Linksys EA6900 review

The reason to buy an 802.11ac router is because you need a fast and stable Wi-Fi connection. Unfortunately, the EA6900’s performance was rather poor compared to that of most of its AC rivals when we tested it with both our usual laptop’s integrated wireless chipset and the Linksys WUSB6300 wireless adaptor, which is expensive at £40.

At 2.4 GHz, neither the laptop’s adaptor nor the maker’s own could maintain a connection to the router in our 20m test, which was disappointing, even though our test environment suffers from a lot of 2.4GHz interference. Speeds at 1m and 10m were good and, with the laptop’s own adaptor, we saw transfer speeds of 37.3Mbit/s at 1m and 33.6Mbit/s at 10m, while the Linksys adaptor managed an excellent 87Mbit/s at 1m and 83.9Mbit/s at 10m.

We anticipated better performance at 5GHz. Our laptop’s wireless 5GHz 802.11n adaptor failed to maintain a connection with the router at 20m but managed speeds of 61.5Mbit/s at 1m and 57.3Mbit/s at 10m. Unsurprisingly, we saw the best results using the 802.11ac WUSB6300 at 5GHz, although its transfer speeds of 83.9Mbit/s at 1m, 78.8Mbit/s at 10m and just 8.3Mbit/s at 20m were poor compared to other AC routers. Its score in our 20m test using the Asus PCE-AC68 PCI-E adaptor was a decent 54.5Mbit/s, though.

Although the router has lots of features, the high cost of the matching WUSB6300 wireless adaptor and mediocre performance in our wireless transfer speed tests means that we’d rather save some money and use the BT Home Hub 5 instead.