Billion BiPAC 8900AX-2400
The Billion offers a range of business-focused features, but the speeds – and price – are disappointing
SCORE PRICE £208 (£250 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk
Where some routers go for flashy stylings, Billion’s high-end offering looks aggressively functional, a militaristic grey box with four bionic legs. Even the name is pointedly unsexy.
That makes sense, because this is clearly a business-first router. That’s not to say you can’t buy one for home use: it’ll happily work with all your tablets and smart gadgets, and it even comes with a convenient internal DSL modem. The single USB socket meanwhile permits media streaming over DLNA, although since it’s only USB 2 it’s probably intended more for a printer, or for local file sharing.
Similarly, while Billion doesn’t provide a parental control service of its own, it lets you hook into OpenDNS to take advantage of category-based web filtering. And the access scheduling feature is actually pretty versatile, letting you configure up to 32 blocking periods of any duration throughout the week.
At the same time, there’s plenty of stuff here that’s really only useful to IT professionals; we’re talking not just extensive VPN support, but IPv6 tunnelling options, SNMP and TR-69 management services, 3G/4G failover and more. What’s more, it’s wrapped up in a web portal that’s jam-packed with technical information and options: non-experts are likely to find it overwhelming, with basic settings buried away in more obscure stuff.
There’s another reason why we’d hesitate to recommend the BiPAC 8900AX-2400 for domestic use. On paper it should be the equal of any MU-MIMO router, with a high quoted data rate of 1,800Mbits/sec on the 5GHz band. In practice, though, we found wireless performance topped out at around 11MB/sec over 802.11ac, regardless of whether we were sitting right next to it or wandering about the other end of the house. Full marks for consistency, but not many for speed.
Finally we come to the price. If you don’t need all of the hardcore networking features that the 8900AX2400 offers then there are much more consumer-friendly options at this price point, and below it. And if you are kitting out a busy office, the DrayTek Vigor2762ac is a persuasive alternative at a much lower cost.