Linksys EA6500 review: A user-friendly 802.11ac router with decent performance - baxterressat

Cisco arrived belatedly to the 802.11ac party, but its Linksys EA6500 (it's hard to articulate the entire name—the Linksys Video recording Pro AC1750 Smart Wi-Fi Router EA6500—in a single breathing tim) is a solid, rich-to-employ dual-band router with one unique, gee-whiz feature.

That feature, called SimpleTap, uses near-theater communication technology; with it, you can joint NFC-enabled ambulatory devices to your mesh by tapping them with a provided plastic card. That pandurate physical natural action immediately provides the gimmick with the router's certificate credentials. Unlike with WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup), you ne'er need to touch the router when using SimpleTap. It does, admittedly, require you to establis a Cisco app connected the mobile device. But I call it a g-whiz lineament because relatively a few mobile devices are NFC enabled (Samsung's Galaxy S Troika smartphone being the most notable). The SimpleTap card is something of a security endangerment unless you lock it away, and the feature is easily injured if you wear't wishing to use it.

The EA6500 clay easy for inexperienced users to set up eventide if you can't convey advantage of SimpleTap, although that entails installing software on a client PC and creating an online explanation with Lake herring. If you're an experienced user and you opt not to use this cloud-founded option, you can log in to the router to perform its initial configuration without setting up an account—but therein case you won't embody competent to capitalise of Cisco's Smart Badger State-Fi cloud service, which allows you to manage the router remotely from anyplace you have Internet memory access. IT also enables you to remotely access information stored on an attached USB gimmick. (The EA6500 has two USB 2.0 ports, so you can share both storehouse and a pressman on your network. You assume't need Smart Wisconsin-Fi to enable local clients to use connected USB devices.)

In addition, Linksys offers a collection of Smart Wi-Fi apps. These run on the router and/or your manoeuvrable devices to bring home the bacon everything from parental controls (so you can control when your children can go online, where they can go, and what they give notice do while they'rhenium there) to media aggregators, device monitors, and IP-camera viewers. The apps are a far simpler unconventional to jiggering port-forwarding, unchanging routing, DMZ, and other settings, but Cisco doesn't prevent advanced users from configuring any of those settings manually.

Linksys has developed a substance abuser-intimate UI for its EA6500 Wi-Fi router.

The dual-striation router arrives from the factory with abundant-to-remember, preassigned network names for its 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks: Ours were named OrangePanda and OrangePanda5, respectively. Wireless security is disabled by default, but you're warned of this at the commencement, and establishing certificate is unity of the first stairs in both of the assisted setups. If you're installing the router on your own, you'll have to hunt for the security settings, because they don't rest under the Security tab where you would expect to find them (you must click the Tune tab, or else).

The Linksys EA6500's 802.11ac performance was fairly comparable to that of our current favorite router, the Asus RT-AC66U; in fact, IT was slightly faster when the router and client were at close range (9 feet apart and in the same room). At this location, the EA6500 delivered TCP throughput of 460 megabits per second, compared with the RT-AC66U's 449 mbps. The Linksys was slenderly slower—171 mbps versus 190 mbps—when the client was in a home field, 35 feet from the router and with several walls in between, but some routers delivered 232 mbps when the client Sabbatum in a home berth that was 65 feet from the router with several walls in betwixt.

The Linksys EA6500's 802.11ac performance is comparable to that of the Asus RT-AC66U, which is the quickest router we've tested.

With the client operating on the 2.4GHz network, however, the Linksys router was more 30 percentage slower happening average than the Asus intersection when we benchmarked the cardinal devices at the same three locations.

The Linksys EA6500 was considerably slower than the Asus RT-AC66U when we benchmarked some routers' 2.4GHz 802.11n performance.

In damage of reading and writing to a USB hard drive attached to the router (we used a 500GB Western Digital My Passport drive), the Linksys held its own against the Asus when reading both a single large file and a collection of small files, but the Asus clobbered the Linksys when writing those files to the attached hard drive.

The Linksys EA6500 delivered performance connected a par with that of the Asus RT-AC66U when recital files from an attached USB hard drive, but the Asus crushed IT when writing those same files to the tricky drive.

If you intend to use a USB hard drive for mount up networked client PCs, you'll be a great deal happier with the Asus. If you'Ra looking to stream media from a get attached to the router, either model will do (unless you're looking an iTunes host, A I'll discuss next).

Lake herring delivers far fewer features with the EA6500 than Asus does with its RT-AC66U. Both routers patronise UPnP and provide a DLNA-registered media server and an FTP server, for instance, simply Asus also provides an iTunes server, a SAMBA server, an onboard download handler for machine-controlled BitTorrent downloads, and VPN pass-through for secure distant network access.

And whereas the Lake herring model provides a guest network happening only its 2.4GHz dance orchestra, Asus's model allows you to run guest networks on both frequencies at the same time. With the possible exception of the iTunes server, however, well-nig mainstream consumers won't miss those advanced features, and might favor the EA6500's relative simplicity and ease of use.