Reviewing the TP-Link Archer C6 (v2): A good quality AC1200 wireless router

TP-Link has launched another affordable wireless router: TP-Link Archer C6. It is the second hardware revision of this model, with support for the 802.11ac Wave 2 WiFi networking standard, and 2x2 MU-MIMO transfers. It also has surprisingly good hardware inside, which should be able to offer a solid wireless networking experience, at a low price. We are the first team in the world to test the new TP-Link Archer C6 v2. If you want to know what it has to offer, and whether it is worth buying, read this review:

TP-Link Archer C6 AC1200: Who is it good for?

This wireless router is a suitable choice for:

• People with small or medium-sized apartments
• Users who desire fast WiFi with support for modern wireless networking standards
• People with a low budget

Pros and cons

Here are the things we like about TP-Link Archer C6 v2:

• Very affordable price
• It is a fast router for its price
• It packs most of the basics people need
• The Help documentation is easily accessible
• It can be administered from a mobile app on your smartphone (but not from anywhere on the internet)
• It can be mounted on walls

There are a few downsides to consider as well:

• The firmware is available only in English, while the mobile app has good multi-lingual support
• It does not automatically check for new firmware versions like other TP-Link routers do
• It does not have a USB port

Verdict

The market for AC1200 wireless routers is very crowded. All the manufacturers offer routers that promise to deliver excellent performance at a low price. However, only a few manufacturers can keep this promise and TP-Link is one of them. If you are looking for a low-price router, that is dual-band, with support for the latest wireless standards, and that offers a user experience above the average of other AC1200 wireless routers, you should consider buying the new TP-Link Archer C6 v2.

Unboxing the TP-Link Archer C6 AC1200 wireless router

TP-Link Archer C6 v2 comes in a cyan box with a big picture of the wireless router on the top. On the sides, you have a detailed description of the features and specifications of this router. The unboxing experience is summarized in the video below: Inside the packaging, you find the following: the router, the power adapter, an Ethernet cable, the Quick Setup guide, the warranty, the license for the firmware used by TP-Link, and other legal information.

Hardware specifications and design

TP-Link Archer C6 is a shiny wireless router, made of plastic, with a few LED lights on the top for things like Power, the two wireless bands broadcast by the router (2.4 and 5 GHz), the Ethernet ports, the status of the connection to the internet, and for WPS. Also, it has four external antennas which are non-detachable. TP-Link Archer C6 has a single-core Qualcomm Atheros QCA9563 processor running at 775 MHz, 128 MB of RAM (quite a lot for an affordable wireless router), and 8 MB of storage space for the firmware. This model offers support for the 802.11ac Wave 2 standard, and 2x2 MU-MIMO transfers. It can also work using the older 802.11n/b/g wireless standards. The total theoretical maximum bandwidth is 1167 Mbps, split as follows: 300 Mbps for the 2.4 GHz band, and 867 Mbps for the 5 GHz band. On the back side of TP-Link Archer C6, you can find five Gigabit Ethernet ports, one of which is used for the connection to the internet. You also have the Power jack and the Power button, the Reset jack, and the WPS button. Unfortunately, there is no USB port on this model. On the bottom of TP-Link Archer C6 v2, you have two holes for mounting the router on walls, a feature that is going to be appreciated by some users. The router is not large: it is 9.1 × 5.7 × 1.4 inches or 230 x 144 x 35 mm in width, depth, and height. It is also rather light, weighing 27 ounces or 767 grams. If you would like to read all the official specifications of this product, go to this page: TP-Link Archer C6 Specifications.

Setting up and using the TP-Link Archer C6 AC1200 wireless router

The setup of the TP-Link Archer C6 is similar to that of many other wireless routers. The quick setup wizard first asks you to create a password for your router. It is a welcome security precaution, and you should not use a password that is easy to guess. It would have been even better if TP-Link allowed us to personalize the username used for administering the router. Then, the quick setup wizard asks you to choose the type of your internet connection, and provide the necessary connection details. It was surprising to see that it does not auto-detect the internet's connection type like other TP-Link routers do. During the next step, you set the name and the password for the WiFi frequencies that are broadcast by the router. At the end of the quick setup wizard, you are shown a summary of your initial settings, and you can test whether the internet connection is working or not. After you are done with the initial setup, you can load the administration user interface. As you can see below, it looks good, and it uses calming colors. The settings are split into two tabs:

• Basic - it displays a network map, basic internet and wireless settings, the parental controls, and the guest network settings.
• Advanced - this is the place to go when you want complete control and personalization over your wireless router.

The basic settings are easy to set, even for beginners, and we recommend that you delve into the Advanced tab. It helps you improve the way Archer C6 works, and get the best user experience and performance. One negative aspect that we noticed is that the initial firmware has no multilingual support. Everything is available only in English. Previous AC1200 wireless routers from the same company offered the firmware in seven languages or more. We hope that future firmware for Archer C6 improves this situation. A positive is the Help documentation. It is easy to access and offers detailed explanations about all the settings you see on the current screen. Another downside that we noticed is that the initial firmware for Archer C6 does not automatically check for new firmware versions, and as a result, the user receives no notifications on this subject. Unfortunately, all you can do is manually check for firmware updates, and perform them yourself. This is not a great approach, considering how few users regularly perform firmware updates for their devices. The router has a flashy surface that is a magnet for dust and fingerprints. If you place the router somewhere visible, you should dust it from time to time. The LEDs on the top are relatively discreet and do not annoy users. Also, they can be turned off from the firmware. After we were done setting up the TP-Link Archer C6 v2 router, we connected several devices to the network: two desktop PCs, two laptops, one tablet, several smartphones, an Xbox One console, several smart plugs, one smart bulb, and a wireless printer. They all connected with ease, and we had no problems in streaming media over the network, or in sharing files and folders. When transferring data through the network, we also looked at the variability of network transfers. Below you can see how a network transfer was performed when we used the 5 GHz wireless network, on a laptop, in a room that was separated from the router by just one wall. We had both a fast average speed and reasonable variability, without any negative drops. When we moved to a room separated by two walls from the wireless router, the average speed dropped, and the variability increased, but the speed never fell to 0, as sometimes happens with lower quality routers. Similar trends were noticed when transferring data on the 2.4 GHz wireless band too. The user experience offered by TP-Link Archer C6 v2 is generally good. Users get most of the basics they need, and its performance is reliable for most apartments and home networks. However, there are a few downsides too, like the lack of multilingual firmware, the lack of automated checks for new firmware versions, and the setup wizard that is a bit less smart than on other wireless routers of the same company. If you want to see the details about the wireless performance of this router, go to the next page of this review, for detailed measurements and comparisons.

Wireless network performance

First, let's look at the apartment that was used in our testing and how it is set up. You can see that the router is placed in the living room. With most wireless routers, the signal strength is not that high in places like the Kitchen and the Medium balcony. Our testing was done using a fast 1 Gigabit Internet connection that is capable of uploads on the internet of up to 500 Mbps. We used an HP Spectre 13 laptop for all our measurements and several software tools. To get a better idea of the performance offered by TP-Link Archer C6 v2, we compared it with its brother TP-Link Archer C5 v4, as well as one of its main competitors: Tenda AC10. We started by evaluating the 2.4 GHz wireless network and measured the signal strength offered in each room, using a tool named NetSpot Pro. TP-Link Archer C6 v2 was slightly better than TP-Link Archer C5 v4, and slightly behind Tenda AC10. Then, we used SpeedTest to see how fast the internet connection is when using the 2.4 GHz wireless frequency. TP-Link Archer C6 delivered fast downloads without being the fastest router in this test. When it comes to the upload speed, TP-Link Archer C6 was the fastest wireless router in our comparison. For the next measurements, we used the PassMark Performance test to transfer data between two computers connected to the network, using the 2.4 GHz wireless frequency. This time, TP-Link Archer C6 was the speed king. When looking at the upload speed, TP-Link Archer C6 was outperformed by Tenda AC10. When using the 2.4 GHz wireless frequency, TP-Link Archer C6 delivers reliable performance, in line with that of other AC1200 wireless routers. Next, we analyzed the performance offered by the 5GHz wireless network. First, we looked at the evolution of the signal strength, from room to room. TP-Link Archer C6 had an uneven signal strength with more variability than that of other AC1200 wireless routers. We then ran SpeedTest to see how fast the internet connection is on the 5GHz band. To see the maximum potential of TP-Link Archer C6, we used the world's only PCI-E network card with support for 4x4 MU-MIMO. When we used this network card, we obtained a maximum speed of 533.61 Mbps for the download and 470.85 Mbps for the upload. These are excellent speeds for an affordable wireless router. For more down-to-earth results, we also measured the download speed with SpeedTest, in every room of our test apartment, using our HP Spectre 13 test laptop. TP-Link Archer C6 v2 delivered fast downloads, but its brother TP-Link Archer C5 v4 outperformed it. The same was true when looking at the upload speed offered by TP-Link Archer C6 on the 5 GHz wireless network. For the last measurements on the 5GHz wireless network, we used the PassMark Performance test to transfer data between two computers connected to the network. Again, TP-Link Archer C6 v2 delivered fast downloads, without being the fastest in our comparison. The upload speed measurements revealed a similar story. When using the 5 GHz wireless frequency, TP-Link Archer C6 delivers reliable performance, without being the fastest AC1200 router.

Wired network performance

To test the quality of the wired Ethernet connection, we used a desktop PC, equipped with an Intel Core i5 4460 processor, running at 3.20GHz, 16GB of RAM and a very fast Samsung 850 Pro 512GB SSD, and a Lenovo IdeaCentre 610s mini PC. We measured the speed of the internet connection when using a 1 Gbps Ethernet cable, using SpeedTest. TP-Link Archer C6 v2 delivered fast downloads, but TP-Link Archer C5 v4 outperformed it. Then, we ran a network transfer between the two computers, using the PassMark Performance test. TP-Link Archer C6 v2 was outperformed again by TP-Link Archer C5 v4. TP-Link Archer C6 delivers real 1 Gbps Ethernet connections, as promised in its specifications.

Extra features

The most interesting additional feature offered by TP-Link Archer C6 v2 is the ability to remote control it using the TP-Link Tether app for iOS and Android. Unlike the firmware on the router, the mobile app is available in many languages. With it, you can configure all the essential features of your router: the wireless network, the internet connection, parental controls, network diagnostics, the guest network, the LEDs, or the operation mode. The TP-Link Tether app is useful even though it has one downside: you can use it to remote control the TP-Link Archer C6 v2 only locally when your smartphone is connected to the same network. You cannot use this app to remote control the router from anywhere on the internet. This feature is offered by TP-Link only for more expensive wireless routers. Other features that you can find on the TP-Link Archer C6 v2 are the following:

• Parental Controls - allows you to control the internet access to devices on your network as well as block access to websites based on keywords. It is a rather basic parental controls feature which has limited usefulness and needs manual maintenance.
• Guest network - you can enable up to two additional WiFi networks, one for each band, and separate guests from your local network, which is excellent.
• QoS - a basic Quality of Service feature that helps you control how the total bandwidth is split between devices.
• Dynamic DNS - allows you to assign a fixed host and domain name to a dynamic IP address. It can work with the No-IP and DynDNS service providers.
• VPN server - you can set the router to work as a VPN server using OpenVPN and PPTP VPN protocols. The router also allows VPN pass-through for clients that are connecting to external VPN services.
• System Tools - a collection of logs, statistics, and diagnostic tools that allow you to troubleshoot problems.

TP-Link covers all the basics people need on the Archer C6 v2 wireless router. The only important feature we would have liked to have is the possibility to remote control the router from anywhere on the internet.

What is your opinion about TP-Link Archer C6 AC1200 wireless router?

Now you know our opinion about the TP-Link Archer C6 v2 AC1200 wireless router and how it performed in our testing. Before closing this review, tell us your opinion about this device. Is it worth buying? If you have it already, what is your experience so far? Comment below and let's discuss.