TP-Link Archer AX50 AX3000
Bringing Wi-Fi 6 to the masses.
A few months back we reviewed Asus’ RT-AX3000 router which was a largely unremarkable router but for the fact that it was the first unremarkable router we’d seen that supported Wi-Fi 6. In a market that was full of large, expensive, ostentatious, spikylooking spaceships, it was the first, sober-looking ‘affordable’ model we’d seen. Now, here’s a second soulless specimen from TP-Link. Could it be heralding Wi-Fi 6’s market maturity and, if so, will that help the technology proliferate amongst the masses?
Our first impressions raised our hopes… this thing really is dull looking. You can even find it on sale as a ‘white-box’ unbranded product which typically means it’s avoided visiting a decent, industrial design studio. It’s a box with four, plasticy sticks sprouting from it. Routers looked like this on the small, hiddenaway stands at Taiwan’s
Computex trade show back in 2005: so, we’re off to a good start.
What’s even better is that, completely unlike routers from 2005 – this one is simple to set up. You download an app, connect to the router and choose a name for its networks. However, there’s no fancy SSID-binding here: you get to choose separate names for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands individually. If you don’t like having two, you can turn one off. Beyond this, all standard Wi-Fi features are present plus TrendMicro network security and decent parental controls.
So far, there’s not much difference between it and Asus’s competitor, but Asus’ router did have a trick up its sleeve: despite it achieving (very) disappointing speeds at distance, up close it managed the fastest, real-world transfer speeds we’d ever seen – 754MB/s! An Asus insider told us that the chips inside were actually over-specified.
We ran our standard suite of Wi-Fi tests which involve downloading large video files from a Synology DS1019+ NAS to a Wi-Fi-6-equipped Dell XPS 15 OLED laptop in a three-storey Sydney Town House, using both 5Ghz and 2.4GHz bands, separately. Up close it managed a respectable, 387.5Mb/s and 273Mb/s (respectively); one floor up this dropped to 191Mb/s and 128Mb/s and two floors up it dropped to 157Mb/s and 86Mb/s. These are thoroughly mediocre scores... for Wi-Fi 6 routers. But, compared to standard, last-gen, AC routers (not the turbocharged, premium variety) they’re super-fast.
A dull but decent router that slashes the cost of entry to the world of Wi-Fi 6
Nick Ross