Review on 📶 Manhattan AC1200 Wireless Dual-Band Router for Enhanced Connectivity (Model 525480) by John Snook

I've seen various iterations of Manhattan products as inexpensive peripherals, so I was surprised that they had wireless connectivity. As you might have guessed from the Manhattan line of products, this device is the same as the 1200ac Edimax router, just renamed. To give some backstory, when my D-Link dual band N Gigabit router stopped working wirelessly a little over a year ago. I was looking for a cheap replacement and the cheap replacement was 10/100 and had constant latency issues even with firmware updates. Given that even a device with two antennas (maximum 300Mbps in half duplex) unless you're right next to the router will get 100Mbps or less (Ethernet full duplex), this wasn't the case. t really factor for me. In comparison, 802.11ac uses 433 Mbps per antenna, so you have a good chance of beating a 100 Mbps Ethernet connection even with built-in wireless loss. Back then, 802.11ac had just come out and the prices were obscene. At the time of this review (5/2014) the prices are still very high, but they have fallen a bit. I was able to purchase this device from a brick-and-mortar store for more than half that with a coupon that's about $40 with tax, which is about what I'm willing to pay for disposable consumer wireless routers. Based on my general experience with consumer grade routers and the lack of setup I have decided to use a separate box as a router (using Vyatta/VyOS) and use these WiFi routers as mere access points by using the DHCP disable features. Therefore, this review will not consider anything related to the router. As far as I can tell, the default router and firewall options run with cloning of NAT and WAN MAC addresses, but nothing special (I haven't seen any advanced options for VPN, VLAN, etc.). It might also have a WISP option so you can use the wireless network as a WAN, but that hasn't been covered either. IPv6 is definitely NOT suitable for this router, which is a disappointing and short-sighted oversight. The management interface available through the built-in website was acceptable. Not the worst I've seen, but certainly not visually appealing. The main thing is that it is functional. In theory this would allow you to change multiple settings on different pages and then "Apply" them - in practice it really depended on the settings you tweaked. Things I've seen on other routers but were missing here were eye-catching recent-use bar graphs, a tabbed layout at the top of the screen (as opposed to a long list down the left), and an overall lighter color palette. From a hardware perspective, 4MB FLASH and 64MB RAM is a massive improvement over routers of yesteryear and should be plenty for whatever you use in them. So far nothing in the DD-WRT world for this or its Edimax equivalent. The antennas are FIXED (meaning you can't unscrew them and insert large antennas) and have a 3dB gain compared to the 5dB gain seen elsewhere and on my previous router, which got me in terms of coverage something disturbed until the successful bid. In the box was a CD that you can use as a stand, the shortest ethernet cable you've ever seen (although to be fair all 8 pins are used - so gigabit - lately I've only got 100mbps / s 4 cable supports seen 100 Mbit/s). pins in the ethernet cables they give you) and a power adapter. The power supply is 5V 2A so should the power supply ever fail you could theoretically use a high powered USB charger and connect the cables together - whilst of course making sure to comply with all your local electrical codes. As for the WiFi part, it has a gigabit connection, so it SHOULD be able to transfer as much data as the WiFi can reasonably handle. The number 1200ac is misleading, it is dual band AC with two antennas, so 300Mbps in 2.4GHz "N" band + 866Mbps in 5GHz "AC" band. So if you bought one of their adapters and are using their drivers and everything is working as intended, you might be able to get 1166Mbps if you're nearby. In the reality of wireless networks, you'll never see how these speeds actually work - the more wireless devices on your network, the further away you are, the composition of the walls in your house, up and down the list, the worse the connection . receives. For my part, I don't actually have AC devices with two antennas, only AC devices with one antenna, so they will run at 433 Mbit/s, and if they are close to the router, I was of course surprised and amazed, but it showed 433 Mbps. The speed was on par, so the color impressed me. As always YMMV in terms of range, but it was on par with my previous router. I live in a 2500 square foot house between a basement, two floors and an attic and with a router in the basement it covers the whole house. In our bedroom on the 2nd floor, the signal strength is still "good" - depending on the device 3/4 or 3-4/5 "bars" - with single-band "N" devices with 65 Mbit /s specified. Latency is good, with no traffic typically 1ms to the router (vs <1ms with a wired connection). Wireless network performance in terms of Mbps was at least as good as the old 100 Mbps router and sometimes better, but speeds (probably due to a latency issue) improved significantly. You can setup 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Scope of the SSID (Wi-Fi name) itself. By default, WIRELESS DEVICES SECURITY is DISABLED, so be sure to go there and set a password. You can also disable WPS per band, which is a good idea given the vulnerability reported a few years ago. Detailed settings for authentication types (WPA, WPA2, WEP (which you shouldn't use)) weren't available, but considering it's going to be WPA2, don't worry. There were advanced wireless radio settings (which you'll never touch anyway). It also gives you a list of connected clients for each band, which I've really liked on all the different Wi-Fi routers I've seen lately. I didn't see an option for guest wifi (which isn't the case in my case). I use IPv6 at home (and in the outside world) and as you'd expect, this device just connects the network, so DHCP/IPv6 auto-detection works fine on client devices and they're ready to race. I've seen any firmware updates from Manhattan, although there seem to have been some firmware updates from Edimax where the hardware comes from. So if I see any issues reported for an Edimax product (requires frequent restarts etc) I will update the review. Other than that it's been decent gear so far and with the discount I'd say it's great value for money. However, at full retail price (which was about $80 for brick and mortar) I would spend an additional $20 and buy a 3 antenna router, which you can get from companies like TP-LINK. 802.11AC should also be overhauled next year with multi-user MIMO, which should improve performance when many devices try to access it. So if you're about to upgrade, you should wait a year too. .