TP-LINK AC3200 Wireless Tri-Band Gigabit Router Review

Others/Networking Gear by stefan @ 2016-06-29

The AC3200 router from TP-LINK is another high-end offering which does use Tri-Band technology to run no less than three separate Wi-Fi channels at once. The second added 5GHz band makes sure that more devices can connect to the router, without a decrease in performance; also, thanks to the Smart Connect feature, the devices which do need to connect to the router will be assigned to one of the channels which has least load in order to perform balancing.

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A Closer Look Contd.

The TP-LINK Archer C3200 has an interesting symmetric chassis and sports no less than six antennas, three of which being dual-band and the remaining three single-band:

 

 

 

Both LEDs and interface buttons can be spotted in the frontal area of the router:

 

 

 

From left to right, we’ve got the Power LED, the one for the 2.4GHz band, the one for the first 5GHz band, second 5GHz band, one LAN activity LED, a WAN activity LED, WPS LED and also separate LEDs for the USB interfaces:

 

 

 

The hardware buttons are for turning Wi-Fi On/Off, to enable WPS but also for turning the LEDs on or off:

 

 

 

Besides the ventilated top, we get ventilation grills on each side too:

 

 

 

The interfaces of this router are located in the back and here we will get to see from left to right a Reset button, an USB 2.0 port, a WAN port, four LAN ports, an USB 3.0 port, the Power button but also one DC-IN port. These are color-coded, can be identified easily and have enough spacing between:

 

 

 

There is no surprise that the bottom layer of this router also presents itself as a ventilation grill:

 

 

 

Each lateral features a small rubber foot:

 

 

 

Here is how the Archer C3200 does look when it is ready for operation; each wireless band is driven by a different co-processor and the system is accompanied by a dual-core 1GHz processor:

 

 

 

 

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