benchrat · 24 days on the bench, two-pack, bought at retail
7.4 out of 10
The R6 is the first mesh kit in two years that I have not wanted to throw out of a
window during setup. It is also the first one whose coverage claim survived being
checked. Those two facts are worth more than the missing 6 GHz band that will make
people skip it.
What we measured
Same room, 5 GHz
861 Mbps median of three, 12 ft, clear line of sight
Two interior walls
640 Mbps median — the run spread was 611 to 668
Satellite backhaul
404 Mbps at 40 ft with one wall, wired backhaul untested
Roaming handoff
Under 300 ms on a walk test, no dropped call in nine attempts
Idle draw, both units
11.4 W combined
Sub-scores
Does the job
8 — the box says “up to 2,200 sq ft” and that is roughly true
for a single-storey layout, which is a rare thing to be able to write.
Build and repair
7 — screws, not clips. The power jack is soldered to the main board,
which is the usual failure point and the reason this is not an 8.
Software and privacy
7 — full local admin, no account required, firmware downloads over TLS
and the checksum is published. The web UI looks like 2009.
Noise, heat, power
8 — fanless, 38 °C top surface under sustained load.
Price honesty
7 — no subscription for any feature we tested, including the parental
scheduling, which is where these kits usually put the paywall.
Living with it
Three weeks in, two things stand out. First, the handoff is genuinely good; I walked
a call from one end of the flat to the other repeatedly and never heard the gap.
Second, the UI has no search, so finding the DHCP reservation page means remembering
that it lives under Advanced, then LAN, then a tab called “Static”.
Correction
The two-wall figure originally published here was 720 Mbps, which was the best
of three runs rather than the median. See the
corrections log.