TP-Link AX5400 WiFi 6 Router (Archer AX73)- Dual Band Gigabit Wireless Internet Router

The tp-link ax5400 is a wifi 6 router with dual band and long range wireless capabilities. Also known as the archer ax73, the wifi 6 technology allows this product to achieve speeds up to 5400 mbps as a theoretical maximum. Even though actual speeds will probably be lower than that, it will still be fast enough to perform bandwidth demanding tasks such as large file transfers over the network or ultra high definition streaming on your local home network.

Installation is super easy, it’s basically plug and play. You connect the router to your internet modem, and then connect your devices via the wifi networks. The a5400 will come with default wireless settings, including a predefined network name and password, for easy initial setup. It is strongly recommended to change these settings to your own, for security reasons. Management can be done either via the smartphone app or (very happy about this one) the web interface. More about that later.

Aesthetically, you will notice that this router has a rather interesting rectangular design, and it is equipped with 6 (!!!) antennas. Yes, you read that right: 6 antennas. Tp-link claims that this supports large wifi coverage and good signal strength to all devices with their beamforming and 4t4r technologies. Even though i have no practical way of measuring the performance of these technologies, i can attest to the fact that the ax5400’s coverage is excellent and i didn’t notice any dead spots at home (including the devices located outside my home, such as wifi cameras and doorbells). In case you do experience dead spots, you can add an extra tp-link mesh device compatible with the ax5400 to solve the issue. I talk more about mesh networking below.

One of the major features of the ax5400 is mesh networking. Mesh means that all your routers connect with each other, forming a mesh of coverage rather than having one router that acts as a single point of connection. Your wireless device will always connect automatically to the mesh router that provides the strongest signal. This is called roaming. Much like in telecom/mobile networks, your wi-fi devices might change positions and move around your house. This means that the wireless signal between your device and the router gets weaker with distance. With mesh routers your device will automatically connect to a different router unit that offers a stronger signal, without interrupting the running service and streams. This not only increases the coverage vastly, but also offers seamless handovers and transitions of wi-fi services as you change your position in your house. In other words, you get wi-fi roaming capabilities that will vastly improve the reliability of your wireless connection. That, of course, means that you need another tp-link mesh capable device to achieve this functionality. Tp-link provides a list of mesh devices compatible with the ax5400 on their website.

So far i have no complains regarding the ax5400’s performance. The wi-fi is very quick and outperforms my internet connection. I haven’t noticed any issues with latency either. One remark i want to make here is that, even though older wifi cards will still be able to connect and operate with the ax5400, you will need a wi-fi 6 compatible wireless card to make the most out of the mesh system. Making the most out of it doesn’t mean that you will experience speeds close to 5.4 gbps. These speeds are a theoretical maximum, they are achieved in the lab and they are impossible to see in the average home network setup. You will see, though, very high speeds depending on the quality of your wireless card (in my tests, i used the tp-link wifi 6 ax3000 pcie wifi card), the distance from the router and the obstacles that separate you from it. Bottom line: it’ll be fast, but be realistic with your expectations.

But probably one of the things i’m most happy about this router is the availability of a web interface for management. Being the owner/user of the otherwise great tp-link deco system, one of my main complaints was the lack of a web interface for network configuration. As a power user, i find it hard to configure my network equipment via the small screen of a smartphone. You can access the web interface by typing the router’s management ip (you can find it listed as gateway on your computer’s network settings) in your browser. You’ll have to first set up a local password (or create an account with tp-link) before accessing the router configuration.

Once you log in, the first screen you’ll see is the home screen, or a summary screen if you like. You can see the internet status, the router status and some shortcut button to common functions, your mesh devices (if you have any) and the connected client devices. This last bit is quite interesting, since you’ll be able to see the connected devices, their real time speed (up/down), the interface they’re connected to (ethernet, 2.4g or 5g), their “negotiated” max bandwidth, how long they’ve been connected to the router and, finally, a “block” button to deny the device access to the network. Below, i’m going through some of the functions that i find interesting, but i will omit the ones that are so common you can find them virtually in every router out there.

On the wireless screen you’ll find your wifi settings. You can turn on or off ofdma, twt, smart connect and, of course, the wireless radio itself. Ofdma (simultaneous transmission to different devices within the same transmission window) will significantly increase the traffic speed with compatible devices (your device must support ofdma), twt will help increase your device’s battery life by maintaining the connection with the router and allowing the device to go to sleep (aka not forcing the device to send keep alive messages to the router too frequently), while smart connect optimized the connectivity of the router’s radio bands with the client devices.

Tp-link offers a security platform with the ax5400, similar to what they offer with the rest of their flagship devices, homeshield. The user will get some basic functionality out of the box, and additional sophisticated features and analytics are available with a subscription service.

The last screen on the web interface is the advanced screen, where all the advanced options are located. Power users will definitely appreciate some of these. The first thing that caught my eye was lan —> link aggregation. You can aggregate (combine) up to two ethernet ports into one (logical) network port, aggregating their bandwidth as well. Of course, you’ll need to aggregate ports on the other end of the connection as well, but that is the other side of the problem. Pretty cool. The router also supports direct dyndns logins, for those of you who still use a dyndns client on your computer. Another cool section is routing. You can use your own static routes defined in the router’s config if you need to direct specific traffic to specific destinations. Use this only if you know what you’re doing, otherwise a bad routing config will probably block your access and traffic. The router comes with a usb port, which is nothing unusual. What is very cool, though, is the fact that the usb port supports (except for mass storage devices) apple’s time machine. Just connect a storage device to the ax5400’s usb port, enable time machine in settings, and voila! No need for one of those old apple airport extreme routers anymore. Nat is, of course, present in this device as well, for your port forwarding needs. Security features include a firewall, acls and mac spoofing protection (by binding ips to specific macs). You have your standard vpn server built in, supporting both openvpn and pptp, ipv6 support for you dual-stackers out there and a bunch of router admin features (firmware update, backup, remote management, system logs etc.). Last but not least, you can switch the mode of the device between a router (the device will route traffic and provide routing services) and an access point (the device will become a wireless gateway for clients, but you will need to connect it to a router for routing services – this is used mostly to expand the wifi network).

Overall the tp-link ax5400 wifi 6 router is a great home routing device and a strong contender in this segment of products. I’m very happy with it for the time i’ve been using it, and i definitely recommend it.

We’re going to stream our television & use an antenna. The signal from the old router didn’t quite cut it, so i looked for an alternative. I found the t-p link ax6000 online & read some reviews and was a bit apprehensive because some said it was hard to set up. In the past i’ve used netgear and they are good, but i saw this and like what i read.

It wasn’t really hard to set up. It was time consuming, however. I still use a hard wired connection for sensitive work i occasionally do. This works for that purpose and the vpn worked well.

The wi-fi was pretty much seamless. Unfortunately, i have a lot of devices and connecting all of them took a bit of time. I just remembered one that i still need to connect.

The wi-fi speed doubled near every device in the house compared to the old router. I just used an online speed test to measure the speed. The hard wired computers didn’t have a significant difference in speed. I’m going to get new floors in my home office and will upgrade all the cables to cat 8, i’m not so sure there will be a significant difference. This router has 8 ethernet ports, i’d been using 2 routers for my printers & computers, now i just need this one. I know, a switch would have worked, but i had an extra router, so i used it. Besides, i couldn’t find my 10 port switch and didn’t want to buy another one.

There are also security features and you have to turn them on manually. It’s a good idea to pay attention to this as there are so many devious people trying to steal your identity, hijack your computer and so much more. I was recently in a couple of cyber security & crimes webinars and the problems are getting worse. So please, pay attention to those security features.

I don’t foresee any problems, only time will tell how this router will work. Sorry that i’m not that technical, i just wanted you to know that this router doesn’t require a ‘network guy’ to make it work. If i can do it you can too.

For perspective: my house is one level and about 1,600 sf. The router is in one far corner and the signal is good through all the doors & walls. It also works well on the back porch for the television i have out there.

Bought it to replace the wireless router that is included with a fios plan. The replaced router did not reach the entire apartment and, though i cannot provide any sort of evidence outside of my streaming experience, seemed to be bad at routing. The tp-link reaches all corners of the apartment, and scp across the lan reaches near theoretical speeds. There are no hiccups streaming. There are generally 13-15 devices on the wireless, 3 or so actually pulling data and a couple of wired devices. The speeds on the 2.4 ghz bands are slow, though i live in a dense area with a lot of stuff going on in that band so it might not be the router. The 5 ghz band reaches everywhere, at speeds faster than 300 mbps in locations where the fios router did not reach.

I replaced my old linksys router with this new tp-link wifi 6 router. The wifi speed is excellent, even on the other side of the house. My phone uses wifi 5 (ac) so i have not tried the wifi 6 (ax) yet. But i hear it will be even better.

If you see slower than expected upload speeds, check to see if you have ‘killer intelligence center’ installed. If so, go in and turn off the killer prioritization engine. I had this problem, and at first i blamed the router. But it was actually the killer prioritization engine application.

Solid entreprise wifi 6 router. Faster than my older netgear r8500 tri band 5400 but cheaper in price than mesh.

I become a fan of tp-link and purchased almost all their wifi6 router, 1500, 1800, 5400. I like them alot cuz it’s simple access menu 192.168.0.1. I was a big fan of rosewill router that were no frills, cheap and simple you had to program everything yourself. This tp link is child play to those older router way simpler and gui consolidated.

They are alot cheaper than other router for the same technology. I liked linksys then they got outdated so i jumped to netgear but they are just to pricey. I paid almost $500. For a netgear r8500 way back and now for this bad boy that has more security like wpa3 and faster bandwidth like wifi 6 and frequency that airports are using i paid like $150. It’s a no brainer and these companies have to check reality and ppl wallets to dump $1000 on wifi router that will all but get you online just like the budget router and they also have bells and whistles.

I will continue to support tp-link if they keep it real. Like real cheap, real good, real simple and real deal.

I purchased this device to upgrade my home to wifi 6. It was a choice attempting to find the best quality for the least money. So far this has paid off. I purchased one to be a router and one to be an access point on the other side of my home for better signal coverage — this works.

The user interface/user experience on this is fairly good, with graphics displaying network and connected devices. My experience and other reviews of this devices show that if you get the tp-link account, you can control more features of this unit. I am an electrical engineer and so fairly skilled in router/switch setup. I chose the old-school approach. The unit also has built-in support for automatic mesh devices ‘onemesh’ that should work well for less technical users.

The one unit i configured as a router (default use) was easy to configure. The second unit defaults to router as usual, but i found where to convert it to access point function in the ‘operation mode’ setting. I named the wireless networks exactly the same as the router but offset the radio signal band from that of the router.

This device has a primary 2.4 and 5 ghz radio, so you can have two ssids. You have independent full control of settings for these two including radio channel. Note that some wireless routers have three radios, not just two — so you may have limitations with this router. There is a guest network at 2.4 and 5 ghz as well that lets you separate connection to your primary wireless network for security purposes, or connect them so networks can see each other. But… You cannot control the radio channels of the guest network — must be automatic. Another setting separates users on the guest network, which is a nice security feature to use if you wish. Many other features on this router.

Ive been using this router for about a year and it is an awesome upgrade to my old battlehorse (the original rev1 archer c7). The signal goes much further and when i found out about the onemesh ability i quickly got a compatible extender unit and voila, easy and works just like an out of the box mesh system.

I would also like to note that i have close to 75 devices connected (a lot of them smart iot) and it handles everything like a champ!

I’m probable going to get another onemesh product soon and expand my network a bit more.

Customer service with tp-link has always been a breeze as well, they’ve always helped me out and in a quick manner as well.

The signal is very strong. We live in a 2000 square foot home and the signal reaches from one corner to the furthest corner. It is eas to set up from some of the reviews i was expecting a much bigger footprint. But it’s not too big. Love all the extra lan ports it comes with. The only complaint is that the status leds are on the top. So, seeing them can be awkward if you want to place the router higher up. But i can live with that.

This tp- link ax 5400 router surpassed my expectations. Using the tether app, installation and set up was a breeze. My house is over 4000 ft.2, and with my old router i had to use multiple extenders and that still didn’t really give me the performance that i was looking for. When i ordered this router i also ordered an extender. However, i decided not to unboxed it until i checked out the performance of the router. That was a good move because once i installed the router and set it up, my coverage was from corner to corner to corner to corner of the house with virtually no degradation of the signal. I can go to the end of my rather extensive backyard and i still have a signal that is comparable to the signal i receive if i was standing 1 foot away from the router inside the house. What’s even more amazing is that the router is at the back of the house on the first floor, and after going through the den wall, the dining room wall, the living room wall and out into the street of the front of the house, i still have half of the signal that i get while standing right next to the router. To go through that many walls and be in the middle of the street that’s in front of my house receiving that strong a signal is in my book, completely unfathomable. Needless to say, i sent the unboxed tp link extender back to where i purchased it because i obviously did not need an extender anymore. Kudos to the tp-link team for producing such an outstanding quality router. It makes life so much simpler. The wi-fi 6 and the
wpa-3 security capabilities is really nice also.

I’ve been testing several ax routers over the past 6 weeks and ran into issues with several other high end routers that cost twice as much if not more. The biggest issue when testing the netgear ax6000 and asus ax6000 was that most of my legacy 2.4 802.11n only devices would fail to connect or constantly disconnect and reconnect. I really wanted to upgrade my current ac network to ax but didn’t want to spend the 3-400 on a high end router and then upgrade my 30+ network connected home automation devices. I am a network admin so belive that i tried every possible professional setting on those routers and still had issues until i forces the highend routers to n only mode which defeats the purpose of buying and ax router. I end up trying this out what would you know every device works flawlessly. I realize i did lost a lot of custom features that netgear and asus offer but for the extra $ savings i couldn’t be happier and very unexpected i had low hopes for this tp link router. I was really worried this cheap router wouldn’t handle explicit beamforming very well but was i wrong. Testing with my s22 ultra and my 2 acres property i can see about 150 ft from my router the signal drops then 2 seconds later signal goes from -70db and shoots up to -40db beamforming works so well i’m shocked.

I purchased this router to replace a several year old linksys ac2200 in the hope i would get more reliable wifi calling on with my android 11 5g phone. Unfortunately, my router apparently wasn’t the cause of the problem but i decided to keep this router since it was probably time to upgrade anyway. So how does the tp-link ax5400 compare?

First off, i don’t currently own any wifi 6 equipment so i don’t benefit from that technology. I’ve owned 5g smartphones from tcl and lg and neither support wifi 6. I own a xiaomi flagship phone that also doesn’t support wifi 6. I own the latest roku 4k streaming stick and the nvidia shield tv pro (2019) and neither supports wifi 6. I own a top-of-the-line panasonic 4k blu-ray player and sony 4k television and still no wifi 6.

Wifi coverage throughout my two-bedroom apartment is much stronger with the tp-link (i used an android app to measure wifi signal strength in each room) but there isn’t any improvement in actual download speed. The tp-link is dual-band 6 stream while the older linksys is tri-band 2 stream so if you have multiple family members the tp-link should provide more robust wifi speed when using multiple devices at the same time but since i live alone i couldn’t figure out a way to test that in a real-world situation.

The linksys was much easier to set up on my windows 10 computer. The qos feature on this tp-link router can’t even be set from within their own computer interface–that function can only be accessed through the tp-link android app. It also took me several days to figure out how to get the smb media server on my windows 10 computer to work over ethernet with my nvidia shield which was a simpler process with the linksys. If you think there’s the possibility that you could require technical support then you might want to consider a different brand. My experience trying to get support involved a phone number that no support employee ever answered and automated robo-responses through chat and email. It’s very possible that tp-link support is better under normal circumstances and that covid is responsible for my poor experience.

I previously owned two tp-link routers that i couldn’t get to work with their android app (even with support attempts from tp-link) but this model connected in seconds. This router can also be set up entirely using the smartphone app rather than a computer interface.

A completely unnecessary annoyance is that while you get the basic router security features you need out of the box tp-link tries to upsell their premium security service every time you go into the security tab. There is no click box to permanently dismiss the ad because tp-link really wants to upsell their premium security service.

Something in tp-link’s favor is that you can flash open-source firmware if you want to go that route (but is not something the casual should screw around with). That wasn’t possible with the linksys. This router is also compatible with amazon alexa which is something i haven’t tried but the alexa app on my phone knows that i have a compatible router and there’s a button that automatically showed up in the alexa app to use if want to connect the router–its not necessary to manually find and download the necessary alexa skill.

The tp-link ax5400 seems like a solid, well-made router and its 6 antennas provide excellent wifi coverage throughout my entire home. Mesh devices can also be added if you need a stronger signal for a large house or multi-floor building. I would recommend the tp-link ax5400 for people with at least basic computer skills but for someone who isn’t computer literate linksys routers are much easier to set up.

I had issues with the ax5400 router and my netgear cm1000 modem. I was replacing an older tp link ac1900 router that was working ok, but had issues reaching everywhere in my house. So i upgraded to this newer router because i read that it had great coverage. The way my setup was i had the modem and router next to each other. This worked with my old router so i decided to put the new router there. Well, when i installed the new ax5400 router with wifi6, the netgear cm1000 modem was constantly resetting. I tried multiple setups and even turned off the wifi channels. It got better, but still caused the modem to reset. I was about to return the new router, but i had one more idea. Maybe there was some form of interference between the router and modem specially when wifi6 was turned on. I had seen issues like this in other electronic systems. So this morning i placed the router 3ft away from the modem and started it up. Initially i turned wifi6 off. Internet stayed up for over 30 minutes. This never happened before. I then turned on both the 2.4 and 5ghz channels. It was now been over 5 hours and it is still running great. So long story short, great router (coverage is amazing) but you need to install it a distance from the cable modem.

I like the interface which is very easy, wired is also great, but when it comes about wi-fi signal is weak and from 600mb i get about 110mb even when my android tv is sitting in the upper shelf of my entertainment set. In my bedroom, about 14ft away is worse, my laptop only gets about 85mb. I have 3 cameras in my apartment which is about 700sf, i had to install 2 wi-fi extenders from tp-link to have good signal in the patio and one is inside and it reads medium strength signal. This router looks very intimidating for the way it looks but at the same time looks awesome. Tp-link needs to fix this problem with the weak wi-fi signal. I shouldn’t have this type of problems in such a small place.

I started with a 2-star review for this, but have since revised it to 4. I’ve come to realize that compared with competing products, what it can be reasonably expected to do, it seems to do pretty well so far. Setup was easy, features seem solid, coverage has been pretty good. Read on for more detail:

first, my gripes and the basis of my initial 2-star review:
i picked this up along with a new motorola 8600 for an 800 mb cable internet upgrade. I set it up, connecting my pc directly through one of the gb wired ports on my tp link 5400ax, and speed was around 300 mb. I initially assumed it was a comcast problem, but they just came out and tested the internet coming out of the modem, which tested at over 800 mb. The router seems to be failing to route at anywhere near the speeds needed.

Why giving this a 2-star review because of this horrendous issue would be misleading:
first, a 300 mb internet routing limit probably won’t be an issue for most users. But if you have a higher speed plan and you’re someone who intends to fully utilize it, it’s a big problem. I was initially very displeased with the performance of this device. Indeed, i think it’s pretty shady for tplink to market speeds that it can’t deliver. However, in researching competing products and combing through the reviews, basically everything i could find under $400 from everyone, including asus, linksys, netgear, all has stories of the exact same thing – actual speeds well under the router port speeds, and similar to what i observed with my 5400ax. Maybe lan and wireless lan is close to advertised speeds, i’m not sure – that doesn’t represent a huge use case for me so i haven’t tested it. I’d be willing to bet it performs better and the routing capacity is where the throttling occurs. But point being my big issue with the product seems to be shared by all the other competing in-category products, so it wouldn’t be very informative to give a 1-2 star review. If you want a wireless router that is going to route at greater than 600 mb, as far as i can tell it’s going to run $350+, and even those i found seemed to have stories of throttling, connectivity, and firmware issues. Here’s the path i wound up taking instead:

after lots more research i ordered a ubiquiti edgerouter 4 (basically every other wired router i found, including lesser ubiquiti models, also suffered the same issue of throttled speeds way under port speeds). I’ll be connecting that to my modem and combining that with my 5400 ax in ap-mode to provide wireless lan, and a gigabit switch for wired connectivity. I’m pretty optimistic this will provide the connection speeds i want, at least 800 mb for wired, and decent coverage/speed for the price point via wireless through this device. I can’t say from experience yet but it’s worth noting that ubiquiti routers are not renowned for being easy to configure – if you aren’t familiar with configuring network equipment this may not be a good design for you, or you might need to line up some help to pull it off.

Summary: if you have 400 mb or slower internet, this is a solid buy, as far as i can tell after reading dozens of reviews, no worse than anything else remotely in the price range. If you have higher than 400 mb internet and want to actually get those speeds, you’ll probably need to look closely (look deep in those reviews for reviewers who had your internet speed or faster, with the exact model you’re looking at, and actually speed tested their connection after setting up – basic users won’t even be aware this kind of issue exists) at higher end routers in the $350+ range (i didn’t find one i was comfortable with after reading all the reviews), or run this in ap-only mode in conjunction with a wired router that you know will handle your isp connection speed (again, read those reviews closely and look for speed tests). Splitting functions out this way is a bit more involved, but can reduce exposure to a single expensive device failing on you, which is kinda nice. Stories abound of such failures in the review pages of the high end wifi routers.

I like this modem. I would give it five stars if it were not for the fact that you have to login to an unsecured website. That i do not like at all.

Performance wise, when using the ethernet, it works well for online video courses, but i am am not a gamer, so i cannot tell you how it would work for gaming.

It does not drop wireless connections. The wireless signal shows up ‘strong’ speed tests show that i am getting the speed i am paying for. Setting it up is straight-forward for tech heads like myself, but could possibly be kind of difficult for newbies. I cannot tell you how tech support is, i have not used it.

The manufacturer’s idea for security is logging into an unencrypted website (http), instead of using a secure (https) protocol, and this is a big turn off, so that is why i have given the modem four stars instead of five stars.

Easy to set up , great for big downloads that i do for work .