TP-Link Archer C2300 MU-MIMO Gigabit Router Review

I remember when I was in the computer sales industry and would talk to people about Wi-Fi and their needs. I would show them a couple different models we had, but price would always be their main decision maker and it was hard to explain why one Wi-Fi router was more expensive than the other. I would explain the differences but all they saw was the dollar amount. Perhaps I wasn’t the best sales person, eh?

Then again, that was also back when there was really only 2.4GHz available, though the higher end routers did have 5GHz. I don’t believe anyone I talked to owned devices that handled the 5GHz frequenc,y which is what the more expensive routers supported. Today, I find that there is a big range of prices for Wi-Fi routers and today we will look at a new feature-packed offering from TP-Link that offers performance for the digital connected family without needing to take out a loan: the TP-Link Archer C2300.

TP-Link Archer C2300 at a Glance

Everything is connected these days it seems. How many electronic devices do you have in your home that are connected via Wi-Fi? For me, I have at least a dozen and with that I need to ensure I have enough wireless bandwidth to handle all those devices. Yes, not all of those devices are always active, but the majority are passing data around my home network.

When I look for a Wi-Fi router, I want something that allows me to connect devices to their best possible signal to get the best possible throughput without sacrificing performance on any other device that is connected. The TP-Link Archer C2300 offers dual-band connectivity with a reliable and robust hardware component to ensure packets flow freely around the network and out to the Internet if and when needed.

The Archer C2300 is an AC2300 router, which means it is capable of up to 2300 Mbps speeds in total. In the 2.4GHz frequency, you can theoretically get up to the 600 Mbps and with the 5 GHz frequency you can theoretically get up to 1625 Mbps, so that’s a total of approximately 2300 Mbps. Not too shabby right? It’s more than enough bandwidth for whatever sort of home Internet service you might throw at it. 

To help pass that traffic around your network, the Archer C2300 is powered by a Broadcom 1.8GHz Dual-core 64bit CPU with a co-processor. That’s enough power to help maintain a 4K video stream while playing the latest MMOs on your PC or console.

What’s in the Box?

As with most retail products these days, there is not a whole lot included inside the box. You get the C2300 unit itself of course, 3 detachable antennas, the power supply, a short Ethernet cable and the quick installation guide. Just the right pieces to either add as a new home Wi-Fi router or to replace an existing outdated one.

Specs and Feature Highlights

There are some pretty nice features on the TP-Link Archer C2300.

• AC2300 – 600Mbps at 2.4GHz, 1625Mbps at 5GHz
• MU-MIMO Technology – 3 external and removable antennas
• 1.8GHz 64-bit dual-core CPU with a Co-Processor
• 512MB RAM with 128MB Flash
• 4 Gigabit LAN Ethernet Ports
• 1 Gigabit WAN Ethernet Port
• IPv6 Compatable
• USB Sharing
• Parental Control
• QoS – Quality of Service
• VPN Server – PPTP, OpenVPN

There’s enough power to help keep packets flowing around your network and robust enough as you add more and more devices to your network. The feature of having a built-in VPN server is nice so that you can create a secure and encrypted connection between your home network and a location remotely.

The Looks

Wi-Fi router designs are fairly similar across different manufacturers, especially the two and three antenna models. The TP-Link Archer C2300 takes on the traditional rectangular, black plastic design with a mesh-type enclosure.

The top of the Archer C2300, being mesh to help passively cool the components, is also home to the status LEDs. Depending on where you have the router located, you may not be able to see what is going on by just looking at the unit. If you press and hold the silver little button, you can toggle the status LEDs on and off.

The back is where the interactions happen. The three antennas are spaced apart across the back with the Ethernet ports, power port and power button nestled between them. I do have to say that I like how you can detach the antennas and swap them with larger gain Wi-Fi antennas if needed. Some manufacturers I find go with the built-in antennas that you can rotate and fold but cannot remove or upgrade if you wanted to.

When you move over to one side of the Archer C2300, you are presented with the Wi-Fi on/off button, the reset button (you need a pin!) and the two USB ports: a USB 2.0 and USB 3.0. Yes, you can attach a USB drive to share access to it across your home network!

If you flip the router over to see underneath, you can see that they carried the mesh-type design on the bottom to help passively move air about the internals of the router.

There are also two mounting holes so you can hang it up on a wall out of the way if you needed to. If you wall-mounted the Archer C2300, you could then make better use of those status LEDs and, of course, you can position the antennas so they point upwards when mounted that way as well.

Setting It Up in 1, 2, 3, 4…

There are two options when it comes to setting up the TP-Link Archer C2300: either through their Tether Smartphone app or through the web-based user interface. Since I had issues with the Tether app with my TP-Link Archer C3200, I thought I would give it a try with the C2300 this time.

TP-Link Tether Smartphone App

In a previous review of ours where we looked at the TP-Link Archer C3200, I was never able to log in to the C3200. So of course I wanted to see if I could use it with this device. I don’t know what it is or what has changed but I can finally make use of the Tether Smartphone app with this router! Setting up the Archer C2300 was a breeze and only took 4 screens.

All done and ready to go!

It has a similar feeling to their web-based user interface, which makes it easy to use. I also found out that only one person can be access device’s configuration screens from the web-based UI or through the app. You will be presented with a dialog that says that someone is logged in on another device and you can close that session and open one for you. Great for ensuring only one person is ever changing settings at any given time.

Setup Through the Web User Interface

If you cannot download the Tether app, you can still set up the TP-Link Archer C2300 via your web browser. You just associate your computer to the default SSID of your device and log in to the IP of 192.168.0.1.

In my particular setup, I needed to specify a Static IP but the setup screen is essentially the same flow as the Tether Smartphone app setup.

One you have logged in, you are presented with a screen that is similar across the TP-Link router family. It’s clean and simple, which is great! Nothing to scare a timid end user. One thing I noticed right off the bat though is the colour they use for a connection to the Internet; yellow. To me, yellow makes me thing there is something wrong or it isn’t 100%. There doesn’t seem to be anything wrong in this case; it’s just part of the colour scheme they use for this particular theme.

It would have been nice if they used green, as every time I look at the screen, my first instinct is that something isn’t quite right when it shows yellow.

Dealing with Data

Once you have the router set up and configured, you can just sit back and enjoy your favourite streams on YouTube or watch your favourite movie on Netflix, while someone else plays whatever latest MMO is on the market without noticing any network performance issues.

Performance Tests

When it comes to Wi-Fi routers, performance is where it is at and how it can handle multiple streams of data traffic at once. We need to see how the wireless handles the speeds or bandwidth. Can the TP-Link Archer C2300 offer fast data speeds to the clients connected to it and then will there be issues when there are multiple devices trying to access data on the network or on the Internet at once? We’ll have to check out how well does the Archer C2300 handle the pressures of a fully connected household!

So, on to the tests! For these bandwidth tests, I have utilized a couple of different ways of measuring the bandwidth on a given channel making use of a couple of different Wi-Fi based devices.

The Smartphone Test

First up are bandwidth tests on a smartphone, namely my Apple iPhone 7, using the Wi-Fi Sweetspot app. This app takes readings on your Wi-Fi bandwidth to help you locate the best position to place a Wi-Fi router for maximum performance. I use it to test the bandwidth of a router based on walking around the area to where I have it placed. Same difference right?

To utilize the maximum potential bandwidth, I utilize the 5 GHz channel. I theoretically could reach up to 1600 Mbps but with the iPhone 7, its support of 802.11ac and a single antenna, among some other things, I will never be able to hit that speed, but I should be able to obtain something decent.

Here you can see that I start off at about 535 Mbps and as I walk away from the TP-Link Archer C2300 the speed does drop as expected. I was easily across the other side of the area when it was hovering around 140 Mbps. I walked back towards the Archer C2300 and then away from it in the other direction putting two rooms between myself and the router. This is where it dipped to 62.4 Mbps. That is still plenty of bandwidth to stream 1080p videos!

The Laptop Test

In order to try and obtain the maximum speeds, I needed a device with a bit more Wi-Fi power behind it. My Apple Macbook Air only has 802.11n which will not come close to the theoretical speeds of 1200 Mbps. In fact, it was only able to pull about 350 Mbps. That is not bad, but it was really under-utilizing what the TP-Link Archer C2300 has to offer.

The next step involved the Dell Latitude E7470 with its Intel Dual-band 802.11ac AC1200 wireless card. This wireless card has a 2×2 antenna configuration and should be able to reach up to 867 Mbps on the 5 GHz band.

For this test, I utilized iPerf3 and its ability to send data between endpoints configured in a particular way. In my case, I make use of UDP as that will give me the faster numbers, which is great for things such as streaming video. A TCP-based test would yield slightly slower speeds as there is more overhead to that type of connection.

In this test, iPerf sends a variety of datagrams over a 120 second (2 minute) period and I plot the bandwidth at 5 second intervals over the course of the test. As you can see from the above graph, the Dell Latitude was able to maintain an average of about 531 Mbps throughout.

Let us do the same test but for the 2.4GHz Band

As typical of 2.4GHz bands, the throughput isn’t as high as the 5GHz ones, but the distance can be further from the Access Point. Here we do the same test as the 5 GHz Wi-Fi test but we associate to the 2.4GHz band instead. The Dell Latitude maintains an average of about 85.4 Mbps.

USB External Storage

A nice feature that a lot of Wi-Fi routers have these days is the ability to plug in a USB Storage device. This allows people to easily access a central location to save and share files and other documents. In the case of my testing, I plugged in a simple 8 GB USB 3.0 flash stick and turned on the access to it.

So in this test, the computer attached to the TP-Link Archer C2300 is on the 5GHz band and has the drive mapped locally over the SMB protocol. At 55 MBps (440mbps) and 23 MBps (184mbps), the speeds aren’t bad at all when you take into consideration the speed of the flash modules in the USB flash drive itself, being connected at 5GHz and any network traffic that might also be present.

This is great if you are looking to store files in a localized location for other people within your network to easily access. You could also probably stream 1080p videos at those read speeds, since a 1080p stream can require about 5 MBps and 4K would require about 14 MBps.

Final Thoughts

I have been using the TP-Link Archer C2300 for a couple of weeks and like other TP-Link Wi-Fi routers I’ve used, this one just works. It is simple to setup and use. Setting up the TP-Link Archer C2300 for the first time is easy and you can utilize either the smartphone app (Tether) or a web-based UI. Having more than one way to interact with the router is great, especially if I need to quickly troubleshoot an issue that might show up. The web UI feels the same across the other TP-Link Wi-Fi routers I have looked at, which is nice. It is just easy to navigate and use.

The speeds that were experienced are those you would expect with a 3-antenna, dual-band Wi-Fi router. Being able to pull an average of 500 Mbps with either phone or laptop is great when a wired connection is either impossible or inconvenient. I also like how more Wi-Fi router manufacturers are adding USB 3.0 ports so people can have pseudo-NAS (network attached storage) available to them. In the case of the TP-Link Archer C2300, as long as you make use of a USB 3.0 external drive, you can stream 1080p from it.

The only thing that I did not like about the TP-Link Archer C2300 was the location of the status LEDs. Most other routers display them on the front so that you can easily glance over and see what is going on. With the Archer C2300, you have to look on the top at very small white LEDs. I would have also liked to see an activity flicker or something with the LEDs themselves, so that I know data traffic is being passed around the network if I am doing something else. Not much of a complaint though.

I have enjoyed the TP-Link Archer C2300 and recommend it to those who want dual-band router with a bit more performance without breaking the bank. It’s available now for about $140.