TP-Link Deco X60 AX3000

amazon TP-Link Deco X60 AX3000 reviews

TP-Link’s Deco X60 AX3000 Whole Home Mesh wifi System costs $329.99 and comes as a three-piece wifi mesh system designed for good home wifi six coverage. It’s easy to set up, and you can manage it with a user-friendly mobile app that comes with a lifetime subscription to TP- Link’s HomeCare parental controls and anti-malware tools. You can even control the X60 with Alexa voice commands. However, while it’s a good enough performer, it can’t match the transfer rates and feature set you get with our more expensive Editors’ Choice, the system. Asus ZenWiFi AX XT8 or even the more advanced TP-Link Deco M9 Editors’ Choice award-winning sibling.

Design and Features

The X60 3 comes with three identical white cylindrical buttons that provide up to 7,000 square feet of coverage. 2-pack systems up to 5,000 square feet are also available for $269.99, a good price, but still not a product that qualifies the Deco family as a budget router. 4.5 inches tall and 4.3 inches wide, the buttons don’t offer the same low aesthetic as the Deco M9 Plus buttons (2.5 x 5.7 inches) but are still smaller than the TP-Link Deco M4 buttons (7.5 x 3.6 inches). The LED indicator on the base flashes blue during setup, solid green when everything is working properly, and glows red when the button has connection problems.

The back of each button houses two gigabit LAN ports and a power jack, and there’s a reset button on the bottom of the base. Missing are the USB and multi-gig ports that you get with the Asus ZenWiFi AX XT8 wifi system. Under the hood are four internal antennas, a 1GHz quad-core CPU, and 802.11ax circuitry. The X60 is a six-stream, dual-band AX3000 system capable of achieving transfer rates of up to 574 megabits per second (Mbps) on the 2.4 GHz band and up to 2,402 Mbps on the 5 GHz band. It uses all the latest wifi six technologies, including 1024 QAM, Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) data transmission, WPA3 encryption, MU-MIMO concurrent data transmission, Band control, and beamforming directly to the client.

The X60 comes with a lifetime subscription to TP-Link’s HomeCare, a suite of parental controls, anti-malware, and Quality of Service (QoS) tools powered by Trend Micro. Parental controls offer age-based presets (Children, Teens, Adults) that prevent your child from accessing sites with gambling content, social networking, sharing file sharing, pornography, and other adult content. You can add any URL to your blocked sites list and create a visit schedule and time limits.

Anti-malware tools include Malicious Content Filtering for all connected devices, Intrusion Prevention, and Infected Device Isolation. HomeCare QoS settings offer several optimized presets, including Standard, Game, Stream, Surf, Chat, and Custom. Here you can also give individual customers high bandwidth priority with specific bandwidth allocations. You can set bandwidth allocation manually or let the Speed ​​Test utility do it for you.

You can manage the X60 using the TP-Link ‘Deco mobile app or with the web console. Still, the web console lacks access to many of the management options you get with the app, including accessory control parents, quality of service, and anti-malware settings. When you launch the application, you will see an Overview screen with the name of the network and its Internet status and a list of currently connected clients. Tapping the Internet icon will take you to a screen showing all connected grid nodes, and tapping any button will open a screen with real-time upload and download speeds, and a list of the client is currently connected to that node. Here you can disable seamless roaming for any app.

At the bottom of the Overview screen are three buttons: the Overview button takes you back to the home screen from wherever you are in the app, and the HomeCare button takes you to a screen where you can configure your controls mentioned above parent, anti-software installation, and quality of service (QoS) settings. The More button opens the Settings screen with buttons that let you configure wifi settings, test Internet speed, create a network blocklist, view monthly usage and security threat reports as a firmware update. Use the Advanced button to configure IPv4 and IPv6; Port forwarding; and Fast Roaming settings, create preset IP addresses and enable/disable IPTV/VLAN and MAC Cloning options.

The X60 supports Amazon Alexa commands that allow you to use your voice to do things like pausing internet access for clients, turn on/off guest networks, and turn off LED indicators.

Settings and Performance

As we’ve stated, it’s easy to set up. We got the X60 up and running in no time, a process that starts with downloading the Deco app and creating an account. We then hit Let’s Begin, select the X60 from the list of Deco models, and follow the instructions to power off the modem. We connected the Deco node to the modem using the provided LAN cable and powered the modem and the Deco button.

After a few seconds, the button’s LED will flash from yellow to blue, indicating that it is ready to set up. Using our smartphone’s wifi settings, we connect to the Deco’s SSID and wait for a second or two for the app to find the button. We then give the node a location (office) and allow the application to use the default DHCP settings and MAC address to configure Internet access. Finally, we’ve given the new network a name and password, connected our phones to the new SSID, and completed the network setup. We press Next and follow the instructions to plug in other buttons, recognized within 30 seconds. We named each location, and after a quick 5-minute firmware update, we were all up and running.

The X60 scores well in our transfer speed performance tests. Still, it can’t keep up with the more expensive 6-mesh wifi systems we’ve tested and many gaming routers with mesh connectivity and versatile wireless router. The X60’s 758 Mbps score on our close-range (same-room) test is certainly faster than most wifi five mesh router scores (802.11ac), averaging somewhere in the 540 range. Mbps. But it has followed the wifi 6-based Linksys Velop MX10, Netgear Orbi RBK852, and Asus ZenWiFi XT8 routers by more than 100 Mbps. The Velop MX10 leads with a score of 865 Mbps. On the 30-foot test, the Router X60 score of 290 Mbps was slightly slower than other sets, but not by much. ZenWiFi XT8 leads the way with a score of 347 Mbps.

X60 satellite button not working well. It achieved 521Mbps in the proximity test, behind the leader Asus ZenWiFi XT8, 154 Mbps. The Linksys Velop MX10 and Netgear Orbi RBK852 are both more than 100 Mbps faster than the X60. In the 30-foot test, the X60 node scored 386 Mbps. That is 233 Mbps slower than the ZenWiFi XT8 node. It should be noted that the X60 is a dual-band system and therefore does not have the benefit of the 5GHz secondary band for backhaul processing, which other leading systems all offer, including the Linksys Velop AX MX10, Netgear Orbi AX600 RBK852, and Asus ZenWiFi AX XT8.

We used Ekahau Sidekick’s wifi diagnostic device and Ekahau’s Survey mobile app to measure signal strength and used heat maps to illustrate coverage throughout our test house. Darker green areas indicate the strongest signal measurements on the map, and a lighter green and yellow areas indicate weaker signals. The circles represent the location of the router and satellite node. With band control enabled, the X60 system provided a strong signal throughout most of the house but became weaker in the far corner of the lower left bedroom. This area has more walls between it and the router than any other room in the house.

Not fast but with good features

The TP-Link Deco X60 AX3000 may not be the fastest networking system. Still, it is easy to set up and manage and comes with some perks, especially free lifetime parental controls and protection network and client malware. Pack 3 covered a lot of ground (7,000 square feet) and showed good signal strength in testing, and it supports Alexa voice commands. That said, the Asus ZenWiFi XT8 offers outstanding transfer rate performance and more powerful features, including four LAN ports (one of which is a 2.5GB LAN port), USB 3.1 connectivity, and wireless bandwidth. The secondary 5GHz frequency can be reserved for wireless support.

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