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The vast majority of our reviews come from verified purchases. Reviews from customers may include My Best Buy members, employees, and Tech Insider Network members (as tagged). Select reviewers may receive discounted products, promotional considerations or entries into drawings for honest, helpful reviews.

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Works Great! Easy to Set Up.

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser

  Our Orbi died after five years. I bought this to cover a 3,400 s.f. two-story house. It was easy to set up, and the phone app gave clear instructions throughout the process. We are enjoying fast WiFi throughout the house. Although we use the LAN for our TVs, we use WiFi for several laptops or tablets, security cameras, Smart devices, and a couple of Kindle readers. After experimenting to find the optimal locations for the two satellites, the only problem I had was reaching the control panel for the solar energy system in the garage. That was probably due to large metal beams in between the mesh router and the control panel. It was easy to add a fourth mesh router at a location that was line of sight to both the primary router and the solar control panel.

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  DennyCraneEsq Posted 3 months ago

• Rated 5 out of 5 stars

  Exceptional good router with 10GB Ethernet

  • Incentivized
  • Verified Purchaser
  • Owned for 3 weeks

  Easy to setup, keep away from floors for best signal strength like all other WiFi routers, and avoid sending signals going through brick walls. 14000gbit/s is fairly theoretical, I get 6-8gbit/s TCP und 9 on UCP with my Mac Studio connected to another unit on 10gbit/s Ethernet. No fan and noiseless operation is great. I measured power consumption of about 10W per unit which is also acceptable. The bandwidth drops significantly when QoS is enabled, so I’ll leave it off.

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  sdietric Posted 3 months ago

• Rated 4 out of 5 stars

  Yes, mesh really DOES make a noticeable difference

  • Tech Insider Network Member
  • Top 25 Contributor

  This BE68 (BE14000) system is now the third TP-Link mesh router package we have in our house, and although it is arguably the least powerful of the three models we own (the others are BE95s and BE16000s), the improvement in network coverage and throughput was more than just a little noticeable. Whether you are expanding an existing Deco mesh network or you’re going to use this set by its lonesome, the BE68 is an uber-simple way to “paint your home with WiFi.” When you open the box, you are greeted with a very limited amount of hardware to contend with; just three cylindrical Deco units, three power supplies, a short Ethernet cable to run between your existing modem and the main Deco unit, and a reset tool (think paperclip) used to press the small do-over button on the bottom of one of the mesh nodes when it starts misbehaving. The units themselves are fairly nondescript with a stylized “7” across the front and a single VERY low-mounted (though thankfully defeatable) LED status indicator. From there, you’ll need to haul out your phone and download the TP-Link app to get your network up and running. Calling the setup process “simple” would be an understatement as the app literally holds your hand through initial setup of the main network node and all attached mesh nodes with easy-to-understand and informative graphics that outline the VERY simple setup procedures. The LED status indicator at the bottom is equally simplistic with just a few different colors to keep track of (orange: turning on/resetting; blue: ready to connect/connecting; green: connected/firmware updating; red: disconnected from main unit/hardware issue). Once the network is established, you also have an intuitive and easy-to-manage network map that indicates in real time which nodes are on and offline, which clients are connected to which nodes, and which frequency bands on those nodes each client is using. From those screens, you can easily change the name of the clients for better management and visibility of who/what is on your network, as well as adjust that device’s connection priority, device isolation, turn on/off mesh roaming, and even block the device—all in a very simple, nearly idiot-proof interface. Unfortunately, that interface simplicity may also translate into frustration for anyone who may be a bit more IT/network-savvy, especially if they are accustomed to OCD-levels of granular network control and detailed network settings. For example, there are some common router features that are locked behind a paywall such as additional security options, parental controls, and whole home VPN. The user-friendly app also takes typical WiFi broadcast controls out of the user’s hands. For example, network optimization routines will only tell you if there are better channels available and which ones were automatically chosen; you cannot assign specific channels to specific frequency bands yourself (or if you can, I certainly haven’t found a way to do so). QoS (quality of service) is also handled in a more rudimentary fashion as you can only set network priority by device (dad’s phone, kid’s PC, bedroom ROKU, etc.), but not by protocol so that, for example, gaming traffic can be prioritized over media streaming. Such issues can be remedied by applying a third-party firmware like DD-WRT, but I suspect most users who are attracted to the simplicity of the Deco mesh setup and maintenance probably won’t go down that rabbit hole on their own. However, there are some reasons one might want to go spelunking into the “More” section of the Deco app. For one, default setup automatically uses the same SSID for the 2.4GHz and 5GHz channels; the idea being that you use the router’s onboard computing power; AI-flavored mesh routing, client, and traffic management; and all that awesome forward-looking WiFi-7 stuff under the hood to smartly and dynamically ensure that each client is registered on the fastest band achieving the best performance. The trouble I experienced was that many of my 5GHz clients were still connecting to the slower 2.4GHz band, probably because it is typically carried on a stronger signal, especially the farther you get away from the router. So, if you’re used to having your network SSIDs named differently so you can tell which network you’re using (like HomeNetwork-2.4G, HomeNetwork-5G, etc.), and ensure that your 5GHz clients are indeed operating on the 5GHz network, you’ll need to head into the Deco app’s WiFi settings to break out the SSIDs between those two frequency bands. On the other end of the spectrum, the default WiFi configuration also doesn’t give you a dedicated (and isolated) 2.4GHz network—at least not right away. This also created problems for some of my older devices because they weren’t connecting reliably to the consolidated SSID that covered both bands. If you need a separate 2.4GHz network, especially to support legacy wireless devices, you don’t make adjustments in the “WiFi settings” menu as you might expect. Instead, you must create a separate IoT (Internet of Things) network and specify it to operate only on the 2.4GHz band. It’s not incredibly difficult to do, but it’s also not entirely intuitive, especially if you’re used to having direct control over wireless settings on each band as is common in other routers’ more detailed admin pages. In all fairness, these are the same issues I experienced when using the more expensive BE16000 and BE95 mesh routers, so they really have more to do with TP-Link's network engineering solutions than any sort of limitations of the hardware itself. But where these new Deco units DO flex their muscle over their larger BE16000 counterparts is that they have a dedicated 10Gbps wired port vs. only 2.5GHz ports on the BE16000. This means that if you intend to use the BE14000 as your primary mesh solution, you can connect to your ISP at speeds up to 10Gbps and the Deco’s wireless capabilities can theoretically match that throughput to compatible wireless clients. With the BE16000, even with higher speed 6GHz connections between nodes, I could still only surf at a maximum of 2.5Gbps because that’s all the wired connection to the modem could handle. In practice, the benefits of a mesh configuration were instantly apparent. I have 1Gbps service from my ISP and was able to get close to that same speed even when 1 or 2 rooms away. But things really started to drop off in an upstairs bedroom that did not have line of sight to one of my other Deco nodes. Just by adding a Deco unit to that bedroom, my daughter’s Internet download speeds went from 736Mbps to 999Mbps (about the top speed I’m paying for), and upload speeds practically doubled from 452Mbps to 700Mbps. Same-floor performance did not improve as noticeably, though upload speeds did tend to improve by 100-200Mbps wherever I added a Deco node to the mesh network. Obviously, your in-home performance will vary depending on the size and complexity of the architecture in your house, but the increases we noted 2-3 rooms away were substantial enough to warrant the extra hardware...at least for a family as connected as ours and with nearly 120 smart devices (and counting) on our network. While maybe not for everyone, the BE14000 really is a great way to jump into the WiFi-7-ready world for a high-speed and future-proofed home network without having to invest a lot of time and effort to manage that same network. The decor-friendly form factor is also a refreshing departure from the black, blinky, spidery mess antennas that came with routers of days past—definitely recommended!

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  WyldeBlue Posted 9 months ago