TP-Link Archer C7 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router
$81.50
$99.99
18% off
Reference Price
Condition: New
Top positive review
959 people found this helpful
Excellent Router that Punches Well Above its Price Point -- Buy It
By Tech Dude on Reviewed in the United States on October 3, 2016
I found this router through a third party website review (the Wire Cutter), that aptly called this, "the Best Wi-Fi Router (for Most People)." I would probably amend that title and say, "the Best Wi-Fi Router (for Virtually Everyone)." Do not let the low price fool you into thinking it's an entry level or low-end model. It only costs around $100 but, from my observations against four other routers that cost considerably more, it performs well beyond its price point.I have purchased a number of routers over the years as the technology and performance improves, and the number of devices my family uses has increased. Over the past few years, I had migrated to the more expensive ($300+) routers in the hopes of greater performance. Right before this, I had an Asus RT-AC5300, a beast of a router that exceeded $400 when I bought it. But what I found was that as the price point goes up, the performance does not, and the reliability goes down. These expensive routers tend to be buggy and drop connections; they simply have too many features and are way too complex, all to provide functionalities that no one uses, or that none of your connected devices support anyway. The ASUS got so bad it was rebooting itself every few hours. The days of the rock-solid Linksys WRT54G seemed long gone... So I returned the ASUS RT-AC5300, gave my WRT1900ACS to a friend, and bought an Archer C7 (v2).After two weeks of testing it, I have four words: it just works -- period. The signal is strong and punches through the lathe-and-plaster walls of my nearly 100 year old house. Its signal is considerably stronger than the WRT1900ACS that I had (which cost almost three times what this one did), and rivaled the signal strength of the $400 ASUS. It doesn't drop connections, doesn't reboot itself, and delivers a strong and steady stream of data to all devices, wired and wireless.Only one word of warning; you need to make sure the Archer C7 that you purchase is NOT a first version. Everyone on the web has reported that TP-LINK badly botched the V1, especially for Macintosh/Apple devices (which is most of my house); most of those should be out of circulation or in landfills by now. The one I bought from Amazon was a V2, and it works perfectly with all of my Apple and non-Apple devices.
Top critical review
36 people found this helpful
Don't waste your time. There are far better options out there. - UPDATED
By Dread on Reviewed in the United States on May 14, 2016
UPDATE: I am keeping the router, and actually like it again. I'm leaving the 1 star review, though. TP-Link customer service was BS, as I explain in the old review below. What caused me to change my mind about the hardware? LEDE Project started building OPENWRT firmware for this device, and I tried it out. It blows the stock TP-Link firmware completely off the battlefield. This is now my primary router and it works fantastically. If you have a chance to pick up the Archer C7 V2, and don't mind fiddling with the firmware, get it. If you don't want to mess with it, I suggest you go with Ubiquiti.I know that reddit suggests buying this router quite often, but don't take that advice.This router has no configuration settings for Quality of Service (QoS). This means that streaming, gaming and voip do not get any sort of priority over downloads or other low prio traffic. This also means that if your ISP suffers from bufferbloat, you are screwed.I have a 100mbps download speed from my cable company, yet wired streaming is interrupted by wired game downloads. This is unbelievably bad.To add to this, TP-Link has now taken a stance against aftermarket firmwares such as DD-WRT or OpenWRT, so even if you wanted to go in yourself and fix these game-breaking issues, you are unable to. I am beyond my return window, so I am actually going to donate this piece of junk to my office for use as a wireless access point only and will buy a router that's got basic features included.EDIT: TP-Link responded to my review and asked for an email discussion. So I contacted them, they asked me to paste my review into the email, which I did.The response was to give me a link on how to use their awful "bandwidth control by IP", as some kind of half-butt work-around for QoS.Option 2 was for me to buy the TP-Link AC2600 router instead, which has updated firmware and actual QoS settings.This is a joke. First time buying anything from TP-Link, and definitely the last time. 1 star review remains.11-8-2016 UPDATE: I decided to replace this router with an ASUS AC68u. Night and day as far as performance and options. I have not had a single problem.Here's where the Archer continues to woe me. I relegated it to a wireless access point by turning off DHCP and NAT, plugging a LAN port wire into the main router and setting the SSID/passwords the same, and putting the wireless broadcasts on differing channels from the main router. This is similar to how I had it set up with my Netgear as the AP and the Archer as the main router.What a piece of junk. I understand android phones don't have roaming built in for access points on the same network. But this Archer AP now actively boots me off for a few minutes, even with all roaming features disabled. I've relegated this pile of trash to being an expensive 4 port dumb switch for my kid's room.I will absolutely not buy another TP-Link product again. This one piece of equipment and stand-off p*ss poor customer service that went with it is enough to keep me away for life.
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