![]() I’m red/green color blind, so the choice of green and orange colors were not good for me. The LED callouts shows the single LED used to communicate status. The RE9000 is a compact little guy and could be mistaken for one of Linksys’ remaining E1200 or E2500 N-class routers were it not for the four external dual-band antennas (not upgradeable). The RE9000’s connection wizard has a built-in site survey to make setup easy. In any event, the RE9000 is like most other of today’s extenders and doesn’t require your router to support WDS. But when I confirmed the no-2.4 GHz-for-backhaul "feature" with Linksys, they didn’t say they would be changing this limitation. I suspect this is a software limitiation and could be changed in a future firmware release. The EX8000 prefers to use its four or two-stream 5 GHz radios for backhaul, but will fall back to using 2.4 GHz if it can’t connect on 5 GHz. The more significant difference between the Linksys and NETGEAR, however, is that the RE9000 does not use the 2.4 GHz radio for backhaul. The simple approach for the RE9000 is, if in doubt, just set your base router’s 5 GHz radio to 36, 40, 44 or 48. In the old days before Wi-Fi classification became the mess it now is, it was much easier to tell how many streams a router used. Since maximum allowed transmit power is now the same for both channel groups, this should have no effect on performance.īut you’ll want to make sure you change the base router 5 GHz channel to allow the RE9000 to take full advantage of its maximum bandwidth if you have a three or four-stream router. However, where the EX8000 uses the 5 GHz U-NII-3 high band (Channels 149-165) for its four-stream backhaul radio, the RE9000 uses the U-NII-1 low band (Channels 36-48). So far, this puts the RE9000 and EX8000 on equal footing.īoth products always prefer to use the highest-bandwidth four-stream 5 GHz radio to connect back to the base router being extended, i.e. Maximum link rates of 400 Mbps (2.4 GHz), 867 Mbps (5 GHz) and 1733 Mbps (5 GHz) add exactly up to the 3000 Linksys uses as the RE9000’s class rating. The RE9000 combines a two-stream dual-band 802.11ac AC1300 class radio with a third, four-stream 5 GHz radio. I’ll be comparing the two throughout the review. Linksys has decided to use price as its primary means of knocking the EX8000 down a peg or two in sales, given its current $170 price vs. Linksys’ RE9000 MU-MIMO Range Extender follows NETGEAR’s EX8000 Nighthawk X6S Tri-Band WiFi Range Extender as the second "tri-band"/three-radio Wi-Fi extender to hit the streets. ![]()
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