The IT Nerd

WiFi 7 is quickly becoming mainstream. I say that because all sorts of new WiFi 7 hardware options are coming onto the market every time I look around. Today’s example of this is the TP-Link Archer GE800 BE19000:

The first thing that came to mind when I saw this was that it looked like an Imperial Shuttle from Star Wars: Return Of The Jedi. But this shape does give it some party tricks for your enjoyment. Before I get to those, you get buttons on the front that do the following easily:

• WPS button
• Wi-Fi on/off
• Game Acceleration. This accelerates game applications, game devices, mobile games, and the like with WTFast GPN.
• Turning on/off the LED lights

I am going to assume that the antennas are in each “wing.” But that’s not all that’s in them.

There’s RGB lighting on the sides which you can tweak with via the TP-Link Tether app.

Not to mention that there’s RGB lighting on the bottom as well. Now I had to turn these off during my testing as my wife thought that it was beyond over the top and ordered me to disable all of it the second she saw it. So for those of you who have significant others, you might want to keep that in mind and proactively turn the RGB effects off.

Here’s the business end of the router. Besides a USB 3.0 port for a storage device like a hard drive, you get two 10 Gbps ports. One of them is a LAN port, the other is a combo WAN port which gives you the option of running an SFP+ module. So if you have fibre Internet and you don’t need to use an optical networking terminal like I do, you can plug the fibre cable straight into the router for maximum speed. Nice! There’s also four 2.5 Gbps LAN ports but one is a dedicated gaming port. Meaning that any device connected to this port will be automatically prioritized. Which in turn means that it will give you that extra millisecond or two to pwn n00bz.

With the looks and connectivity out of the way, let’s get to the WiFi part of this. This is what you get out of the box:

• 4×4 2.4GHz BE: Up to 1376Mbps 
  (20/40MHz)
• 4×4 5GHz BE: Up to 5760Mbps (20/40/80/160MHz)
• 4×4 6GHz BE: Up to 11520Mbps (20/40/80/160/320MHz)

That’s not all. You can create an SSID (network name) for each of the three bands which allows you to support special use cases such as mine where I want all the bands separate to make sure that devices, especially IoT devices have no issues connecting. And on top of that you can create an MLO (multi link operation) SSID for your WiFi devices that support MLO. That was easily done through the TP-Link Tether app. But it also has a web interface that also gives you way more customization if you want to tinker with your router’s setup. I should also mention that this router supports TP-Link’s EasyMesh which allows you to add a compatible TP-Link router to create a mesh network should the need arise.

Set up is going to be easy for most using theTether app. By that I mean that if you have a straight forward Internet connection, you can be set up in under five minutes. But it took me about 20 due to the fact that my Internet connection isn’t straight forward as it uses PPPoE and a VLAN on top of that. Thus I had to spend some time figuring out how to set that up. But once it was set up, and I did a firmware update, I was ready to go with my testing.

Let’s start with 5 Ghz testing. Frankly I wasn’t impressed when I tested this router with my iPhone 14 Pro:

I’ve gotten much faster 5 Ghz speeds with other routers in the past. But my lack of enthusiasm quickly changed when I tested the 6 Ghz band via my M2 Pro Mac mini. When I did that, here’s what I got:

My Internet connection is a symmetrical 1 Gbps fibre connection. So over WiFi it not only came close to maxing out my Internet connection, but it also recorded the fastest speeds from a router that I have ever tested. Or put another way, if I had a faster Internet connection, This TP-Link router has the headroom to support it. Impressive. And range wasn’t an issue as I was getting insanely fast speeds through walls and even outside my condo in the hallway.

Gripes? Well for starters, this router has a fan to keep things cool. Which it needs as I could feel the heat coming out the various vents that the router has. Now I had to really make things quiet to come close to hearing the hum it made. And to be clear that hum wasn’t objectionable. But I have to wonder if that fan will survive the test of time as any moving part in any device will eventually fail at some point. My advice is to make sure it’s in an open space so that heat and the potential of a fan failure less of a potential issue.

My other gripe is that features like Security+ which makes your router more secure by implementing features like intrusion detection and prevention as well as scanning your web traffic for harmful content such as malware, as well as parental controls are paid subscription services. That’s a bit of a #fail and I say that because ASUS for example just tosses these features into the cost of the router. While that does make ASUS routers more expensive than the TP-Link equivalent, at least you those features out of the gate and don’t have to sign up for yet another subscription to get those features. Plus it makes users more secure in the process as users will simply turn on those features rather than think about taking out their credit cards in order to be as secure as possible.

The TP-Link Archer GE800 BE19000 is currently $900 on Amazon.ca which is a good price for a router that performs this well. If TP-Link added the security and parental control features as part of the price, or increased the price of the router to include those features by a reasonable amount, it in my mind would go from a great router, to an almost perfect router as I really didn’t find any flaws with it. That makes this router worth a look if you are a gamer, or you have an Internet connection that can fully leverage it.