My spouse would not care a lot concerning the dozens of tech merchandise I get in a month, however she insisted I arrange Huawei’s Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional router as quickly because it confirmed up. That is due to the design of the router; most routers are usually downright ugly, and whereas the greatest Wi-Fi 7 mesh techniques just like the Orbi 970 and Orbi 770 are designed with a contemporary aesthetic, they nonetheless find yourself trying like tech merchandise, and do not actually mesh with the decor of a home.
That is not the case with Huawei’s newest mesh router. The Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional seems to be beautiful, and truthfully, you’ll be able to’t inform that it’s a router. My spouse and I made a sport out of asking visitors visiting our home during the last month to guess the place the router was, and nobody was in a position to establish it accurately — if something, virtually everybody thought it was a wise lamp (we do have a variety of these in the home).
The Mesh X3 Professional has a novel design that evokes the texture of a snow-covered mountain inside a cylinder, and the built-in lighting is dazzling. It switches between heat and white hues, and you’ll simply regulate the lighting by urgent down on the highest of the router. The mountain-like design is not only for present; Huawei by some means managed to combine Wi-Fi antennae into the construction, and it seems to be fabulous. As it is a Wi-Fi 7 mesh system, you get a smaller satellite tv for pc within the field that appears like a temper lamp.
Look, I examined dozens of routers over the course of the final decade, and I have not used something that appears fairly as hanging because the Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional — not even shut. Most of all, although, my spouse likes the router, and that is the largest promoting level of the Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional. The mesh router is now accessible globally, and it prices across the equal of $285, which is affordable as you get the primary node and a satellite tv for pc.
Coming to the connectivity a part of the Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional, you get 2×2 dual-band radios with Wi-Fi 7 and MLO, and the 5GHz channel has a theoretical bandwidth of two,882Mbps, with the two.4GHz delivering 688Mbps. Annoyingly, the router will get simply two 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet ports, and a type of is used for the WAN connection, so that you get a solitary port to attach different units.
Fortunately, I’ve a 24-port swap that I take advantage of with the router, so it wasn’t a difficulty, however even then, I needed to reroute just a few issues — just like the Pi 4 — to the swap earlier than I used to be ready to make use of the router. The satellite tv for pc will get Ethernet connectivity as effectively, by way of a single Gigabit port.
You’ll be able to technically management the router by way of Huawei’s AI Life cell app, however I wasn’t ready to take action. It doesn’t matter what I attempted, it simply would not pull up the router’s settings, however fortunately, you’ll be able to simply configure all of the settings by way of the online interface, and it has a good listing of settings. There’s the flexibility to vary 2.4GHz and 5GHz settings, break up each channels into distinct SSIDs, use a customized DNS server, configure WAN settings in case you use a static IP like me, arrange a visitor Wi-Fi, and all the opposite settings you’d see on a standalone router.
Protection by way of the primary router is fairly good, however you may ideally want to make use of it with not less than one satellite tv for pc when you’ve got a sizeable residence. It delivered respectable bandwidth contemplating it is a price range mesh system, but it surely was nowhere as efficient as a standalone router just like the RT6600ax that I used to be utilizing beforehand, and it would not maintain a candle to my UniFi community.
The difficulty with utilizing the Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional in my home is that we’ve too many units connecting to it, and infrequently sufficient, I see the router dropping reference to my telephones and tablets even when I am within the subsequent room. I examined it over the course of two months now, and whether or not it is the Discover X9 Professional, Vivo X300 Professional, iPad Professional M4, or the dozen or so Android telephones I linked to it, the issue was the identical — the 5GHz channel would lose connectivity every time I moved between rooms, and it could wait just a few seconds and swap to the two.4GHz band or reconnect to the 5GHz SSID.
I get that my house is an outlier within the sheer variety of good residence units, telephones, projectors, and different equipment that hook up with the router, and in case you do not routinely have 100 units on your property community, this should not be a difficulty.
Intermittent connectivity points however, I haven’t got any issues with the Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional; it’s higher than most different mesh techniques within the sub-$300 class, and the online interface provides you intensive configurability in the case of tailoring the router to your community.
In the end, I should swap to a extra highly effective Wi-Fi 7 router, however I am hesitant to try this as a result of no different router I’ve in my home seems to be anyplace nearly as good — nor blends in as effectively with my front room decor — because the Wi-Fi Mesh X3 Professional. Huawei actually must make a higher-end variant of this router with quad-band connectivity and higher-gain antennae. Now I simply have to persuade my spouse that we have to return to a router that does not look as elegant.