Customer Ratings & Reviews

I have been eyeing this router since it was $500 to $350 to finally deciding to buy it at $300, and still too overpriced. Service is AT&T fiver at 1g up 1g down. Setup took over an hour since it kept telling me numerous times to restart and wouldn’t connect to my Linksys account, setup as IP passthrough from the AT&T modem settings. Xbox photo is hardwired and getting 500 up. Wifi SpeedTest on iPhone in front of router tops out at 450 down and 400 up on 5ghz. In the Linksys app SpeedTest shows 945 down and only 150 up! It does do a good job at range but speeds overall are just meh. Will be going back to the att wifi 6 modem/router combo they make you get unfortunately, better speeds overall.

I've been using the Linksys MR7500 Hydra Pro 6E Tri Band Router for the last 10+ days. The MR7500 is one of the newest 6E routers to hit the market this year. The Hydra is also a mesh router that can work in concert with some other Linksys mesh offerings. Before the Hydra I had a mixed setup of Linksys Velop dual band and tri band routers. The dual band system is Model WHW0103, and Velop Tri-Band system Model. I pretty familiar with several of the Linksys mesh offerings. I decided to see what their more traditional router setup had to offer. So far, I have been happy with the performance of 6E Hydra router – with some caveats. For reference my house is 1700 sqft split between 2 stories, and an attached garage. WiFi 6E: What is it? So I have to admit that the switch to a WiFi # has thrown me off – I was very used to 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax convention. So now an N router is WiFi 4, AC is WiFi 5, and AX is WiFi 6. With that out of the way what is the difference between WiFi 6 and 6E? 6E uses the same congestion mitigating tools as WiFi 6 (MU MIMO,1024 QAM,OFDMA, etc), operates the same way on 2.4 an 5GHz bands, and is fully backwards compatible. What 6E does that 6 can’t is the expansion into the 6GHz spectrum. In mid-2020 the 6GHz spectrum was opened up for use by WiFi devices. The spectrum range has lower traffic density, wider channels, and a drastically higher throughput. However, you have to have a 6E compatible device to tap into this range. This is the biggest hurdle because of the lack of 6E devices currently available. At this time only the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra and the Samsung NED QLED 8K TV have 6E radios. There are some PCIe WiFi cards for desktop computers available, but not really anything else at this time. I currently only have 1 WiFi 6 device – an ASUS laptop. The MR7500 Hydra Pro 6E Tri-Band Router This is an AXE6600 router (1 band of 4800Mbps @ 6Ghz, 1 band of 1200Mbps @ 5Ghz, 1 band of 600 Mbps @ 2.4Ghz) with simultaneous tri-band radios and MU-MIMO. MU-MIMO allows multiple WiFi users to communicate with the router simultaneously without taking the performance hit. There are 4 fixed antennas with 6 amplifiers (2 per band I’d assume), as well as 4 gigabit LAN ports, and 1 WAN port. There is also a USB 3.0 port to be used for a networked printer or a storage solution. A single ethernet cable (cat 5e) is included. The router comes with an upgraded processor (quad core 1.8MHz) over the Tri-Band Velop node (quad core 716MHz), and has 512MB of RAM/512MB of flash memory. Before I started anything I took my current Linksys Velop Mesh offline. Setup for the Hydra was a breeze. This is the 4th Linksys router I have setup (2 Velop systems, and a Max Stream), and it was probably the easiest one yet. I already had the app installed on my phone, so I logged in and moved to add a new router to my account. Following through the app took about 2 min total before I was connected to the internet. I copied my settings over from my existing mesh – kept the SSID/password, QoS ranking, and MAC filtering I had already setup. Like I said it was a breeze, and the app really looks like it has been improved upon in the last year. Performance I wanted to test the performance of the Hydra like I have tested my previous Linksys Velop and Max Stream systems. I booted up LAN Speed test from Totusoft and performed some dummy file transfers (300MB packet size) between my wired/WiFi 5 tower computer and my WiFi 6 laptop. Both computers have NVME SSD drives. The PC's were connected wirelessly to the router, each at 15 ft. I achieved 66 Mbps Up and 101 down. This was decently lower than even my Velop dual band system using a computer with a HDD in the mix (101 Up/314 down). I then switched my PC to wired and ran the test again. This time I achieved 193Mbps up and 390 Mbps down. What this tells me is the speed difference that occurs when WiFi 5 is brought into the mix. I decided to do a fully wired test which led me to achieve 383 up/812 down. When I ran the fully wired test on the Velop system I achieved 124 up/423 down. So the wired transfer speeds doubled on the down and tripled the up, which is pretty impressive. I should note that the transfer speeds on WiFi 6 are lower than what I achieved on a fully WiFi 5 setup 2.5 years ago. Something doesn’t seem right here. It seems like the focus of this router really isn’t on WiFi 5 or even 6, and without a 6E device I can’t even tap into the really high speeds that I could be seeing. With a device like this I also wondered what the range would be. I had used another Linksys router (MR8300 Max Stream) with external antenna and it had better coverage in my house than my Velop node. I have a couple of places in my house where a single access point (i.e. a single Velop node) struggles – my garage and my bedroom. The Max Stream didn’t have much issue addressing my bedroom, and did fairly well in my garage. I expected the Hydra to perform similarly with its 4 external antenna. I was a bit surprised when I encounter the same range issues as the single node Velop, and in my bedroom it was actually a bit worse. Streaming Netflix to a Roku Express (1080p) took forever for the content to start and in some cases buffer often. This was at the level of my old DLink N router that I replaced 3 years ago. It’s just a shame that the WiFi 5 devices are given such little bandwidth and consideration. My house isn’t even that big – 1700 sqft split level. I didn’t have a chance to test the USB port. My network NAS has gone offline and is in need of replacement. Reliability Since I have been working from home I took the chance to place several UPS backups on my equipment – one of which was my router/modem. I needed to avoid any service interruptions from power blips, so now I rely solely on the reliability of the Hydra. In the 10 days I have ran the Hydra I have had perfect uptime – no dips or disconnects. I did simulate some shutdowns/power blips by unplugging it and plugging it back in – service was restored in about a minute (this my take longer if your modem is slower to recover). Compatibility with Velop The Hydra contains the same AI Mesh technology as the Velop system I took offline to try the Hydra out. I deleted 2 nodes from my old network and repurposed them in the new mesh. The Hydra sat as the primary node with 2 dual band AC1300 (WiFi 5) routers connected to it. I connected them as wireless nodes without any issue. Setup time when building out this mesh was quicker than I expected – maybe a few minutes faster overall compared to setting up the old network. After testing this out for a bit I took the nodes down as fully wireless mesh points, and connected them to my wired network. In this mode they became wireless backhauls pushing out faster speeds further out. This is how I will be leaving my mesh system. It has the benefits of better LAN performance, “future-proofing” the WiFi, and I can remove a gigabit switch. Interface This isn’t my first time using the Linksys app. I have said in the past that I the interface is fairly slick albeit simple. The interface does not look like router config pages of old, and is made for people that aren’t networking pros. You can still access the router GUI through a webpage if you want to dig into the settings a little further. Enter 192.168.1.1 into your browser URL (I still have to access from Microsoft Edge instead of Firefox). From here it’s a little easier to navigate more advanced features of the router (port forwarding, DHCP reservation, etc). For initial login the password is located on the serial label on the underside of the router. I didn’t particularly care for the web browser layout though. Locations for port forwarding and the MAC/DHCP lists are kind of buried under ambiguous main tabs. The most frustrating thing to find is controlling the different radio bands. The default mode for the router is 1 SSID for all the bands. If you want separate SSID’s for the 2.4, 5, or 6 you will have to configure that in the GUI or the app. However, if you need to turn off specific bands then you have to go through the GUI. This can come into play when setting up IoT devices that need to connect to the 2.4 band only. Some devices won’t initially connect unless the SSID only contains a 2.4MHz signal. The only way to make this happen to find a little link called “CA” in the GUI located at the bottom of the page (along with the Terms of Service and the license agreement). Click this link and it will bring you to a page that lets you turn off the 5 and 6MHz bands. Once your device is connected you can re-enable the bands without any issue. Overall, I have mixed feelings with the performance of the Hydra. Lan speeds were blistering compared to my Velop system which matters the most to me since my biggest internet consumption comes from wired devices (tower, work PC, Xbox one, and Series X). I only have a handful of devices that rely on the WiFi to be as fast as possible – my bedroom Roku and my phone. Since I am pairing the Hydra with my dual band Velop nodes, I will eliminate these shortcomings, and maintain the LAN speed upgrade. However, it is a little concerning that you would need to add additional mesh nodes to service your WiFi 5 devices – especially at this price point. This device is meant to be forward looking as more and more devices will get WiFi 6E rollouts, but that bucks the reality that most devices still utilize WiFi 5, and will for the foreseeable future. All I can say is you need to know what you are buying this device for - faster LAN and future proofing for 6E.

If you're an average person who plugs their router in and doesn't want to change many settings this is perfect for you. I had this router for nearly 2 years hoping they would update the firmware AND add new settings. There were 0 updates the entire time I owned the router. It has only the most basic of settings. It doesn't allow you to save your configuration. I use the guest network for my IoT devices like smart bulbs, alexa, wyze cams/plug because of the multiple security issues with almost all IoT devices, however after about a year of owning the router the guest network started allowing data transmission between my guest network and main network and with no option to congifure VLANs in this router I wasn't able to address this security flaw. I was under the impression this would be a great router because Linksys is owned by Cisco but I was wrong. They sold the brand to Belkin some time ago which explains why the software features are so limited. Another feature that would be nice is Link Aggregation. The WAN port on this is 2.5Gb but all the LAN ports are 1Gb meaning if you have Internet faster that 1Gb there's no way to take advantage of this with wired devices. Had they enabled Link Aggregation I could at least use two of the 1Gb LAN ports to double my throughput to my network switch to 2Gb. There's no settings for DDNS meaning running a server with a dynamic IP from my ISP is painful the 1-2 times a year my IP changes. There are no settings for implementing a network wide VPN. The DHCP client list has an odd naming scheme for my connected devices. The hardware is decent except for the broadcomm chipset which means there won't be any possibility for custom firmwares anytime soon if ever. There are tons of other settings I wish this 6E router had but I can't think of them off the top of my head. As I said in the begging this is great if you're one of those people who just plugs their router in and expects it to work but if you're like me who expects basic features like saving configs to your PC this thing is horrible.

I could get full 1G on my 6E Wi-Fi card using this router on 1G Comcast internet connection. Wi-Fi 6 signal is weak on this router don't know whether it is faulty router or not as I don't have another model to test.

It's alright. Was expecting much faster wifi speed with my 2gig fiber. Getting 4-500mbps. Coverage is a little better.

It was okay. Bought for 6E capability. Regular 6 capabilities were meh. Returned.

This router was ok. Not what I expected. It wasn't playing nice with my switch. Once connected to the switch it will slow down in transmission speeds. I used another router and switch and it worked fine. LAcking port control for speed in the interface. It is very limited.

Not as powerful as hoped, does not cover 2000 sq ft on 2 level brick home well. Kicked down to 2.4ghz channel, unless close to router. Went with Atlas mesh instead, way better coverage AND bandwidth. Just my experience....

doesn't perform like I had hoped. Range was not good and even with the additional nodes didn't help.

This is average at best. We purchased this to increase our reception for our wireless products. We are still having issues.

took a long time to setup. Once done seems to work fine.

Did not stay connected ever. I spent a year trying to troubleshoot issues with my internet on my computer and as soon as I took this router away, my internet stopped dropping.