Linksys EA9500 AC5400 Tri-Band Wi-Fi Router with MU-MIMO router review – CNET

The Good The Linksys EA9500 has a whopping eight Gigabit LAN ports and stellar Wi-Fi performance and supports seamless roaming, which is useful if you need to extend your network The router’s Parental Control feature can block https websites.

The Bad The router is expensive and extremely bulky and its specs are overkill for most homes.

The Bottom Line If you have an extremely fast broadband connection and want an all-powerful home network, the Linksys EA9500 fits the bill. But a different router with more modest specs will satisfy most.

Visit manufacturer site for details.

I often receive questions from CNET readers asking “What’s the best router on the market if money is not an issue?” This is a hard question to answer. For most, money is an issue and how good a router is depends on what your needs are.

However, if you have $400 to burn, the Linksys EA9500 Max-Stream AC5400 Tri-Band MU-MIMO is one of the fastest consumer routers on the planet, rivaling the speed champions Asus RT-AC5300 and Netgear R8500. That is if you have a large enough space to host it. Yes, this new router takes up that much room.

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The Linksys EA9500 is a very large and powerful router that has eight LAN ports.

Josh Miller/CNET

Powerful hardware, stellar performance

The EA9500 is a tri-band, quad-stream router with a combined Wi-Fi bandwidth of up to 5,333Mbps. Specifically, it has two 5GHz bands, each with a top on-paper Wi-Fi speed of 2,166.67Mbps and its 2.4GHz band tops out at 1,000Mbps. (Read more about Wi-Fi standards here.) The reality however is that you won’t experience speeds of this magnitude with the EA9500, at least not today. That’s because the fastest Wi-Fi clients (such as tablets, smartphones or laptops) top out at just 1,300Mbps. But the powerful specs don’t hurt and they also put you in a good position for when clients can reach those ungodly levels of performance.

The router supports Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO), which is a technology designed to efficiently handle Wi-Fi bandwidth in homes with clients of different speed grades. Each client can connect to the router at its highest speed without adversely affecting the speeds of others.

CNET Labs AC5300/5400 5GHz Wi-Fi throughputs

Linksys EA9500

685.2

496

Asus RT-AC5300

643.6

345.2

Netgear R8500

632

329.6

Legend:

Close range
Long range

Note:

Measured in megabits per second. Longer bars mean better performance.

If all that background info bores you, here’s an important take-away: the EA9500 blew away the competition in real-word testing, topping the charts with a sustained Wi-Fi speed of nearly 700Mbps at a close range of 15 feet. Even more impressive, from 100 feet away, with one wall in between the router and the testing client, the router delivered a sustained speed of some 500Mbps. The router’s maximum range was around 150 feet in a residential setting (with walls and other obstacles.) And it passed our stress test of operating for 48 hours with no disconnections.

CNET Labs AC5300/5400 2.4GHz Wi-Fi throughputs.

Linksys EA9500

243.6

120

Asus RT-AC5300

228.6

101.7

Netgear R8500

179.4

66.6

Legend:

Close range
Long range

Note:

Measured in megabits per second. Longer bars mean better performance.

Eight Gigabit LAN ports, ‘Seamless Roaming’

Eight Gigabit LAN ports is a lot (most routers top out at four; the Asus RT-AC88U is currently the only other router with as many.

While four LAN ports are sufficient for most households, it’s always nice to have extra ports in case you want to plug more wired devices ino your network and the truth is wired network connections are always faster and more reliable than Wi-Fi.