Hands on: D-Link Eagle Pro AI R32 review
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This comment first appeared in issue 354 PC Pro.
AI It seems that it’s been everywhere lately, including Home Network: D-Link’s latest “smart router” proudly wears AI credentials on its sleeve. As we will see, this is definitely a case of buzzword hyperreality, but if R32 lacks Smarts, it can make up for the value of this. When we pushed the media, it cost only £73. VAT Amazonmaking it the cheapest Wi-Fi 6 Around the router.
The Eagle Pro AI R32 is the successor to last year’s Eagle Pro AI R15, which is equally cheap and looks almost the same. The main difference between the two is what you can guess from the name: the new model is only twice as fast as the old model in terms of wireless bandwidth. It supports connections of up to 800mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band, while the 5GHz radio has a maximum speed of 2.4Gbits/sec. There is more wired bandwidth as the R32 gets an additional Ethernet socket at the back to make up the full quartet of the Gigabit LAN port.
There’s nothing to see except those sockets: there’s no USB, no multi-party connectors, and there’s only four LEDs on the front to show your power, the status of the Internet and Wi-Fi. But that’s good – do you really need more?
Setting up with D-Link’s Eagle Pro AI is very easy Mobile apps or the router’s built-in web management interface. There isn’t a lot of configurations, but D-Link builds more features than you would expect from such cheap devices. For example, a basic quality of service tool allows you to assign different levels of priority to individual customers, and can also enforce Internet access schedules and time limits for children’s devices.
To increase security, you can replace the default DNS of your ISP with secure DNS Google or Cloudflare, which provides protection from hijacking attacks. There is also a basic configurable firewall, unexpected treatment is incoming VPN servers, and No IP. com and dyndns.com Easily externally access your home network.
If you want to use the R32 as a Wi-Fi extender for an existing network, you can switch it to bridge mode—or use grid mode to connect two or more units together and propagate wireless signals to wider areas. But remember that the amount of mesh traffic back and forth between radios is in the bandwidth available to the device, so you are trading performance into range.
Finally, don’t forget the “AI” capabilities that R32 promises. In practice, this only means router Regularly check its Wi-Fi channel and adjust its beamforming settings to get your customers the best connection. To be sure, these are popular features, but it’s a very shocking over-the-top word AI.
That’s OK; you probably won’t buy a £73 router in a world-class feature suite. The real question is, how does things behave? The answer is very good – close up. I tested R32 by connecting an R32 NAS Drivers Go to one of the Ethernet ports and then as I copy the NAS and a set of 100MB test files from the NAS, I hang a laptop around my house and measure the upload and download speeds.
The initial findings were very positive. I was glad to see the average download speed of 85.5MB/sec in the same room as the router, and when I moved down to the living room I still got a 72.9mb/sec speed.
Unfortunately, the R32’s four small antennas aren’t strong enough to maintain this performance through my home. The speed in the kitchen drops to 25.8mb/sec and the speed in the bedroom drops to 21.1mb/sec; for typical internet tasks, this is still enough bandwidth – a 4K HDR The video streaming takes about 4MB/sec – but it’s still tough.
Not surprisingly, the R32 performed the worst in the bathroom behind the house. Here I can clearly see mine File transfer Hang and recover a few times in my tests, so while the final average download speed of 5.5mb/sec might sound good, it’s blob for web browsing or cloud sync: I’d rather not rely on it for video calls or online gaming.
Does this mean you should avoid R32? It really depends on the router you want. Those who need reliable large area coverage should consider spending £50 here Asus RT-AX59U: And more stable long-term coverage, it will provide you with a wider range of software capabilities. However, if you want to have a basic connection in just a few rooms, the R32 will be perfect for that bill – no more.
