RP-AC66 Review – AN IMPRESSIVE REPEATER THAT DELIVERS CONSISTENT WI-FI THROUGHOUT THE HOME – AT A REMARKABLE PRICE
The RP-AC66 repeater looks a lot like the extender unit from Asus’ PL-AC56 powerline kit, and It’s almost as huge. With radio transmitters, bigger often means better and the RP-AC66 impressed us with its 5GHz coverage, keeping up a consistent service throughout our “test home”. Speeds in the bathroom and study were barely any different from those on the terrace and in the hallway.
That a great achievement: it means you can enjoy a stable connection all around the house, without worrying about switching between networks.
(If you’re partnering the RP-AC66 with an Asus router, you can also use the Roaming Assist feature to automatically shunt connected clients to the transmitter with the stronger signal.) Keeping that degree of consistency over 2.4GHz proved too much to hope for – here, we saw a marked drop-off in connection speeds as we moved upstairs.
In addition to repeater duties, the web interface lets you set up the RP-AC66 as a wireless access point, but there’s only one Ethernet port rather than the three on the PL-AC56. Overall, it’s classy hardware held back by the price: is a lot for a repeater, especially when the much cheaper TP-Link RE450 delivers even better performance.
