Edimax AC1200 Wireless Concurrent Dual-Band Router

By Samara Lynn

Edimax enters the 802.11ac wireless networking space with the AC1200 Wireless Concurrent Dual-Band Router.? This nifty-looking router (it resembles an alarm clock from the '80s) produced some of the fastest throughput we've ever tested in a consumer router. This router blazes in 11ac mode when paired with the Edimax AC1200 Wireless Dual-Band Adapter. Unfortunately, its amazing throughput is offset by clumsy management software. If Edimax could get the software up to par with the hardware, this would be an almost perfect piece of networking equipment for high-throughput tasks, one that could really leverage the power of 802.11ac in such demanding areas as high-definition video.

Specs and Design
The Edimax router is currently not on the market, but is slated to release in April. I did get?an early look, though.

The housing is a white plastic material with a rounded design. There are two sturdy external antennas fastened to the top?2x3dBi dual-band external antennas. The router is an AC1200, which is not a random designation, as you might suspect. How do they arrive at that figure? Well, it's a 2x3 router capable of up to a theoretical 300 Mbps at 2.4 GHz and 867 Mbps at 5 GHz; 867 plus 300 equals 1167, round that up and you have 1200.

On the front panel are LEDs for power, WAN, each radio, and each LAN port.? On the rear are four color-coded Gigabit LAN ports, a Gigabit WAN port, reset button, and a toggle switch to turn the wireless radios off and on.

This fairly lightweight router (it weighs 0.67 pounds) comes with mounting brackets so you can easily wall-mount the device. The router overall is an attractive piece of home networking equipment and the hard, white case make it resistant to fingerprint smudges that can make routers made from softer material look beaten up in a short time.

Setup
In the box is a quick installation guide and a disc that includes the user manual and the install guide in multiple languages. With the AC1200, Edimax adopts the current setup trend in the consumer routers space, which is to ship the wireless network pre-configured. This means users can set the router up using a wireless device and not need a hard wired connected between a computer and the router.

Once it's powered up you can connect to the router's "edimax.setup" SSID. Opening up a browser after connecting takes you to the Web-based setup page. Setup walks you through ensuring you have the WAN connected properly and then detects the internet connection. This detection took under five seconds on my network.? You then give each band a name and a password of eight characters this completes the configuration. The software also gives the option to back up the configuration.?

The initial setup is very basic and good for novice users, but power users may want to change the level of encryption. Security is set as WPA2 (AES) by default, although there's no enterprise class-security so this is a consumer-level router. Those users may want to tweak other settings and can do so via the web-based management interface.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/ienoENXtvQ8/0,2817,2417357,00.asp

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