The IT Nerd

When I signed up for Distributel, one of the things that I was offered was what they described to me as a “WiFi pod”. I only took one as I had zero intention of using the gear that an ISP provides as that’s a form of lock in by said ISP. But what I got was a pre-configured TP-Link Deco X50 WiFi router/Access point as opposed to something unique and custom made for the ISP. That piqued my interest.

The Deco X50 is a WiFi 6 dual band router that when you have two or more of these can also deliver mesh WiFi. Let’s have a look at it:

From the front, it’s rather unremarkable. Which is good as it will fit into any decor.

From the back you get three gigabit ethernet ports. Any port can be used to connect to your ISP. But because they are all gigabit, you’re limited to gigabit speeds. Which makes the X50 not the correct choice if you have faster than gigabit service.

Now each X50 unit has only two radios. A 2.4GHz one and a 5GHz transmitter that handles both client connections and backhaul traffic. Having a third radio for backhaul traffic would be better for a lot of people who have a lot of devices in a mesh setup as that will create some amount of congestion between each unit if the traffic between the two is high enough. But only having two radios keeps the price down which I suspect was the priority here.

Power users will be disappointed with the fact that there’s no web page with advanced configuration options as everything is done through the Deco app, although there is a web based status page. To be fair you can configure a number of things via the app form the initial setup, which by the way is easy enough for the average person to do, to some more complex tasks as turning on QoS or using their parental controls subscription service. In terms of the parental controls service, the fact that parental controls are a subscription service that you have to pay for is a bit of #fail as competitors ASUS offer that for free.

Now in my testing, performance was actually decent. Let’s start with the performance from the Optical Networking Terminal that Distributel supplied to the X50:

Now I had to test this via plugging in an Ethernet cable to my MacBook Pro because I couldn’t find a speed test built into the router or the Deco app. But this result is better, especially on the upload end of things than my ASUS Zen WiFi XT8 which isn’t that good when it comes to upload in PPPoE scenarios. Further validating that I need to dump the ASUS gear for something better as I am clearly leaving some speed on the table by using the ASUS hardware.

From a WiFi perspective, the performance was also decent. This result was from about 5 feet from the X50:

That’s competitive with the XT8 which also supports WiFi 6. So from a performance perspective, it doesn’t suck. Though I do wonder how it would perform with multiple units and a lot of traffic given that there’s no dedicated backhaul.

So would I recommend the X50? It depends on the type of user your are. If your needs are modest. As in you need WiFi 6 in your home and you’re not doing anything crazy, this might be an option for you. If you’re a power user or you have faster than gigabit internet, you should likely look elsewhere. At least the price is better than decent as I found a pair of these for $179 CAD on Amazon. Thus if you fit the use case for this WiFi router/access point, it’s worth looking at in my opinion.

This entry was posted on November 6, 2024 at 9:17 am and is filed under Products with tags TP-Link. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.