Buffalo Air Station AC1300 N900 802.11ac Wireless Router Review
Final Thoughts on the Buffalo Air Station WZR-1D800H
We were able to seamlessly integrate the WZR-D1800H into our home theater network using our configured Netgear R6300 AC router as a bridge. In the past we have successfully streamed music and even high definition audio using a variety of set-top boxes with ease. One of the things that had always been a challenge was to wirelessly stream 1080p high-definition MKV files or Blu-Ray ISOs. Because of the presence of 802.11ac, we were able to finally stream 1080p HD content! The MKVs played through our Western Digital TV Live Hub with no skipping and very fast starts. The guys in the LR bunker ended up watching the freshly ripped for streaming Dr. Seuss The Lorax with no breaks at all.
802.11ac is truly an amazing thingwhich brings me to my next point: If you are going to upgrade your router, you really need to look at this next-generation wireless standard. Buffalo was first to market with their WZR-D1800H, but almost every networking hardware manufacturer has announced plans for new AC routers, gateways, and USB dongles. Hopefully, we will be getting in some more equipment so we can directly compare how each vendor is implementing this technology.
Because AC is the wave of the future, it is really good to know that the standard really is backwards compatible and will work with your existing wireless networking hardware. Not only does the “AC” standard work with older hardware, we measured a significant improvement for the legacy devices when used in an 802.11ac and 802.11bgn mixed environment. You should not worry at all if you want to upgrade your router to AC but dont have any AC clients. You will still see a speed bump.not as much as a pure AC environment, but significant just the same.
While we cant stop singing the praises of the next-gen Wi-Fi, our first AC router, Buffalos WZR-D1800H Air Station didnt impress us as much as we had hoped. First off, the GUIs design is just not that pleasant to navigate. There are a number of different features that we are happy to see Buffalo include like robust port forwarding or the ability to name individual SSID channels (ie. Buffalo 5G, Buffalo 24, etc), but there are omissions that make us scratch our head too.
We also found out (the hard way), that this Buffalo router is not compatible with DD-WRT, the Linux-based custom firmware that many choose to load on their wireless routers. The reason we went to DD-WRT is because the stock firmware that WZR-D1800H ships with is very tough to work with. Unlike Netgears polished GUI or even TP-Link limited but logical interface, the Buffalo was just a pain. Unfortunately, the GUI was slow and hard to navigate. We were also thrown off a bit when using Firefox to access the routers GUI as the pages would only partially load and If you werent familiar with the page, you might miss it entirely that there were available options. We discovered later that because we were had Ad Block Pro running that it caused havoc with the Buffalo GUI.
A last complaint that we had is centered on the USB port on the back of the Buffalo AC1300. This port only seems to support hard drives and thumb-drives that are FAT32 only. Our first attempt to connect an external drive was a Seagate GoFlex 1TB USB drive that didnt show up at all. We had the option of letting the router format the drive to its XFS file system but we really didnt lose all the data we had stored on the drive.
The Buffalo Air Station AC1300/N900 Gigabit Dual Band Wireless Router is backed by a three-year limited warranty and lifetime 24/7 US based technical support. Even though this router is listed at $179.99, you can easily find the router on shelves for less than $165.
Legit Bottom Line:
If you are looking for ultra-fast performances via Wi-Fi, the new 802.11ac standard is a must have. Buffalo is first out of the gate with their new flagship WZR-D100H Air Station and the pure speed of this router might be enough to overcome the challenging GUI and limited features.
Comments are closed.