Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsFool Me Twice, Shame On Me
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2017
I upgraded from an N300 router so as you can imagine this has breathed new life into my internet connection. The user interface is a bit weird. It takes a while to find what you're looking for in particular. The software/interface is far from perfect. I've encountered issues with it not displaying all of my connected devices until I power the router off and then back on again. On occasion I can't even access the interface and it will not show me an option to connect locally rather than using the smart wifi login. This is a huge hindrance, especially when I'm trying to troubleshoot the problem. Not having access to the interface also means I can't click/tap "restart router" so I have to flip the power switch manually. For the price I would expect something a bit more reliable.
As far as speed goes it seems to work well on my newer devices. I've been having hiccups with older wireless cards so I'm still tweaking the settings and trying to iron out the kinks. I can vouch for it's ability to stream very well to Steam Link. My Steam Link is connected to the 5ghz band and my Steam client is run from a PC connected via ethernet. I have no noticeable lag and the audio will cut or skip very seldom. I had my PC connected through 2.4ghz but the audio dropped frequently and occasionally the gameplay would lag by 2 to 3 seconds.
The range on this router is awesome. The ground level of my house is a little over 1,700 sq. ft. and I have 3 out of 4 bars from 5ghz at the opposite end of the house. This is passing through two walls and lots of furniture. I owned a competitor router briefly, which could not transmit even half of that distance.
I have a 4tb external drive hooked up to the USB port. Transfer speeds are great and it's nice to be able to turn local storage into networked. I have it locked down so I am the only one who can login but I do have a Raspberry Pi 2 connected via ethernet running as NAS with a hefty flash drive for everyone else on the network to access.
All-in-all, the hardware in this router performs well but the software leaves something to be desired. I'm thinking about flashing DD-WRT if it's an option. I used it on my last Linksys and it worked way better than the stock firmware/software. I just need to do some research to make sure it doesn't break any of the functionality.
Update 08/23/2017:
Unfortunately, DD-WRT isn't available for this router yet. I have to restart the router almost daily because the Wi-Fi will randomly disconnect from some devices and reconnect only to drop again. It will do this on an infinite loop until I restart it. Another issue is that it will drop the speed to something on par with Dial-Up. I was unable to download an 80mb file this morning because it was slower than molasses. I gave up after five minutes of waiting for it to creep up to 4.6mb downloaded. I have a 100mb connection. This shouldn't be an issue. If there's no ETA for DD-WRT I might be returning this router and buying something more reliable.
Update 08/24/2017:
Had to restart the router once this morning and just had to power cycle it because I couldn't access it again. As soon as the replacement arrives on my doorstep this thing is going back. For reference, I have about 14 devices connected at any given time. Most of those are Wi-Fi switches for home automation. At most, I'll have 3 computers running simultaneously.
Update 01/26/2018:
I ended up getting the AC4000 through another site for half the price it's selling here. It has all of the same issues. Disabling "Smart Connect" did alleviate some of my 5ghz issues. My 5ghz devices would randomly get stuck in an endless connect/disconnect loop until I rebooted the router. The interface is still garbage. Half of your settings are more easily accessed using the phone app and the other half from PC. The router will randomly decide it doesn't want to load anything from anywhere between 30 seconds to 3 minutes at a time, with no indication of connection issues or why it feels the need to shut off your connection. This happens across every interface: wireless, wired, and network connections via USB. I had hoped the AC4000 would be a beast with it's upgraded hardware but it's just as unreliable as the AC2200. DD-WRT is not an option because Linksys locked their devices. Hopefully, I'll be able to get a Netgear Nighthawk or something similar to replace it with after taxes.
