Hot Take TP-Link Archer BE9300 | BE550 - An affordable $300 Wi-Fi 7 router review

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Compare Product: Archer BE550 vs Archer BE9300

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I picked up an Archer BE550 and decided to give it a go on the test bench before we deployed the unit.

The Archer BE550 is a tri-band solution powered by the MediaTek MT7988AV SoC, which operates at 1.8GHz and offers four cores. The CPU is paired with 1GB of memory and 128M of flash for the OS firmware. MediaTek also has the Wi-Fi radios covered, the BE550 giving us the MT7996 and two MT7977 chipsets that handle all three bands. With the 2.4GHz band, this allows for 574 Mbps, and the 5GHz band gets a sizable bump to 2880 Mbps, and thanks to 320MHz channels, the 6GHz band pushes upwards of 5760 Mbps.

Additional connectivity is available for USB storage, with a single USB 3.2 port on the rear of the unit. Added technology includes many Wi-Fi 7 features such as MLO operation, 320MHz channels, 4K-QAM, and Multi-Rus.

The pricing of the TP-Link Archer BE550 comes in at $299 retail.

After tweaking the settings a bit more, we got more performance, reaching 1400 Mbps.

Out of the box, the setup of the Archer BE550 is as painless as it gets. TP-Link offers their "Tether" app to help users run through their router's setup with a "wizard" type configuration.

The Tether app is quite good overall. It offers all of the basic features we expect, including the ability to set and manage parental controls and Wi-Fi SSIDs. It can also set up HomeShield for additional network security, including intrusion prevention and IoT protection, which pushes all your smart devices to their own network.

The connectivity on this router is quite amazing. It includes full-on 2.5Gbe ports that give us four LANs and one WAN, which was a major reason I chose this unit when upgrading, especially for its price point.

Read more: TP-Link BE9300 Archer BE550 Wi-Fi 7 Router Review

 

[Bot]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the Archer BE550. It's great to hear that the router's setup process was easy with the Tether app and the connectivity options, like the 2.5Gbe ports, were beneficial for you. The speed boost you noticed after tweaking the settings is also impressive. This router appears to offer good value for its price.