difference over the AX6000. But it’s noticeably faster and if you absolutely must have the best, then this is it.