QNAP QMiro-201W
A fast, tri-band mesh Wi-Fi router with business focused work from home features.
Patchy Wi-Fi signal strength is a true horror, but to help upgrade your network QNAP has released the new QMiro-201W tri-band mesh router. It has some businessfocused features, but is also well-suited to normal home use, and comes in a unique baby blue.
The QMiro-201W AC2200 spec, which means dual band 802.11ac (2.4 and 5GHz) plus two more 5GHz bands across four internal antennas. The router itself has two GbE ports – WAN and LAN, plus a USB 3.2 connection, and Bluetooth. Each router is rated to cover 195 square metres, which translates into enough for a one or two bedroom apartment. The 201W is mesh capable, which means adding in extra coverage is simple as buying another router – no cables needed. Being Tri-Band, the units can use a high speed 5GHz connection to talk to each other, without compromising bandwidth to your other network devices. The router has inbuilt features that allow parental and quality of service controls, VPN creation, Wi-Fi scheduling, and even USB FTP creation.
Uniquely for such a device, the QMiro-201W can be used with the fairly sophisticated QNAP QuWAN (SD-WAN) solution. In a nutshell, the QuWAN software makes it very easy for a business to connect remote workers securely and reliably into their network. It also brings the mesh architecture to the WAN, creating a much more fault tolerant network. An in-depth QuWAN dive is beyond the scope of this review, but suffice to say it’s a new and interesting feature that will appeal to businesses with people working from home.
Setup was a little more complicated than we would have liked, and after a number of frustrations with the app, we resorted to the web interface, which worked without any issues. Getting the router up and running requires a QNAP ID, and expect firmware updates to take a little while, but after that configuration was straightforward. Adding a second QMiro-201W for mesh networking was fast and easy, and the routers maintained excellent speed and seamless handovers between nodes. During normal operation we had no issues using the app to manage the network. The colour change status light (which can be turned off) and alert beeps were also a nice touch.
Performance and coverage will depend on exactly what devices you connect with, and your environment, but generally we found the claim that a single QMiro-201W can cover the area of a 2 bedroom apartment to be true. Up close we could happily manage almost 300 Mbps, which dropped off to around half that two rooms over. Thanks to the extra 5GHz link, the mesh backhaul connection happily maintains near full speed performance back to the main router even when multiple rooms away.
The $200 price tag for the QNAP router is very competitive with other Tri-Band WiFi routers, but it might be overkill if you don’t need the performance, or extra functionality. At this stage the QMiro-201W isn’t available in multipacks, which can make it much more expensive than the competition for covering larger houses. Still, it’s a solid choice, and potentially must have for certain businesses that can utilise QuWAN.
While there’s no multi packs available to save a little money, the QNAP QMiro-201W is nonetheless an excellent mesh Wi-Fi router that will appeal to both home and business users.