Band leader
WI-FI ROUTER ❘ £161 from Amazon www.snipca.com/49274
The Eagle Pro AI R32 is the successor to last year’s Eagle Pro AI R15 (£70, www. snipca.com/49275), and looks almost identical. The main difference is speed, with the new model offering twice the bandwidth of the old one. It supports connections of up to 800Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and a maximum speed of 2.4Gbps at 5GHz. There’s also greater scope for wired network devices because the R32 gains an extra gigabit Ethernet port, so you have four available.
There’s little else to see from the outside, with no USB, no multi-gigabit Ethernet ports and only four LED indicators on the front for power, internet and Wi-Fi.
Getting started is delightfully simple using either D-Link’s mobile app or the router’s built-in web interface. There isn’t much to configure, but the router provides a few useful settings, such as a basic quality-of-service tool that lets you assign different priority levels to individual devices. You can also enforce internet access schedules and time limits for children’s devices.
For added security, a simple switch lets you replace your ISP’s default DNS with more secure DNS from Google or Cloudflare. There’s also a basic firewall that you can configure, and an incoming VPN server. Integration with https://noip. com and https://yndns.com provides easy external access to your home network over VPN, should you need it.
As well as a standard router, the R32 works as a Wi-Fi extender, or you can connect multiple D-Link devices together to form a mesh system.
It performed well in our tests, achieving a download speed of 85.5MB/s with a device in the same room as the router, and 72.9MB/s when we moved downstairs away from the router.
Sadly, the four little antennas were not powerful enough to maintain such good performance throughout our test home. Speeds fell to 25.8MB/s in the kitchen at the back of the house and 21.1MB/s in the upstairs bedroom. With a few more walls in the way, it dropped to an intermittent 5.5MB/s. That might be enough for web browsing but not for streaming TV.
If you want better performance at greater distances, look to the more expensive Asus RT-AXE7800 (£230, www. snipca.com/47142), our current Buy It favourite – see page 33.
SPECIFICATIONS
Dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi 6 • 4x Gigabit Ethernet ports • 4x external antennas • 62x228x159mm (HxWxD) without antenna • Two-year warranty • www.snipca.com/49274
