TP-Link AX1800 WiFi 6 Router (Archer AX21) – Dual Band Wireless Internet Router, Gigabit Router, USB port, Works with Alexa - A Certified for Humans Device
[{'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2020', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-5 review-rating', 'review_body': "Update 2: Firmware issue fixed my dropped connections in the morning. Ran speed tests. Same speeds. Seems to be same signal strength.\n\nUpdate: Well...I've set it to reboot every day now. And oddly some mornings there's just no wifi signal. So I have to go over and reboot it. I'm thinking of updating the firmware package to see if this resolves that issue. I'll post once i have this issue fixed.\n\nI bought a Nighthawk prior to this. But the nighthawk was a pain setting up as you had to get an app, create an account, and then I still never saw great speeds even on 5ghz. This thing blows that nighthawk out of the water (and was about $30 more). The nighthawk also dropped my cisco vpn alot. NOT COOL.\n\nWith this router:\nSignal is great. I can walk down the street a few houses and get signal (not great, but usable). It works great for our square 2,300sqft house just fine. I bought an extender - but found we didn't need it.\nSpeed is great. I get full use out of my 200mbs connection to my provider.\n\n2ghz I get about 60mbs. 5ghz I get 210mbs.\n\nThe modem I'm using is a Motorola 24x8. It works well with that.\nI haven't seen any signal drops. My VPN stays connected all day (which is rather important these days given covid).\nIt runs cool to the touch (big factor as I'm always paranoid about house fires and cheap poorly built electronics).\nI have it auto reboot every sunday (which is a great feature you can set in the menu).\nI'm using the firmware out of the box. I did not update the firmware. With routers, I tend to only update the firmware if I see a problem that needs resolution.\nSetup was easy. Plug in router to modem. Turn modem and router off. Turn modem on. Turn router on. Pair computer to wifi. go to 192.168.1.1 in browser. setup wifi and password. Done. Great interface too on this router.\n\nVery happy i brought this. Should my experience turn the other way I'll be sure to update this review."}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2021', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-2 review-rating', 'review_body': 'No time wasted, i will procede directly to pros and cons:\n\nPros (with a HUGE *):\n1. Good 2.4 and 5.0 speed\n2. Good ethernet speed (1000mbps)\n3. Good software features\n\nCons:\n1. The huge * itself, which is POOR RANGE. Now allow me to elaborate. I was trying to setup an extender which is about 15 meters away, with only a glass door in between and clear line of sight. I go to the extender position and look at the signal strength and WOW 5 bars, almost no signal lost (at least i believed) even in my garage where wifi has never reached i got 1 bar. So theoretically this had GREAT range. But no. As soon as my extender connected, the connection dropped and SSID even dissapeared. That was weird, so i pulled out my cellphone thinking the extender was bad. Same result, got 5 bars signal but as soon as i connected, connection dropped and SSID disappeared. Tested 2 more cellphones, 2 laptops, a Nintendo Switch, all to which gave me the exact same result. I closed in to the router with all devices and with a whole day of testing concluded that the signal could be reliably held with ANY device being 5 meters or closer. Thats right, 5 meters. Then i thought, maybe my house is over a iron ore or something. No, i bout a $20 linksys ac1200 and could easily reach the extender 15m away and even more with a stable and reliable signal. Curious is that at about 20m, this router does "appear" to have more signal strength than the ac1200, but as soon as connection is attempted, connection drops and SSID dissapears.\n\nI would have given it 0 stars, but i guess anything in a 5m radius works well. but totally a BAD ROUTER if what you are looking for is range. If all your devices are 5m o nearer then i guess this is good for that.\n\nTried all firmwares on the support page and nothing fixed this issue.'}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2021', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-5 review-rating', 'review_body': "Long review but hopefully helpful:\n\nBought this to replace an aged Airport Extreme and give my Oculus Quest 2 a better WiFi connection. So far so good.\n\nSet up was okay but I had some trouble getting the Ethernet light to go green despite all the others being green and I was unable to get online via wired or wireless connection. If you reboot your modem and this device, go make coffee or something when it is starting back up because the router takes a while to restart. The light finally went green but it did feel like it took an inordinate amount of time.\n\nI understand the frustration that comes with setting up these new things and the rage factor sometimes enters the picture. If it does: unplug the cable modem and the router, leave everything unplugged for 5 minutes, plug in the cable modem and wait until it is fully booted up, plug in this router and walk away for a bit. Give it 5-10 minutes and hopefully you'll be good to go.\n\nThe interface looks a bit dated and clonky but most do. Seems the least priority is given to creating a clean, attractive interface for all these things, but coming from an Airport Extreme where you have essentially no features to work with, this is a dream. The ability to edit the names of the clients is something I was never able to do before and it really makes a difference.\n\nI wanted something with the ability to kick clients off the network while I am using the Quest to ensure it has no bandwidth competition with devices that are not in use at the time the Quest is being used, but then put them back on without having to jump through hoops, re-entering passwords and such. I have a lot of devices on my network and while they may not be in use, they are still hovering around and eating up some bandwidth even while idling.\n\nThis router allows that in an easy peasy way but the icons used are confusing. First, if you go to the Network map, clients section, you will see a list of all the clients on your network. You can click the pencil next to the name of the device and change it to make life easier. On the right side, if you click Block, that client gets blacklisted and cannot connect to the network. If you click View Blacklist, you will see all of the blocked clients and there is a garbage can icon on the right. This is a confusing and poor icon choice because most people would think that this will remove the client entirely. It doesn't. It simply puts the client back on the whitelist. It's a great thing to have, for example:\n\nLet's say you have a Zoom meeting and want to ensure that there's as little connection issues as possible. You can block all other clients on the network that are not needed and have all the bandwidth to yourself for your meeting and when it's over, just click the garbage can on each device in the blacklist and poof! they are all able to connect again.\n\nI am not really understanding the point of the QoS feature on this device because in the past when I've set up QoS in a work environment, you are able to directly allocate bandwidth to devices. Ideally, this would be what you would use if you had a Zoom call rather than kicking clients off for a time. With this router's QoS, you have two choices: On or Off. Each device listed has a Priority switch that is turned on or off. You can turn on the Priority switch for one, some or all devices, but there's nothing else, so you have no idea how bandwidth allocation is implemented here.\n\nUnder the On/Off switch for QoS, there is a bandwidth allocation box for both upload and download with each set at 1000. You can change this number, but again, it doesn't tell you how it will divvy out that bandwidth to the clients. If you only have one device with the Priority turned on, you are left to wonder what that client is getting as opposed to other devices on the network. That's kind of a shame because you can prioritize a device for Always or for a couple of hours. Would seem the perfect set up for a Zoom meeting as you can give Priority to your device for a set amount of time and the router will release that restriction at the end of the hour or two or whatever you chose without you having to interact with the admin page at all. Unfortunately, you cannot enter times: i.e,. Priority from 10 a.m. to noon. You can choose Always, 1 hour, 2 hours, or 4 hours.\n\nI'm not sure what people are talking about regarding monthly fees for Parent Controls. I don't have kids, but opened it up and you can add a child's computer as a device, block certain keywords from being searched online and limit the days/times that your child can get online. I didn't see anything about fees or payment for those features.\n\nI have noticed more zip in my Quest 2 since setting up this router and am quite pleased with it so far. I set up a 5ghz network set to AX only for the Quest's exclusive use, a 2.4ghz Guest Network for all the Echos, Kindles, switches for lights, etc., and a 2.4ghz network for laptops, iPads, etc."}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2021', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-5 review-rating', 'review_body': "Wish it was a stand up for the area that I have it. My only downfall but I don't really have a router to show it off like it a luxury car. I have a router so I can go search the web, so I can get a smart wifi Luxury car to show off to people. This router helps out, I actually do need a wifi 6 router, because I have over 30 wifi products. Now I a heavy traffic day I am reading high 300, with a ping of average 8.\n\nWifi 6 is best for those that have a lot of products on the internet at once constantly pulling. I have well over 30 products within my own home that requires wifi all the time to work. Do not get it thinking that it will make gaming better. It will if your current wifi system is 6+years old. cause at that point you should be replacing your wifi router for a more up-to-date system. Just watch Linus Tech tips and Linus Media on youtube, very helpful in learning about computers and techs."}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2020', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-1 review-rating', 'review_body': "It worked fine when it was new and we didn't have many devices on it. But as we transitioned devices over from our old WiFi router, it has become unreliable. Constantly has issues with devices that refuse to connect until it is rebooted. No wonder the firmware has an option for a daily reboot! Also if you're thinking of using the built in VPN software, don't! The OpenVPN version is ancient and uses outdated protocols. The PPTP server has an admin/admin login that gets automatically added periodically. You can delete it, but it will come back. Useless! Unfortunately we didn't realize how terrible this device is until after the return period. Don't buy this!"}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on October 22, 2020', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-4 review-rating', 'review_body': 'Great performance - WiFi 6 is real, distance and signal strength were much better than with a new comparably-priced WiFi 5 high-performance router. Setup is made unnecessarily difficult in that requires the user to type in the default password or scan a QR code. However, the font for the default password on the bottom of the router is so small it is almost impossible to read. The quick-start instructions say you can scan a QR code, but fail to note that the QR code is not on the box or on the router, but instead on a little separate slip of paper in the bottom of the box.\nReview update: after a few days wifi seemed very slow. Testing revealed that the problem was TP-Link\'s "smart connect" feature. As with any dual-band router, you can set the slow 2.4GHz band and the fast 5GHz band to the same SSID. Normally this would allow your device - laptop, phone, etc - to choose which band to use. Smart Connect is supposed to optimize network performance by allowing the router itself to decide which band each device should use. But what Smart Connect actually does is the reverse of optimal: it only allows one device to connect to 5GHz, and kicks everything else to 2.4GHz! Even if that one 5GHz connected device is idle, every other device is locked out.\n\nThere is a long thread on the TP-Link user forum about this bug in several TP-Link routers, with users complaining and TP-Link tech support people just saying "that shouldn\'t happen"! In any case, to fix it problem go into the web-based network settings page and turn off smart connect. You can then manually give the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands the same SSID, but keep the check box for Smart Connect in the off setting. After this little adjustment, everything worked great again.'}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2021', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-5 review-rating', 'review_body': "This is my second TP-Link router, the first being an Archer A7. My wife teaches from home and my 4th grade daughter is remote learning. Before the winter break we had a unexplained internet slowdown and high lag one morning (which magically disappeared). My wife was concerned enough, she gave me the go ahead, or excuse, to replace our current wifi setup.\n\nOur old Surfboard modem was going on 8 years old, and we had the A7 router. These ran using a 100 Mbps Comcast account. The A7 by itself covered most of our house, but would really slow down, sometimes drop out, in the opposite corner of the house in one bedroom and a bathroom. This was on 2.4ghz. A OneMesh extender took care of that issue.\n\nThe AX21 does not need an extender. I get 80-85%, maybe a little better, of full speed in two rooms the A7 had issues with. Oh, did I mention that was on 5ghz? The router, by itself, for sure has really good coverage. No need for my OneMesh extender anymore.\n\nSince I was already familiar with the Tether app setup wasn't an issue. The only problem I ran into was an old laptop couldn't see my SSIDs anymore. Updating the wireless drivers fixed that. Maybe something to do with the AX protocol?\n\nSo, the Archer AX21 fills our needs. It covers the entire house well. With only 100 Mbps internet it's speed is about the same as the A7, but with better coverage and much higher speeds at distance. We'll have to wait and see about reliability as time passes by."}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2020', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-2 review-rating', 'review_body': 'Updated;\nAfter one year, this router is not performing the same as first time installment.\nI have 200 Mgb service and can get it out of modem this speed but even next the router I cannot get the same speed. I am not sure if this is because of recent firmware updates but I am not happy with the router like first few months.\nAlso number of active connections are less than last year which drains the bandwidth but performance of this router is significantly deteriorated\nReducing it from five to two stars. not planning to buy TP link products in the future\n\nI have been using Netgear routers for the last 5 years. I was always suffering with the low speed, dead spots in my 1800 sq ft house.\nLastly I was using Nighthawk AC2700 which is their best selling product. I mean I had no complain in first 700 sq ft next to the router including extender. But beyond that it was all disappointment. Even with range extender I was losing almost 70% of the speed which I was paying for. I normally do not change Router very often and this one I set up a year ago. But my pain iwas becoming so big after Covid when everyone was home and needed the bandwidth for their zoom, web ex meetings and they were driving me crazy since they were not supposed to be home during the day time.\nI said enough is enough and switched to TP link after reading the reviews.\nWow there is a huge difference. I always thought I had also problem with the range extender. But with TP link I get the same speed at the farthest corner of the house in 5G. That is fantastic.\nhighly recommended over Netgear and all the others'}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on February 26, 2021', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-4 review-rating', 'review_body': 'I really don’t like that the reviews are of all 3 routers mixed together. This is specifically for the AX21 model (lowest price). Although there are actually 3 versions of this router as well with the AX21 being the newest. What differentiates it from the AX20? More ventilation. Apparently TP-Link has a heat issue as many reviewers have mentioned (but not about the AX21.) This is the best budget WiFi 6 router you can get for that money. But beware it has budget features!\nThe user management interface is super basic and the Tether app is even more basic. Especially if you want to control DHCP Clients. If you want to rename clients you can only do it with the Tether app. If you want to manage clients you have to use the web based interface. This can be problematic for such a simple management function. I certainly hope they step up this utility because it is almost a con for purchasing TP-Link for anyone who wants to tweak or control their router. But if you have no interest in those controls then this router will perform well. I replaced a Netgear 6700v3 because it was having issues with download speeds. It was super inconsistent and their updates seemed to make it worse. Read the forums if you doubt me. But Netgear is far advanced with their user interface compared with TP-Link. But performance is more important overall. I pay for 100 Mb download and Netgear varied between 40-60 with 90 on a blue moon. This AX21 is consistently 100+ on 5ghz band. Truthfully that is the only reason I am keeping it.'}, {'review_meta': 'Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2021', 'review_star': 'a-icon a-icon-star a-star-4 review-rating', 'review_body': 'Summary: Particularly if you want to run what I call a "cheap mesh on the fly" system, mating this Archer AX21 router to TP-Link\'s RE-series Wi-Fi extenders that can support OneMesh+SmartConnect is a great way to go...just turn of QoS in the meantime (easily done with their robust Tether interface). Comments: Whenever a company puts out a lot of hardware variations along with a lot of software options, you have a testing permutation nightmare, having to test a large host of hardware with a huge number of variable implementation options. In my case, I tried to run the AX21 with the full suite of options: SmartConnect (single Wi-Fi name for both bands), OneMesh + WiFi Extenders (RE200+RE220), and QoS. Well, with QoS turned on, the router cut my download speeds in half and then hard crashed one evening (I\'ve only had the router for a bit over a week). Frankly, it bothers me that end users become a company\'s testbed....but it\'s more important that the product works...and in that regard, the AX21 is superior to my prior Archer A6 in terms of speed and WiFi coverage. I reported the QoS issue so I hope TP-Link will investigate and correct the system instability in a future firmware update.'}]