TP-Link Archer AXE75 review

It is the dawning of the age of Wi-Fi 7, but it's taking time to become popular and buying a Wi-Fi 6E router can be a good—and more cost-effective—way to boost your Wi-Fi speeds from Wi-Fi 5 or, heaven forbid, Wi-Fi 4. 

TP-Link has produced a striking-looking router in the AXE75, taking the standard rectangular wedge with antennas up the back so beloved of tech designers and adding into the mix a geometric pattern and a smooth, angled area. It stands out from other routers that follow the same basic shape, but that pattern is sure going to collect dust. Around the back there's nothing unusual, with four gigabit Ethernet ports, a gigabit WAN port, power connector, on/off switch, and further buttons for WPS, reset, and turning the LEDs and Wi-Fi on and off.

The router comes as an already assembled unit, though there are individual plastic sheaths tightly wrapped around each of the six antennas that you'll spend ages picking at with your fingernails to remove. Why they don't slide straight off is a mystery. There's also a peel-off sheet of plastic over a section on top of the unit, that you might not even notice until it bubbles up. Power comes via an external adapter with a cable about 1.5m long, so you'll need to position the router at least that close to a socket.

Setup is very straightforward. Plug it in and switch it on, then use the Wi-Fi network name and password printed on the bottom, or the QR code, to connect the TP-Link Tether app on your phone. Set an admin password, then (in a step that foxed me for a moment because I'm dumb) enter that password, and you're in. You can also do this from a web browser, and once you've got access to the admin page you can separate out the three Wi-Fi bands, which are bundled together by default, and enable the guest network and parental controls.

Wi-Fi 6E is Wi-Fi 6 that extends into the 6GHz band, which can give you additional 160 MHz channels to play with. Wi-Fi 7 would double these to 320 MHz wide, but even so Wi-Fi 6E gives you a lot of extra capacity over previous versions. As higher frequencies have a harder time penetrating the bits of our homes that make them homes—the walls and floors—the 6 GHz channels are better for fast, short-range links, such as a gaming PC in the same room as the router. This, in turn, frees up capacity on the 5 GHz network for your phones and tablets, and on the 2.4 GHz spectrum for IoT and legacy devices. 

OFDMA, or orthogonal frequency-division multiple access—a new Wi-Fi 6 technology—allows these channels to be further split up if a device isn't using them to their fullest, for simultaneous low-data-rate transmission from several users. 

This means a Wi-Fi 6 network is better at handling lots of light-use devices, such as smart lightbulbs and coffee machines, while you keep the 6 GHz network free for those multi-gig Steam downloads and low-ping gaming sessions. Another bit of cleverness, MU-MIMO, which allows multiple nodes and antennas to communicate with each other simultaneously, came in with Wi-Fi 5, but in Wi-Fi 6 and 6E is can be applied in both the down and up link directions, instead of just down as was the case in Wi-Fi 5. This means you'll get a boost in capacity for uploads as well as downloads, which is important for keeping latency down when gaming.

The best thing about getting a Wi-Fi 6E router now rather than a Wi-Fi 7 model is that you'll save a bit of cash, as the slightly older tech doesn't attract the price premium of the new hotness. The TP-Link AXE75 is one of the more reasonably priced Wi-Fi 6E routers on the market, with Netgear's RAXE300 going for over £100 more, Asus' RT-AXE7800 adding £70 to your bill and Acer's Predator Connect W6 needing £40 more in terms of outlay.

These results, carried out in a reasonably modern suburban house without a Faraday cage built into the walls and not a tinfoil hat in sight, are a little odd. The 5 GHz close-by result is faster than the 6 GHz band's speed, and we'd usually expect it to be the other way around. As the two networks share a hypothetical throughput speed they should be allowing data to pass at about the same rate, especially up close. That 5 GHz connection is seriously fast, however, so it's not worth moaning about—it's unusual to see a wireless connection that can actually outstrip a wired one in real-world use.

As fast fibre internet connections continue their rollout, a router like this increasingly makes sense, as internet connections get faster and are shared between more devices, and as games get larger and take longer to download. It can also make a useful hub for a home network if you're running a media server or networked backup solution, and the ability to handle multiple connections at once is almost as important as straight-line speed. 

A Wi-Fi 6E router is starting to look like yesterdays news compared to the very best Wi-Fi 7 models, but networking equipment isn't a sexy purchase, and if you'd rather save your money toward RGB RAM or a step up the graphics card hierarchy, then getting one that supplies enough throughput and the extra features of Wi-Fi 6E is a good way to do it. 

In our testing, the AXE75 provided a particularly fast 5 GHz connection when uncongested and up-close, meaning gamers with a speedy internet connection will be able to download over wireless without suffering too much in the way of slowdown. And the price is low enough that if you're after a speedy gaming router on a budget, this neat little TP-Link Archer will hit the target.