Tenda AC1200 Dual Band Wireless Router

I recently found out that in order to use a certain company customer portal for paying bills or just looking at my account, I have to do it via a cell phone and home wifi. It’s been ages since I went on the internet with a cell phone, I have no need to do so. Thought my wifi was still working but it was not. I bought this new router and thankfully it was easy to install getting me online fast. Never heard of this brand before but the price was lower than most and the reviews sounded good. It’s been a few days and so far it’s working great. If I can install it and get online ANYONE CAN! 82 AND COUNTING. No cd was used.

I live in an apartment building flooded with WiFi signals, but I still need my own WiFi. The commercial router is good, and you can turn the radio power way down, but it also puts out a Hidden SSID when the 5 Ghz radio is on. The other company uses the extra signal to provide WiFi to their other customers. I’ve been asking everyone to turn off their extra signals and turn down the signals they are using. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite, so I turned off the radios in my commercial router, set this one up with no 2.4 Ghz broadcast and set an unused channel on 5 Ghz power to ‘medium’ at a 20 Mhz bandwidth. The only 5 Ghz power choices are medium and high.

While I have full coverage inside the apartment with a data rate faster than I’ll ever need, the signal outside the apartment drops off quickly. I did a test with both the 2.4 and 5 Ghz radios turned down to ‘low’ and ‘medium’ respectively, and the signal for both dropped off fast outside the apartment door.

If you want to spend as little time as possible setting up this router, connect it to your PC with an Ethernet cable and follow the instructions. Since I always know better, it took hours. There aren’t a ton of options, but still enough to get into trouble, especially if your’re trying to set it up from the Android app. Use your PC or laptop, hardwired to the router.

This router is basic, but it allows my wireless devices to have fast throughput. You can set sleep time for the router, program the lights for sleeping hours, or turn them off. There is no USB port. You can set the bandwidth, channel and power level to limit your impact on those around you, while still getting excellent connectivity. It’s only a few dollars less than some well-known brands, this one had the features I was looking for, at a great price.

The only other advice I have: If your devices have an RJ-45 jack, use it. A wired connection will always be faster, more secure and reliable, especially for streaming devices. Not EVERYTHING needs to be connected to WiFi, nobody needs gigabit WiFi and having the loudest WiFi signal on the block isn’t cool, it’s the opposite.

Snygg design och den uppfyller alla mina förväntningar på en router till hemmet.

Just received this yesterday and delivered on time as promised. I have AT&T and with the BGW210-700 RG we kept having problems with wifi dropping and signal strength throughout the house and outside. It took a whole whopping 2 minutes to get this connected to router quite easily. I can say that the signal has improved greatly. Before we were only getting 29-30 out of 50mb throughout the house and outside. Now we get full speeds throughout house and outside and signal hasn’t dropped once in the 3 hours it has been connected.
Another reason for getting this was due to smart led wifi bulbs only being able to use 2.4ghz and not the 5ghz. I simply set this router up with the same SSID as the main router with _ext added to it. I then went into the main RG (modem) and changed the 2.4ghz SSID to _24ghz extension and was able to keep the smart bulbs connected to the main RG and still have 2.4 or 5ghz available on the Tenda router. During purchase I said what the heck and got the 4 yrs protection plan for the cheap price that it was.
So far so good and loving this router. I also like the remote monitoring features as well as the other features inside. Too bad it doesn’t have the USB storage port but I have servers at home so that doesn’t matter.
As for tech support… haven’t needed any yet. Hopefully if, and when, that time comes they are there.

UPDATE: well it kinda stinks that I didn’t pay attention to the Ethernet ports being 10/100 instead of 10/100/1000. No problems though. Simply moved our smart TVs, etc that don’t require a 1000 connection over to it. Just simply put the router as access point mode and was able to get it setup fairly simple.

UPDATE 2: AT&T 50mbps internet worked fine with the 100mb ethernet ports until we upgraded to Charter 200mbps internet. Kept wondering why speeds plugged in would not hit above 90 until I remembered why with the ports only being 100mbps. Oh well. Had to buy a new router that supports 1000mb speeds and relocated this to the other part of the house closer to patio so the wifi extends further out.