LinksysEA7300 Max-Stream: AC1750 Dual-Band Wi-Fi Router, Gigabit Ethernet Ports, 1,500 square-foot Range, 10 Devices, MU-MIMO (Black)

Awesome router. Great range. Easy setup.

I decided on this router to replace my Verizon Fios "Quantum Gateway" router, model G1100, which I was paying $12/month for. I am an engineer by trade but I am by no means a networking expert, in fact this is one technical field that I don't have a lot of experience or knowledge about. Despite that fact I was EASILY able to replace my Fios router with this one, literally within minutes. No problems to speak of. Once you disconnect the Fios router (there are instructions for doing this on the Fios website) this router will automatically connect to the service and activate within a couple of minutes. It is that simple. In addition, the Linksys website and app are both useful and very easy to use.The main reason why I decided to get this, aside from saving myself from the monthly payments, is because I was having connectivity issues in my home. I discovered that there were several reasons for this. But in terms of a direct comparison to the Fios unit, I can tell you for certain that this router is slightly better in terms of overall range. After I switched the Fios unit with this (in the exact same location) my televisions and other devices in my home were receiving a slightly stronger signal and also stayed connected in circumstances when they used to disconnect. I also ended up moving the router location in my home and added a Linksys ethernet switch to further improve the network in my home for streaming, but that really has nothing to do with this review.Overall I am happy with this purchase. This router has improved the overall stability and range of the wifi network in my home and has reduced my Verizon monthly payment amount, which means it will pay for itself in about a year. Any investment that pays for itself that quickly is probably worth it.

I purchased this router at a great price on Black Friday. It replaces a Linksys EA6900, an AC1900 router, which I had upgraded to run Tomato USB.I have a two-story home and have devices on both floors. Internet is Charter Spectrum at 60Mbps. My Lenovo and Dell laptops have 802.11ac wireless cards but no MU-MIMO support. In addition to the laptops I'm running a TiVo, Surface Pro 2, and Roku 3 over wireless as well as a couple of wired devices. I have not enabled guest access nor did I use Linksys Smart Wi-Fi for setup. I don't have a need for remote access and so have not installed the app. The EA7300 supports static DHCP assignments as well as MAC address filtering, both of which I use.The router runs cool, unlike the EA6900.Overall the EA7300 seems to have better 2.4GHz range than the EA6900. It has been stable although there's really no way to tell from the UI how long it has been up between reboots. The 5GHz range seems about the same. I have noticed that the wireless throughput on 5GHz is markedly slower than with the EA6900. Opening a large file on a laptop over the network from my wired desktop (gigabit) takes much longer than with the EA6900 with the throughput showing about 9Mbps even when the connection speed shows 200Mbps. Not sure what is going on.I have a USB stick with about 3,300 MP3s connected to the USB port. Using DLNA I am about to find and play these files on the Roku. However, the initial scan for the files by the Roku Media Player is much slower than the same flash drive in the EA6900 w/ TomatoUSB.The graphical interface is just OK, a bit sluggish sometimes. The amount of performance data and configurability available from 3rd party firmware like TomatoUSB (e.g. WAN usage details, throughput to each device, uptime of device, etc.) makes that interface superior to what Linksys offers. Unfortunately, 3rd party firmware is not available for Qualcomm-based routers. On problem I was having was that the router rebooted a lot when I had static DNS value set. I removed those and it stays up now. It does use Google DNS if you don't specifyUpdate (1/11/17): My problems with downloading speed continue, and I'm deducting a star for that issue. My download speed is nominally 60Mbps after rebooting the router. After several hours (or overnight) the speed always drops to around 9MBps. The upload speed stays at 5Mbps. After rebooting the router, the download returns to 60Mbps. This holds for a couple of hours and then the problem reappears.I am on the latest firmware.Update (1/16/17): Amazon replaced the router (great customer service!) and the replacement exhibited the same speed issues. Linksys offered help. I started changing router options, including reverting to earlier firmware, none of which helped. I did notice that the Intel Ethernet adapter on my motherboard was throwing disconnect errors but it had been doing that since I updated to the latest Intel driver in September. That never seemed to bother the EA6900 but I decided to delete the driver and the Intel ProWin64 software and let Windows 10 reinstall just the driver. The driver that was installed was an older Microsoft driver and the problems seem to have disappeared! I'm getting full speed from my ISP as well as between computers.

I bought this to replace an old Linksys WRT54G, and the huge increases in both wired and wireless speeds let me know that I should have upgraded a long time ago. I live in a standard 1500 sq. ft. ranch house and I connect three wired and four wireless devices, only one or two of which will be active at any one time, so my wireless needs aren't extremely demanding. I think the EA7300 is a good choice for average users like me. I get reliable full speed connections in the back bedroom about 50 ft. away through two walls and some other obstructions.The setup isn't too different from my old WRT54G, except that this model has a nice graphical interface called Linksys Smart Wi-fi. I found setup to be quite easy, but inexperienced users may find the setup of any wireless router to have a significant learning curve. Firmware updates are easily handled with the setup program. I have seen one or two instances where the Smart Wi-fi interface was fussy and didn't want to connect on the first try, but other than that I haven't seen any problems.The only other noteworthy issue I have had is that an old external HDD I had hoped to use as network accessible storage through the USB port failed to work reliably with the EA7300. After some discussion board investigations, I found that this was a common problem and not limited to Linksys routers, so I can't really deduct a star for that. So, as a word of warning, don't assume that the old drive you have laying around is automatically going to work with the EA7300 or any other router. I bought a 128 GB thumb drive to use with the EA7300 and I haven't had any problems with it. In more than two months of use, I have not experienced dropouts or other downtime, other than when the incompatible external HDD was connected, which did indeed cause significant flakiness.