A stylish wireless AC router for speedy home networking. The TP-Link Archer C9 that we have in for testing today makes use of the AC1900 standard which entails 600Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and 1,300Mbps on the 5GHz band. The dual-band AC1900 is only supplanted by tri-band AC2350 and AC3200 offerings that are reserved for speed-demon routers such as the ASUS RT-AC3200 and the Netgear Nighthawk X6 AC3200.

In practice, AC1900 is more than enough for even the most bandwidth-hungry home user and strikes up a more reasonable cost-to-performance balance. The extensive bandwidth on offer with increasingly powerful routers is squarely aimed at sizeable households with numerous devices where the additional bandwidth capability comes in useful. Most single devices, such as a laptop or tablet, cannot exploit all the available bandwidth, but add five or six devices together and the story is very different.

The TP-Link Archer C9 sports a dual-core 1GHz CPU to manage the Gigabit and WiFi processing as well as integrated functions such as traffic management and USB file-sharing. In feature terms the TP-Link Archer C9 is very similar to the ASUS RT-AC68U - the primary difference is the inclusion of two USB ports, one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0, instead of a single USB 3.0 on the rival model.