Honor Router 3
If your speed needs are modest, the eye-bogglingly cheap Router 3 could be the perfect pick
SCORE
PRICE £42 (£50 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318honor
Chinese manufacturer Honor is known for its low-cost phones, but its most astonishing value proposition is surely the item that sits before us – a bona fide Wi-Fi 6 router for just £50.
While the price is low, the construction doesn’t feel cheap at all. The Router 3’s small white case is as solid as any other chassis this month, and when you flip up the four aerials at the back they snap firmly into place. The way the four Ethernet ports are distributed between them looks a little odd, but it’s a space-efficient arrangement that keeps the thickness of the body down to a slim 41mm. Note that one of these ports is needed for your modem connection, so you’re limited to three wired clients.
As you might expect, there’s no USB connector, nor an array of pretty lights – a single low-profile LED at the front glows green if everything’s okay or red if it’s not. Still, the design has a certain minimalist charm, which is rounded off by a circular WPS button on top bearing a little Honor logo. It looks chic and it’s more convenient than hiding it around the back.
The router can be managed from either a web portal or Honor’s AI Life mobile app; both are responsive and intuitive, and the most important features are all here. It goes without saying that you can set up static IP addresses and port forwarding, while the guest network features a neat timer that automatically shuts off transmission after a predefined period. You can apply connection schedules to individual devices on the main network too, and a simple configuration page makes it easy to route all your traffic through an external VPN provider.
So much for the trimmings – what about performance? On paper, the Router 3 looks promising. Its 5GHz radio claims a top data rate of 2,402Mbits/sec, giving it twice the bandwidth of some other low-cost offerings, and there’s full support for 160MHz channels to help you make the most of it. MIMO provision is only 2x2, but for the price that’s hard to complain about.
As we noted in our buyer’s guide, however, numbers don’t tell the whole story, and despite those quoted speeds the Router 3 placed towards the bottom of our test rankings. Over a close-range Wi-Fi 6 connection it gave us a creditable download rate 57.5MB/sec, but performance dropped off by around 30% as soon as we moved to the living room – and when we ventured to other areas of the house our speeds were halved again.
Performance over Wi-Fi 5 fell away in a very similar pattern, though from a lower starting point of 26.6MB/sec. The one conspicuous difference was that our legacy laptop struggled much more in the bathroom, with download rates falling to just 2.9MB/sec – this month’s lowest download speed in any test, representing a drop-off of nearly 90% from the observed peak.
Clearly the Router 3 is no speed demon, but in fairness to Honor we can report that the connection never felt sluggish during our testing. Our repeated file-copy operations completed without a hiccup, and while 2.9MB/sec isn’t exactly swift by home-networking standards, it still exceeds the official Netflix bandwidth recommendation for HD video streaming – while every other room comfortably met the requirements for 4K HDR. For a system that’s limited to an 80MHz connection over 802.11ac, those aren’t awful results.
If you’re seeking an additional lift, the Router 3 also features an integrated mesh mode, which lets you install a second unit in an adjacent part of your home and pair it with the first for an instant coverage boost. Performance still won’t match what you’d see with a high-end router from the likes of Asus or Netgear, but at £50 per station it’s a much cheaper arrangement. A single Router 3 unit can also function as a standalone repeater, making it an affordable way to add a little extra range to an existing router.
By this point you’ll have a pretty clear idea whether the Honor Router 3 is right for you. Data junkies and tweakers should look elsewhere: the Asus RT-AX82U, for example, offers considerably higher connection speeds and a far broader feature set. However, if you just want to enjoy a smooth internet connection around a modestly sized home, the Router 3 does the job with style, and for a price that’s simply unbeatable.