HUAWEI AX3 3000 Mbps Wi-Fi Router, Quad-Core Wi-Fi 6 Plus Revolution, OFDMA Multi-User Technology, Up to 128 Devices on Dual Bands, Huawei Share, Huawei HomeSec, 53037744

I ordered *2 of the quad core (NFC) model at £39 a box.I wanted a cheap way to add AX speeds and reliability to my house and they seem to have done the trick (only 3 days in so far). I have one upstairs, one downstairs linked together with a single cat5e (that I run outside the house). One is in router mode connected to the Virgin hub3.0 (in modem mode), it's running DHCP, WiFi, Guest WiFi and doing my Nat's/port forwarding. The 2nd ax3 is in Access Point Mode. It's simply running as a WiFi switch with the same SSID as the main router. One slight issue is, the 2nd AX cannot run "guest WiFi" unless it's in router mode, so my guests are restricted to connecting to only one AX3. This makes sense as the guest WiFi is a special vlan segregated from the main network and if the ax3 running ap mode doesn't have control of the internet connection it's not going to be able to segregate the guest from normal WiFi lan access.... Unless it had decent vlan support, but it doesn't.My win10 laptop instantly recognised the wifi6 environment as better and even sent a little wifi6 notification (pictured) which was nice - connected at 900mbit/s. Not bad at all 😉Haven't yet tested it with my oculus quest 2 but plan to see if it's better than my old AC WiFi.GUI is pretty basic but it does give you ability to configure very quickly I guess.One bonus is the pptp and l2tp VPN functions (client only). No VPN server unfortunately and no openvpn, but the router was £39 so didn't expect the world.Not tested NFC out yet, but one thing I did notice was that it didn't give you an option to push NFC users onto the guest WiFi. I think it just pushes them onto your main Lan WiFi which is a shame (as whole point of easy touch access without passwords should be secure right!?) Bit of a shame but not a deal clincher.I'd love to see an overhaul of the GUI with open/DD WRT functions from Huawei themselves but then I'm into networking....I think the majority of users will prefer this easy wizard style setup.Overall, I'm very impressed with the performance and stability (over last 3 days) and no problems yet. Fingers crossed.Went for quad core NFC model over the £29 dual core model as I expected the quad core to cope with more wifi clients potentially.... For £10 extra it's worth 2 extra CPU cores surely 😎

Having finally given up on the hope the new Virgin Superhub 3.0 would ever provide a realiable WiFi signal (and this is in a 2 bedroom terrace) I needed a reliable solution. I work from home due to the C-19 pandemic and a large part of my day consists of video calls. In the past I've always purchased high end ASUS routers but given I'd just moved house, parting with £200+ wasn't really in the budget. Looking at routers that meet the latest WiFi 6 standard, this stands out as an absolute bargain, and I'm pleased to confirm it is.It's a nice piece of hardware (in a slender white box with big aerials kind of way) and probably the easiest router I've ever setup. Performace is great, night and day difference on WiFi to the Virgin box which had a think about loading the web page for a few minutes before actually doing it. Everything is instant. We have a lot of WiFi devices with smart home plugs, assistants, white goods etc and it handles them all with ease. Can't comment too much on WiFi 6 - only my Samsung S20 supports it, other than it's as fast as every other device attached to it. WiFi 6 is techincally superior to older WiFi standards, so for those future proofing, it makes sense to purchase the latest tech, especially when it's this well priced. 4K streaming, gaming, downloading large files on multiple devices - it's handled everything I've thrown at it with ease.The only negative is it is missing a USB port, but I imagine 95% of people have never inserted a USB device into their router (and would even know why you would do such a thing) so for those wanting to upgrade their ISP supplied and usually useless routers, you probably won't find better value.

Bought this to see how well it could cover my house over my standard Sky hub, it didn't quite do the job of full coverage but was better than Sky, my house is old with lots of brick walls wifi 5ghz struggles to penetrate, I purchased another couple at huawei UK store and set them up as a mesh, this provided great coverage at a reasonable price with some drawbacks which if you understand are acceptable.These devices don't have an extra 5GHz backhaul radio for communication, so for maximum wifi performance ideally you would wire the backhaul, otherwise you have to accept that there will be a bandwidth loss repeating the wifi signal, this is standard behaviour on any repeater/mesh without dedicated backhaul, still on wifi it does this well its easy to mesh and with a couple placed around the house you can maximise coverage and have great wifi everywhere and your machines will seamlessly switch between APs maintaining a good connection with no dropout.I wired a couple of mine to my server switch and file copies to and from my laptop using wifi6 to server is maxing out my 1Gb LAN port, its a shame these don't have a 2.5Gb port like the more expensive mesh systems but again, this is sooo much cheaper, you can't have it all.Firmware is not perfect, Guest Wifi doesn't propagate to the mesh and is only active on the main router, if not for this I would have given 5 stars, I was tempted to give 5 anyway as I've actually now got the best wifi I have had for years but little things like this annoy.