TP-Link has launched its Deco M9 Plus mesh router over in the UK, a solution designed to cope with all the devices a smart home might throw at it, with a two-pack retailing at a recommended price of £349.99.
As with any mesh router solution, the idea is to position the two devices at strategic points in the home, spread out to cover any potential Wi-Fi dead zones, with TP-Link promising Wi-Fi coverage to the tune of 4,500 square feet.
As mentioned, the other big selling point here is that the Deco M9 Plus is designed for the smart home, and can be hooked up to over 100 smart gadgets – should you own that many.
The Deco M9 Plus supports not just Wi-Fi, but also smart gadgets using ZigBee and Bluetooth, and it has a full ‘Internet of Things hub’ with which you can manage all your home’s smart devices – meaning everything from light bulbs and locks through to security cameras.
A dedicated app gives you this control, and can be used to cook up nifty shortcuts – for example, when you want to watch a movie, you can have a shortcut which prioritizes Netflix traffic and dims the smart bulbs in the living room.
Tri-harder
As for the actual spec of the router, it’s a tri-band affair allowing for speeds of up to a theoretical 2134Mbps (867Mbps over two 5GHz bands, and 400Mbps at 2.4GHz), with eight internal antennas in each unit.
A Qualcomm quad-core processor is running the show under the hood, and you get QoS (Quality of Service) plus a Smart Connect feature to ensure connections are appropriately prioritized for performance, and the optimum bands are selected for each device.
The mesh router is also bundled with TP-Link HomeCare which gives you parental controls and three years of free antivirus cover, a nifty little extra on the security front.
The system is apparently easy to set up using the aforementioned dedicated app, plus it supports Alexa and IFTTT. You can add more Deco units to the initial two-pack if you wish to expand coverage further across a larger house.
If you’re curious as to exactly how the Deco M9 Plus might perform compared to mesh router rivals such as Google WiFi or Netgear Orbi, we are currently reviewing the product, so look out for our final verdict before too long.
- We’ve rounded up the best wireless routers of 2018
