TP-Link Archer AX90
This versatile Wi-Fi 6 router offers not one but two 5GHz radios – although one’s a lot faster than the other
SCORE ★★★★☆ PRICE £167 (£200 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/325tplink
We don’t see many tri-band Wi-Fi 6 routers. Thanks to the technological improvements introduced in the 802.11ax wireless standard, a single 5GHz radio can service dozens of clients at once without clogging up the airwaves, so there’s not much need to pay a premium for a router with two.
Yet there are still benefits to a tri-band design. The extra bandwidth can be useful for large households or small offices with lots of computers all wanting to exchange data concurrently. Or, you can dedicate one radio to a gaming rig or server, so it can enjoy a full-speed connection with no need to share bandwidth.
With the Archer AX90, TP-Link has come up with a clever way to keep the cost down. Instead of using two matching 5GHz radios, the Archer AX90 combines one 4.8Gbits/sec transmitter with a more modest 1.2Gbits/sec one – plus, as always, a legacy 2.4GHz transceiver– giving you the versatility of a tri-band router for less than some dual-band rivals.
Physical design
To cater for all of these radios, the body of the router is set around with eight antennas, supporting 4x4 MIMO on both 5GHz radios and MU-MIMO on the faster one. On the back, you’ll find five Ethernet ports – including, unusually, one that supports 2.5Gbits/sec connections. More accessible is the USB 3 socket on the left-hand side, which allows you to conveniently hook up a storage device and share files over the network. A USB 2 port sits at the rear.
Despite this, the TP-Link Archer AX90 is one of the smallest tri-band routers I’ve tested. Including the aerials, its footprint measures 311 x 207mm. It’s a striking thing, with an upturned snout and a fanned pattern on the top.
The design isn’t entirely userfrien dly, however. It features only a single multicoloured status LED, which isn’t ideal for troubleshooting or checking the router status at a glance. And the buttons for turning the Wi-Fi, LED and WPS functions on and off are located beneath the router’s angled front, meaning they can only be accessed from below.
Setup and software
As usual with TP-Link, you can set up the router using either a web portal or the Tether mobile app. The latter is the easier option: I tried it on Android and it let me simply scan the QR code on the underside of the router to connect, then walked me through a brief process of picking my internet and Wi-Fi settings. The router rebooted to apply these, and within five minutes of my opening the box the AX90 was up and running.
You can continue to use the Tether app for simple admin tasks, such as checking the status of your network, turning guest networks on or off, and browsing, blocking or prioritising connected clients. You can also enable band splitting: by default, the AX90’s three networks all broadcast under one name, but you can separate these into three different SSIDs.
One of the router’s big distinctive features is HomeShield. Don’t confuse this with TP-Link’s extensive HomeCare security platform, which until recently was included as a perpetually free service with most of the company’s routers and meshes. HomeShield is a much less generous proposition, covering only basic network scanning, parental controls and QoS capabilities – unless you pay $55 a year for HomeShield Pro, which unlocks the full set of security features, including active malware blocking and time limits for kids’ devices. It’s disappointing when you consider what came before for free.
The final feature of note is OneMesh, which lets you team up the AX90 with other compatible TP-Link routers to create a range-extending mesh. If you only need a small boost to your coverage, it will almost certainly be cheaper to buy a regular wireless repeater, but the mesh approach lets you centrally manage everything from one console.
Advanced features
Advanced configuration must be carried out from the web portal. Here, you can adjust your DHCP and DNS settings, set up reserved IP addresses and port forwarding. You can also enable a built-in VPN server and configure outbound VPN connections on a per-client basis. If you’ve signed up with a third-party VPN service, you can use this feature to send all traffic from (say) your smart TV via a US-based server, while everything else goes at full speed via your ISP. It’s a great convenience I haven’t previously seen on a router.
“Connect to the right SSID and, in everyday use, you won’t notice any difference in speed between it and the greatest Wi-Fi 6 routers”
Lastly, if you’ve plugged in a USB storage device, here’s where you can enable sharing: the AX90 can present the disk’s contents as an SMB network share, serve them up over FTP or make media files available for streaming over DLNA. Mac users can also use attached storage as a Time Machine backup destination. Neither USB port supports printer sharing, though, nor can you use a USB mobile broadband adapter as a failover service in case your main internet connection goes down.
Speed time
Not only do the AX90’s two 5GHz radios claim different top speeds, they use different frequency subbands: the 4.8Gbits/sec radio operates in the 110-116 DFS channel range, while the 1.2Gbits/sec radio uses the standard 36-48 channel set.
This means the slower radio will probably experience more interference from neighbouring networks, and it doesn’t help that it’s limited to an 80MHz channel width. The 4.8Gbits/sec radio, by contrast, supports the wider 160MHz width, which often copes better with obstacles and interference.
The effect of this was visible in my real-world performance tests. As usual, I set up the router in the study of my home, and connected to it over Wi-Fi 6 from my standard test laptop – a 2020 HP Elite Dragonfly, with an integrated Intel AX200 2x2 MIMO network 160MHz card. I then ambled around to various locations in my home, and tested upload and download rates to a network share on a NAS appliance connected to the router via Gigabit Ethernet.
As you can see from the graphs, the Archer AX90’s two radios both performed excellently at short range (the living room is directly beneath the study). Once I moved further away, the difference between the two became very clear. The slower radio kept up a solid signal all around the house, but transfer speeds were only in line with what I’d expect from a sub-£100 router.
On the faster band, however, the Archer AX90 acquitted itself superbly. Upload speeds weren’t quite so swift as those from our long-term favourite, the dual-band Asus RT-AX88U ( see issue 318, p86), but download speeds compared very favourably indeed. Considering the AX90 is £75 cheaper, these are excellent results.
The TP-Link also held its own alongside Netgear’s tri-band Nighthawk RAX120 ( see issue 318, p89), but it’s worth reiterating that the Netgear offers these speeds across both its 5GHz radios.
Decision time
The he AX90’s lopsided radio provision means it isn’t as versatile as other tri-band routers we’ve seen, but that’s reflected in the price: the Netgear etgear Nighthawk RAX120, X120, for example, costs £290. Still, no matter how you divide up the bandwidth of the AX90, one device (or set of devices) is going to get a slower service. It’s disappointing too that you’ll have to pay a considerable fee for TP-Link’s previously free network security offering.
What saves the AX90 is its performance. Just make sure you connect to the right SSID and, in everyday use, you won’t notice any difference in speed between it and the greatest, priciest Wi-Fi 6 routers.
You can say something similar for the £173 Asus RT-AX82U ( see issue
318, p80). But for only £27 more the TP-Link Archer AX90 adds 2.5GbE expandability, flexible per-client VPN routing and a whole extra radio, allowing you to be picky about which clients get into the wireless fast lane, without having to relegate lowpriority traffic to 2.4GHz speeds.
SPECIFICATIONS
Tri-band 2.4GHz/5GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi 6 router 4.8Gbits/sec on first 5GHz radio 1.2Gbits/ sec on second 5GHz radio 574Mbits/sec on 2.4GHz radio quad-core 1.5GHz processor 8 x external antennae 2.5GbE port 4 x Gigabit Ethernet ports USB-A 3 USB-A 2 311 x 207 x 174mm (WDH) 3yr warranty