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United Kingdom, Belfast
1 Level
721 Review
28 Karma

Review on πŸ”₯ High-Speed Linksys AC2600 4 x 4 MU-MIMO Dual-Band Gigabit Router with USB 3.0 and eSATA (EA8500) by Robert Bigelow

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Ordinary router, more marketing dust than real, not for home VPN work, often drops connections, unreliable.

Well I bought this router for $90 last year during the holiday season. I found the $90 AC2600 in 2016 to be a great deal. But wait a minute, it wasn't like that. You only get what you pay for. I can't bring it back now, behind the window. Here is my honest experience from one year.1. Internal disconnects frequently. This is totally unacceptable for logging into a remote work system over an end-to-end VPN. Corporate networks need a stable connection that lasts 24 hours a day to establish a VPN tunnel. If you disconnect and reconnect your internet connection for even 1/2 second, everything in the VPN will be lost immediately. Most networks are built to protect their networks. This router completely failed the test. Most consumers don't notice this as it doesn't matter when streaming, reading a file, etc.2. The relative signal strength is slightly higher compared to TP LINK. 5% more. According to the rules, any consumer router cannot have more than 1W of power. So all these claims that he is powerful are all false. TP-LINK AC1200, which is slower, performs much better; as good signal level as this.3. Any claims made about this router are just marketing nonsense. Within 1W, you can only increase the bands, increase the speed of the bands, but you can't make big ones, they must play within. So it's all just another marketing gimmick to confuse the consumer and try to win over the competition. Anyone who makes more noise will be noticed.4. Beamforming is not useful for VPN pass-through. It constantly changes the signal strength in one place and connections are lost. The old technology was better than this.5. They have a nice router app interface; You can enable/disable guest networks on the fly from your phone. Most routers give it a few days. Very simple construction. Very memorable and impressive application. What good are all these nice features if the product doesn't work? 6. Reliability: very poor for remote login to a corporate system. Seems ok for consumer use. Even cheap and low frequency AC1200 routers like TPLINK AC1200 are much better than this one. Changing channels did not solve the problem. There is a serious problem with the software in it, it keeps kind of crashing and trying to do some "high tech" stuff.7. SPEED: Worse than lower tech. I did a test comparison with TPLINK AC1200. Place the routers in the same place, measure the signal strength at the same fixed spot for each router. The speed of the Linksys router in the 2.4 GHz band is 54 Mbit/s. TPlink AC1200 in the same place as Linksys gives 85 Mbps. In the 5 GHz band, TPLink has a speed of 115 Mbps! Linksys also fails to connect on the 5 GHz band. So what is the benefit of AC2600? A few years ago I had another Linksys 802.11g router which is now obsolete. I remember one catching fire after 1-2 years of use. Same experience again. I think this company is more marketing dust than reality. I will not risk buying another Linksys in the future.

Pros
  • Good product for the price
Cons
  • Reliability