Digging into the RE7000s GUI shows a clean, easily understandable interface with pretty much everything you could possibly need for a device like this no more than a mouse click or two away.
How does it Perform?
To test the device, I ran it in Wi-Fi Extender mode, rather than using it as a wired extender, since I suspect this is likely to be the more common use case scenario for a device like this in the home. Like the EA9500 testing I used iPerf and tested both UDP and TCP streams to get a feel for how it would handle differing types of traffic. I also checked signal strength in various nearby locations as well as taking speed-tests with iPerf at the same spots. For comparisons sake I have also included readings of the signal strength for the EA9500, which was a floor below when testing.
As you may have noticed from the screen shots of the GUI earlier, the RE7000 wasn’t showing as being in an optimal location when I was initially writing the review, so speeds will have suffered for this, as such tests have been conducted with the RE7000 in the ‘sweet spot’ also just to show what the device can do when it’s properly set up.
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- While the RE7000 wasnt in its ideal spot for these tests, you do get an idea of what a difference it can make when compared to the results seen just using the router alone. In the same room, the signal strength is phenomenal, as are the speeds.
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- In the next room along, a bathroom filled with hard tiling – normally a fairly hostile environment for Wi-Fi – we do see a dip in potential throughput, while retaining good signal strength – ultimately this is still way above what you can expect for 2.4Ghz signals though.
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- As can be seen, on the 5Ghz channel at a point furthest from the RE7000, while on the same floow signal strength does drop off, but potential speeds are maintained at a staggering 1300Mbps
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- Bypassing the RE7000 and connecting directly to the router shows just why a device like this is useful, signal strength takes a massive hit and theoretical throughput suffers accordingly – bear in mind that while the TX rate shows 117, this does fluctuate over time, meaning that this is not a hard or fast indicator of performance, so much as a theoretical max based on calculations performed by the OS.
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- When connecting direct to the EA95000 from the Bathroom, we see a similar hit – as mentioned in the last captiopn, throughput isn’t being properly measured here so much as estimated and did fluctuate wildly in this view when gathering data, so while the performance ‘looks’ better than the previous room, this is just down to when I took the screen shot.
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- Similarly signal strength has took a hit in the bedroom too, though this being above the router it has been less dramatic than the other rooms.
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- Moving the RE7000 to its ‘sweet spot’ as indicated on its GUI shows lower signal quality, though bear in mind this is only measuring the ‘last hop’ that is to say from the client device to the RE7000, rather than the full network path. In this case, the RE7000 had been moved to the landing.. So distance was increased between the two devices as was the amount of potential barriers
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- Similarly in the bathroom we see a slight drop in signal here too, though not by much, which I attribute to their being a single wooden door between the RE7000 and the client, rather than tiled walls.
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- Finally the bedroom – since the RE7000 had been moved to an adjacent wall to this room signal strength jumped significantly. Ultimately with Wi-Fi position is everything, as is frequency and barriers.. The key thing to take away here is that using the RE7000 in either a bad spot ot a good spot is preferable to using just the EA9500 alone for signal strength.
Firstly, looking at signal strength, there is a huge jump when using the RE7000 over connecting directly to the router in areas where signal strength would be impacted by distance or building materials, which is exactly why a device like this is vital in larger buildings, since the lower the signal strength the lower the overall throughput to your devices.
Linksys RE7000
109.99
Pros
- Great looking bit of kit that just vanishes into the background
- Fast, reliable connectivity
- Fairly feature rich fo a device of this type
Cons
- Slightly more expensive than alternatives on the market