Linksys AC3200 Review

I ran into that funny problem where if you have so many wireless devices you’re overloading your tiny wireless router that you’ve had for 5 years. After looking around a bit I settled on the AC3200 Triband Router from Linksys. I wanted something that would be really powerful to handle all of my devices and something with a cool factor.

The device arrived and had some simple instructions to configure it. Connect to the default SSID via a wireless device and open up your web browser to myrouter.local to get connected. The setup had a “Quick Setup” mode to get everything running quickly but I found that the quick setup would not work for my environment. The quick setup expects that you’ve connected your Wireless Router directly to a cable modem and in my case I’m connected to a layer three switch behind an ASA firewall. After resetting the router and doing the manual setup though, everything was good.

I don’t get too excited about user interfaces but this one seemed really sharp to me.

The network MAP seemed really neat to me. Maybe because my old router was ancient but being able to see all my devices graphically was neat to me. I do want to note that the device names show up on the map but I’ve removed them from my screenshot.

QOS was made really simple to do. You can drag and drop devices into the prioritization screen and set your priorities. Likewise you can also select whichever device you want and set parental restrictions only for that device.

One thing I didn’t care for with my last router is that it couldn’t do VLAN tagging. The Linksys AC3200 has a really simple interface to allow you to add VLAN tags to any of the wired ports.

In addition to providing both 5GHz and 2GHz bands, the router also provides the ability to handle Guest Wireless and a DMZ. This should enable about any combination of connections you might need for a home network.

It might not be the most useful feature but the router provides an app for both Apple and Android. I don’t usually need to configure my router from my phone, but I don’t usually need to check my smoke detector either, and I can do that.

The performance of this thing is maybe the best part. The transfer rate I was getting on my Mac was a little over 100 Mbps with my old 802.11n router. The new 802.11ac router is transferring around 700Mbps. You might not notice this browsing the web, but will for sure notice when you try to transfer files.

Negatives

There was one major issue I found with this router. Any time I would configure settings in the router, I would lose my connections. Simple things like changing the password or enabling guest wifi access would make me lose my private network wireless and I’d have to reboot the router. This is a big deal, but only when initially configuring the router. Once it was setup, its been pretty solid. I hope that Linksys will fix this with a firmware update down the road.

Summary

Overall I’m pretty happy with this router. If the dropped wireless continues to be a problem then it will be a serious let down, but as long as I know that it only happens when configuring settings on the router I’ll live with it. Performance is great but so far the stability seems a bit lacking.