TP-Link Archer AX11000
Sadly, its unremarkable performance doesn’t live up to its remarkable design
SCORE
PRICE £310 (£372 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/318tplink
From the name, you might expect the Archer AX11000 to be 220 times as powerful as TP-Link’s cheaper offering above. Sadly it’s not, but it does deliver an abundance of wireless throughput, courtesy of a 2.4GHz transmitter with a claimed top speed of 1,148Mbits/sec, plus dual 5GHz radios rated at 4,804Mbits/sec.
Arguably, tri-band routers are something of a luxury in the age of Wi-Fi 6, but for gamers it makes sense to keeping game traffic on its own network, to minimise interference and maximise bandwidth. Indeed, TP-Link markets this as a gaming router, although there’s very about it that’s truly game-specific – the “Game Center” functions in the web portal are mostly just about performance monitoring and QoS tweaking.
Still, the AX11000 distinguishes itself in other ways. At the back, a 2.5Gbits/sec WAN port rubs shoulders with eight Gigabit Ethernet sockets – a degree of integrated connectivity matched only by the Asus RT-AX88U. And at the side, you’ll find the unique convenience of a USB 3 Type-C socket, alongside a Type-A connector.
Those eight antennae are quite distinctive too. They don’t support 8x8 MU-MIMO, but the router can in theory support two 4x4 connections at once, which ought to deliver a fair burst of speed. In our Wi-Fi 6 tests, however, the Archer AX11000 proved an unremarkable performer: download speeds were uniformly decent, but they never came close to the top of the overall speed rankings. Things were better over Wi-Fi 5, but if you’re considering spending this sort of money on a gaming router, we suspect last-generation performance is going to be a low priority.
Alongside its gaming-oriented features, the Archer AX11000 retains all the software functions of a regular TP-Link router. That includes the Homecare package, with its extensive parental controls and network security features, as well as VPN server support and integration with Amazon Alexa.
Ultimately, though, we find it hard to get excited about the Archer AX11000. There’s nothing exactly bad about it, but for £372 we’d hoped to see more innovative features and uncompromising performance. Still, if you’re set on a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router, there aren’t many about. This one does the job – and it’s slightly cheaper than the Asus GT-AX11000.