Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

UPDATE 9-9-17: VERY POOR behavior by Linksys. As is now clear, this router promised a number of upcoming features on their website! Linksys has quietly taken ALL of these down, indicating they are just going to abandon these and leave all the people that purchased the router with these in mind in the dark. To be clear, Linksys, on their article page for this item, advertised: "Upcoming features (via automatic firmware update) Dual WAN - Dual WAN can aggregate the bandwidths of two WAN connections to achieve a higher Internet bandwidth greater than 1Gbps Link Aggregation - Supports up to 2Gbps for file transfer Advanced Band Steering - Auto select the most appropriate band between 2.4 and 5Ghz for client devices to achieve the best Wi-Fi performance DFS Channels Support - DFS (Dynamic Frequency Selection) will provide up to four times more channels within the 5GHz band helping to improve the internet speed with less traffic congestion. This feature can help users achieve true lag free 4K content streaming OpenVPN Server- VPN feature allows users too remotely and securely access resources shared within their home local area network" All of this has completely disappeared (safe irate users on their support board asking the same question - where did this go?). Makes me very wary considering Linksys again. Unreliable. For the record, I inquired to them (support) about it, to no avail. UPDATE 8-31-17: Looks like Linksys has abandanoded their promised features for this router?! Where is all-band steering (not just 5Ghz)? Where is VPN? This router came with the promise of a number of great innovations, advertised for months on Linksys' own website: DFS, VPN, true bandsteering and much more. Not just has none of it materialized, Linksys has now sheepishly removed all mention of it 'coming soon' from their site, making me worry they have ditched them altogether. ------------------- I really hoped I would love this router, after having tested Asus (5300; great performance but buggy software and implementation) and Orbi and Amplify HD mesh systems (as well as Apple routers). In the end, the specs on paper are great, but the product is hampered by a still limited software implementation, and, frankly, just mediocre performance. Range was good – on par (no better or worse) with similar routers from Linksys (4x4 or 3x3 – though quad-stream in this router may have helped matters a bit) and other vendors; overall the Amplifi HD mesh system (by Ubiquity) turned out better and more consistent results though, in 2 story, 1900 square feet house. This isn’t helped by the fact that I found the Max Stream Extender (1900) to be useless to help in the areas of the house that had very low, or only 2.4Ghz coverage (the extender was weak in reception and signal, and introduced interference as it’s using the same channels as the router itself). This router has a number of ‘coming soon’ features (OpenVPN, DFS channels) of which one – true smart-connect band-steering across all 3 bands is ESSENTIAL to make this a good router. As it is now, there seems to be no rhyme or reason to the logic of which devices are assigned to which of the 5 Ghz bands; and there is absolutely no band steering to/from the 2.4Ghz radio. Equally strange is the channel selection; on Auto, I usually get odd channels such as 8 or 9 for the 2.4 – even though 1,6 and 11 are pretty clear. Why Linksys would let the router grab an overlapping channel is beyond me. On the 5Ghz channels, 36 and 161 were chosen – I found attenuation to be acting strange, and also to be much higher on the low band, which seem to indicate that the upper radio still beams at much higher power (even though the FCC removed the low-band limits in 2014) – but I am guessing this one. The Router functions are pretty good, though don’t offer quite as in-depth controls as Asus or even Netgear. The web interface is ok - cleaner than Asus, less so than Netgear's (though Asus allows a lot more customization, too). The built-in speedtest relies on Flash! No flash, no speed test; that seems odd and a poor choice. Oh, and the app (iOS) is ok; though good luck with the contrast; dark grey on darker grey background make it a chore to read anything at all. And, as has been mentioned before, the network map is pretty useless and inaccurate. There is also no signal meter, making it hard to actually know at what rate clients are connecting. In the end, this is an ok product, it just doesn’t bring anything new to the table yet. And it’s an odd in-between product; generally better hardware than Linksys' top-end EA9500, but utilizing cheaper 3x3 radios. It'd be nice to see an update 4x4 with new Chips and more RAM - but I assume that with 802.11ax around the corner, it’s probably not a bad idea to wait till the end of the year for real innovation (and then the clients to catch up) and new routers. If you DO buy this, it will become a better router when updates provide access to the DFS spectrum, real band steering across all 3 radios, and band steering toward 5Ghz, along with OpenVPN and other promised features (assuming you take Linksys by their word). Still, I simply found range and performance to be run-of-the-mill; and in the end chose the Amplify HD for better overall (and more consistent) performance.