SURFboard mAX Pro W133 Wi-Fi 6 IEEE 802.11ax Ethernet, Cable, DSL Wireless Router

[This review was collected as part of a promotion.] Our old router was several years old and was not equipped to handle all of the smart home devices and various wireless electronic devices we have acquired in the past few years. We had very frequent internet outages (at least once a day, often a few times a day) and the connection was very slow. I did a speed test right before installing this new router - we pay for up to 200 Mbps, but the speed test from my laptop showed that my speed was under 11 Mbps download, 5 Mbps upload. We also have a range extender in another room because of the poor connection in that area. We have a doorbell camera and a few other cameras inside and outside of the house that were not working very well because of our connection issues - the picture on each camera was blurry and pixelated, and in live streaming view it would freeze a lot. To say that I was extremely excited to try out this mesh wifi system would be an understatement. Installation was extremely easy - the app that you will need to download walks you through each step. The whole process took about 10 minutes. The hardest part of installation was getting to the old router and unplugging it. It seems to be designed to be as easy as possible to install it, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on your level of expertise. Great for me, because I don't know much about this type of thing and I was nervous about setting it up myself. It could not have been more simple. There were a few (connection) error messages during setup, but it rectified them all itself, all I had to do was sit there and watch the app work. We gave the network the same SSID (name) as the old router, so all of our devices connected to the new Max router on their own, we didn't have to reconnect any devices. The first day went very well - there's a speed test in the app that says my speed is 184.6 Mbps download, 10.1 Mbps upload. I don't get those speeds on my laptop (wireless) though - my laptop speeds (through Ookla Speedtest) shows 40.20 Mbps download, 11.52 Mbps upload. That is a big improvement over the speeds from our old router, but I was hoping to see more speed. I have noticed that our cameras are all working MUCH better - no blurriness or pixelated images, no freezing or connection issues. I connected my laptop to the router via ethernet today and got a download speed of 225.29 Mbps, upload 11.05 Mbps. Now that we have a router that can handle such high speeds, we will definitely be upgrading our ISP plan to something faster. About 27 hours after installing it, we had our first issue - we lost the internet. I checked our ISP to see if it was just us or if there had been more outages reported. It was just us. The main router had a solid blue LED light, but the satellite router had a slowly flashing red LED light. I have no idea what the problem was. I could not get into the app because my phone was not connected to the same network, because we had no internet. I was using my mobile data connection. So when your internet goes out, the app appears to be completely useless. I could get no further than the "onboarding/factory reset" screen on the app. This was frustrating. I'm not sure what difference it would have made to be able to get into the app, but it was irritating to not have that option. I unplugged the router in my room for a minute then plugged it back in - nothing. Still flashing red. Unplugged and plugged in again - still red. I had to go into the room where the main router is located and unplug that one then plug it back in. That seemed to do the trick, the router in my bedroom started working again after that. * It's now been 3 days since this incident and we have not had this happen again so far. It's been running very smoothly! If you like to be able to manually choose which band to connect your electronics to, I don't think you can do that with this router. Our old router would broadcast the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz networks and I could connect to the one that I preferred, but this Max router chooses the best band automatically for you. The app will allow you to set up parental controls that will allow you to pause the internet whenever you want to. You can set up profiles for children and from there you can block out the internet for certain profiles or devices on individual days of the week or every day of the week, at any time that you'd like. For instance, I could choose to block the internet for child #1 every day after school from 3 to 4 P.M. so they will be sure to come home and do their homework or chores instead of using a game console or social network. I could pause the internet when it's time for dinner and unpause it when we're all done eating. You can set these controls up just about any way that you need to. You can enable a guest network so you can have guests use your wifi without having to give them your main password. There's an Alexa skill you can download so that you can tell Alexa to enable the guest network. In summary, this is a really nice router, it's capable of extremely high speeds, and the mesh system will eliminate internet dead spots in your home so you can have blazing fast speeds anywhere around the house. It was ridiculously easy to set up and, aside from that one incident with the internet being dropped, it works very well. If your home is 3,000 square feet or less you should be able to get away with using only 1 router, but if you have multiple floor levels or a larger than 3,000 square feet then I'd definitely recommend this mesh system. If your home is very large you can purchase a single Max router to add to your mesh system - 1 main router and 2 satellites.