Performance In Benchmarks

Below you have a diagram of how our test apartment is set up. It is a reasonably large apartment and, if you don't have very good router, the wireless coverage can get rather weak in rooms like the kitchen or the medium balcony which are far away from it. You can see that we have placed the router in the living room and the range extender in the hallway. The router that we used is ASUS RT-AC56U. We mounted the range extender on the hallway, to improve the wireless coverage in the rooms that are farther away from the router.

When making our measurements, we compared TP-LINK RE210 with two other range extenders we have tested in the past: ASUS RP-AC52 (another dual-band range extender that's more expensive than the TP-LINK device we are reviewing) and Edimax N300 (an affordable single-band range extender that's almost half the price of the TP-LINK device). In the graphs that we will share the Edimax N300 shows only when making measurements for the 2.4GHz wireless network.

We started by measuring the wireless signal strength in all the rooms where we use our wireless devices. For this task we have used a tool named inSSIDer. Since this is a dual-band repeater, we measured the signal strength for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless networks.

As you can see for yourself, the signal strength offered by TP-LINK RE210 for the 2.4GHz wireless network is relatively similar to that offered by the other range extenders we have tested in the past.

When measuring the signal strength for the 5GHz wireless network, the signal offered by TP-LINK RE210 was generally stronger than that of ASUS RP-AC52.

For the next set of measurements, we used SpeedTest to see how fast the Internet connection is when using the 2.4GHz wireless network.

Unfortunately, the download speeds offered by TP-LINK RE210 were rather slow when compared to other range extenders.

The same was true when measuring the upload speed offered by the TP-LINK RE210 range extender.

However, things have changed dramatically when measuring the Internet connection speed on the 5GHz wireless network. Here, TP-LINK RE210 was the uncontested leader, delivering faster downloads than ASUS RP-AC52.

The same was true when measuring the upload speed on the 5GHz wireless network.

Lastly, we used LAN Speed Test Lite to measure the download and upload speeds when transferring a 350 MB file on the wireless network broadcasted by TP-LINK RE210. Unfortunately, we did not perform this test in the past so we have no data from other range extenders.

Below you have the average download speed across all rooms when using the 2.4GHz wireless network. As you can see, the numbers are similar to those we obtained when making our measurements with SpeedTest.

Below you can see the average upload speed across all rooms when using the 2.4GHz wireless network.

We used LAN Speed Test Lite also on the 5GHz wireless network. Here, the results have improved dramatically and TP-LINK RE210 was again, a very good performer.

The same was true when measuring the upload speed over the 5GHz wireless network.

If there's one conclusion we can draw from our benchmarks is that TP-LINK RE210 is a very good performer when extending 5GHz wireless networks and an average one when extending 2.4GHz wireless networks.

Special Features

The TP-LINK RE210 doesn't bundle any extras like the range extenders from ASUS, for example. However, to us, this wasn't a real downside, as the device did what we expected it to do and it had the features you need from a range extender.

Verdict

The TP-LINK RE210 AC750 Wi-Fi Range Extender is a reasonably priced device that can extend both 2.4GHz wireless networks and 5GHz wireless networks. It's a great choice for those of you that want to extend 5GHz wireless networks, as it offers very good signal strength and transfer speeds, at a reasonable price. Setting up this device is not a difficult process and the user interface for administering it is not difficult to learn. However, it is available only in English. Its only major downside is 2.4GHz wireless networks. TP-LINK RE210 is not a great performer when extending networks using this frequency. If you are interested in extending the coverage of wireless networks that use older standards, then TP-LINK RE210 is not a great choice for you.