Tenda AC9 AC1200 Smart Dual-Band Router Review

Most regular Joe and Jane consumers will likely agree that wireless routers aren’t exactly the most exciting of products. You just want a router that is easy to set up, easy to configure, and offers the performance that you desire to handle your day to day connectivity needs. But that’s because most routers fall into one of two camps. There are the very basic routers that are easy to use and there are the more advanced routers that aren’t nearly as accessible to the average user.

Aiming to fill the void by offering both a robust feature set and a user friendly design is the Tenda AC9, an AC1200 wireless router with smart dual band technology and a browser-based user interface that even technophobes can understand.

Tenda AC9 Specs at a Glance

Priced at just $60, the Tenda AC9 sounds like it should fit into the more budget-oriented end of the product spectrum. If that is indeed the case — Tenda has at least a couple of other routers that are higher spec’d than this one — then this router is easily punching above its weight class. Yes, it is “just” an AC1200 router, meaning you get up to 300 Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 867 Mbps on the 5GHz band for a combined throughput of almost 1200 Mbps.

Most consumer-grade Internet connections don’t get quite that fast, but you’ll appreciate the higher speeds for data transfers within your network, like accessing your NAS or streaming video from your PC to your TV. Tenda says that this router is good enough for “super fast” online gaming and UHD video streaming, supporting up to 20 concurrent connected devices.

Some other notable features include the built-in support for wireless repeating, in case you just want to use this router to extend an existing network, as well as FTP server, VPN server and Samba support. On the back side of the Tenda AC9, you’ll find four Gigabit LAN ports, plus a single USB 2.0 port for mass storage or a shared USB printer.

In addition to the standard WPS button for ease of connectivity, you’ll also find a WiFi on/off button. It’s a little curious, since there is no actual on/off button for the router itself, but you can enable and disable the WiFi part of it by pressing this button. Part of that arises because the UI allows for a scheduled “sleep” mode where you can “wake” the router by pressing this button.

What’s in the Box?

The retail packaging for the Tenda AC9 outlines just about all of the main features on the box, so there’s no real confusion should you find this router in a brick-and-mortar retail store. It even compares it against some other Tenda routers so you can make the best decision to suit your particular situation.

The actual contents of the box aren’t terribly exciting, but they are perfectly comprehensive with everything that you need to get started. In addition to the main Tenda AC9 unit, you’ll find a small base so that the router can stand vertically. There’s also the AC wall adapter, Ethernet cable, and basic documentation. I’m still not a big fan of the larger power adapters that typically ship with devices like this, as they tend to be less than ideal on a power bar or UPS. I’d almost prefer the power brick or perhaps even something integrated into the base.

Double the Pleasure, Double the Fun

As can be expected for an AC1200 router, the Tenda AC9 comes with two antennas that can be rotated and angled about to provide the best possible coverage in your home or office. They are not infinitely rotatable, however, so you’ll need to fiddle around with them to find the orientation that you like best. It should also be noted that, as far as I can tell, these antenna are not user-upgradeable.

All of the indicator lights are aligned in a single row across the top of the router and they illuminate blue when active. There are no real surprises here with indicator lights for LAN activity across each of the four Gigabit ports, network activity across both bands, and so on. What’s great is that you can disable these lights if you’d like within the browser-based UI, in case you have your router set up some place where the lighting may prove distracting.

The design of the actual router itself is not particularly inspired, with a series of angular lines across the lower 2/3 and the glossy black portion on top with the lights. There’s a dash of style, but not much. The build quality is equally unimpressive, consisting of the same thin plastic you find just about everywhere else. That said, both the design and build are perfectly functional and adequate.

Setup and Browser-Based UI

A big part of the reason why so many regular consumers are turned off by wireless routers is that they can feel overly complicated and difficult to understand, especially the initial setup process. That’s why you find so many people with routers that still carry the default SSID and password. How many times have you seen an obvious Linksys or Netgear network when looking for free Wi-Fi?

Perhaps one of the greatest strengths of the Tenda AC9 is the user interface. It’s clean, elegant and surprisingly approachable, giving you access to all the features you might want… and you can ignore everything else that you’re not interested in configuring. The initial setup can be done through a mobile device if you’d like — there’s even an app for remote configuration and settings if you want — but I did it the traditional PC way.

The initial setup process literally took less than five minutes in total time. I simply plugged the router into my modem, looked for the default wireless network on my computer, connected to it, went to tendawifi.com in my browser, and followed the wizard. The wizard was literally only a few very short steps where I did little else other than click next, next, next and set the admin password. After a reboot of the router, I was back into the main UI and was spoiled by a wealth of possibility.

Changing the SSID and password are easy enough, generating both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks. From the main Internet status page, I can see the names of the networks, click for a list of all the attached devices (after which I can blacklist any device), confirm that I am connected to the Internet, and see if anything is plugged into the USB port. If there’s a flash drive in there, I can access the USB files that way.

Along the left sidebar is all the navigation and clicking on any section provides an infinite scroll-like animation in the main part of the window. It’ll take you some time to go through all the features, but also keep in mind that you don’t need to use any of them if you don’t want to. That said, it’s really easy to set up a WiFi schedule so that your network goes to sleep at night, for example. Explicit beamforming is enabled by default to provide a stabler and stronger signal.

Creating guest networks on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands requires nothing more than to provide an SSID and password. Some other very notable features include “sleeping mode” where the router will enter a power saving state, LED control (on/off/schedule), bandwidth control (on a per device basis, setting up and down speeds separately), DMZ, IPTV, UPnP, static routing, and more. If any of it sounds Greek to you, just leave it on default and move on. Parental controls are set on a per-device basis, allowing you to define Internet accessible times (and on what days). You can also add websites to both a blacklist and a white list.

One surprise feature that I think it actually very useful for day-to-day is auto maintenance. When enabled, the router will automatically reboot and maintain itself sometime between 3 am and 5 am daily. It will only do this once traffic falls below 3 KB/s. If you’ve ever had an issue with another router and a simple reset fixed it, imagine if your router did that on its own each night. You’d effectively eliminate a large number of possible problems and it’d be completely seamless.

The Throughput Test

It would not be fair to judge the performance of a router based on Internet bandwidth speeds, as that is heavily depending on the Internet service provider (ISP) and the corresponding broadband Internet plan. Instead, to test the effective throughput on this router, I moved large files between the Western Digital WD My Cloud with a wired connection to the router and my desktop PC with a wireless-AC connection via a ZyXEL AC240 USB 3.0 adapter. The WiFi adapter supports up to 300Mbps over 2.4GHz and 867 Mbps over 5 GHz, the same theoretical maximums as the Tenda AC9 wireless router.

Bear in mind that there are several theoretical bottlenecks involved here. The hard drive and processing power on my desktop can affect speed. The read and write speeds on the WD My Cloud can affect speeds. What I can say is that the ZyXEL adapter was showing a full-bar connection to the Tenda AC9 and there was no other network traffic during these tests. For the purpose of this test, I moved a single 700 MB file between my PC and the NAS.

Over the 2.4GHz network:

• NAS to PC: 77 seconds; 9.09 MB/s or 72.73 Mbps
• PC to NAS: 100 seconds; 7.00 MB/s or 56.00 Mbps

Over the 5GHz network:

• NAS to PC: 30 seconds; 23.33 MB/s or 186.67 Mbps
• PC to NAS: 41 seconds; 17.07 MB/s or 136.59 Mbps

These figures are nowhere near the posted theoretical maximums of 300Mbps and 867 Mbps for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks respectively. To test the throughout put further, I tried moving a single 2.82 GB file from the NAS to the PC and that took 99 seconds. This works out to 29.27 MB/s or 234.18 Mbps.

A Brilliant Router for the Money

With so many other routers, you had to remember the IP address in order to access the administration panel, assuming that you didn’t have to deal with a separate piece of software altogether. And even when you got in, the UI can be so overwhelming and confusing, even for people who may otherwise consider themselves to be tech-savvy. Truly, the UI panel with the Tenda AC9 is a joy to use, perfectly robust for advanced users while be easily accessible by the less technically inclined too. Setup and configuration are an absolute breeze.

Performance doesn’t quite hit the theoretical maximums described by the AC1200 standard, but that’s only to be expected. They are theoretical maximums and not averages, after all. Speeds are more than adequate for the average consumer household supporting up to 20 devices with particularly speedy throughputs on the 5GHz band. Wireless range is also pretty decent, easily covering the entirety of my home.

And really, when you consider that the Tenda AC9 is listed for only $59.99 online, this is an exceptional value that is jam packed with all sorts of more advanced features. Tenda may not be a household name like some of its competitors, but if the AC9 is any indication, it’s a brand that you should start paying attention to.