- 3 separate frequencies
- Beamforming for hard to reach places
- Supports up to 3200Mbps
- Cost a bit high for general use
- Antennas do not detach
- No sFTP access to external drive (optional)
Final Thoughts
With so many Wi-Fi routers out on the market, why would someone pay for a more expensive router? You want performance and don’t want to hinder your current wireless experience of course. You also may want to ensure that you can later upgrade other pieces of equipment to support the faster speeds. With the increase of 4K video streaming around the home, console or PC-based online games, the typical household is probably doing a lot of Wi-Fi based tasks. You want to ensure while you’re watching that 4K wireless stream of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in the back bedroom, that little Timmy out in the living room is not losing any of his frags during his latest online session of Star Wars Battlefront.
Out of the box, set up is straight-forward and easy. It took no time to get it up and running. With a little bit of tweaking, I was able to get my regular router settings applied and all my network accessories talking to it. I liked having the 3 separate Wi-Fi frequencies, so I could do my own little load-balancing. The devices that require higher throughput on the network get to go on one of the 5GHz SSIDs, most of the other devices are happy on the 2.4GHz SSID and then the third and final 5GHz is reserved for things that require the faster speeds but not as often.
During the setup of the external 1TB USB3.0 drive, I did notice that you can set up an FTP server with the router to the external drive and also configure it for outside access. I’m surprised that there wasn’t an sFTP (Secure FTP) version to ensure that if you connected from the outside, that you wouldn’t have such an exposed un-encrypted protocol available. Typically, people would want to make use of services such as SSH or sFTP, not Telnet or FTP as those are less secure services. I guess that’s one thing that I won’t be enabling on this router, though it could have been a really useful feature to people.
So, Should You Buy It?
If you’re a family who is digitally connected all around the house with a variety of wireless devices, then perhaps it is time to look at adding a bit more horsepower to your wireless network setup. I would recommend looking at the TP-Link Archer C3200 Tri-band Gigabit router to ensure that your wireless (and wired) devices do not put a damper on the experience your household members could experience. Keep little Timmy fragging Stormtroopers without him complaining about connection issues while you and your loved one stream 4K videos to the bedroom TV!
The TP-Link Archer C3200 is listed at $299.99 but sells for less online. It is available now.
