Amped Wireless Athena-EX, High Power AC2600 Wi-Fi Range Extender with MU-MIMO (RE2600M)

I was waiting for a certain step before installation finalized and it never happened. At this point I do not recall what was supposed to happen but did not. However, it was installed and worked when I tried it. Just frustrating to be told follow items 1-5 for installation and be waiting for step 4 on their end and not being able to contact anyone for technical assistance and only to find out just by chance it installed. Since installation, it has worked fine. A little concerned with the notice I receive of the connection not being secure on the extender, so will not use for any secure transactions. Primarily bought to extend WiFi for operation of pool equipment ap and sprinkler system ap. Reluctant to connect smart TVs to it due to the security issue.

My situation is a bit unique, which only proves how fantastic this repeater is. I live in a rural area with lots of trees. My only option for internet is Viasat, a satellite service provider, which has a large dish and a modem wired to that dish. Unfortunately, due to the location of the trees, the dish had to be mounted on my detached garage instead of the house, and a Netgear Nighthawk (long range router) is connected to the modem inside the shop. I can pick up the Nighthawk from most places on the property, but the signal strength is only 1-2 bars. My PS4 and Hopper DVR (Dish Network) couldn't see the network or had a very weak signal (20%), making streaming impossible.I had tried a Belkin repeater in the past and it never worked properly. After reading reviews I thought I'd take a chance on this Amped Athena in the hope that I could stream Netflix. Setup was easy, it was up and running in about 15 minutes. And the result was...simply astounding. My phone and the PCs in the house went from 2 bars to 4 bars. Both my PS4 and my Hopper get a nice, strong 70% signal. I can now stream Netflix...it takes about 30-40 seconds to buffer a show, and then it streams a full 2 hour movie with no further buffering. It also saved me money by reducing my channel package on Dish ($95/mo. to $65/mo.) and replacing the lost channels with Netflix, with the difference adding up each month, so the Athena will have paid for itself in a year.So is this a good product? No.It's a GREAT product! I can't say enough good things about it, but I have to stop somewhere...

Far superior to standard Amped Wireless repeaters. Unfortunately, the Verizon (now Frontiers) FIOS router is very poor, resulting in very poor signal strength on the second floor of my house. While the standard Amped Wireless repeater helped, connectivity and signal strength, often weaker than competing signals from neighbors' routers created very slow downloads and intermittent dropped connections altogether. While I was apprehensive about spending over $200 on this unit, due to great reviews, I decided to take a chance on the Amped Wireless Athena EX. So far, I could not be happier. Finally, the signal strength inside my house is now stronger from the Athena EX than it is from my neighbors' routers, resulting in very fast downloads and markedly improved connectivity. Despite a couple reviews that reported being unhappy with this unit due to difficulty setting up, I experienced no problems. A few users had suboptimal results with this unit as they were expecting a router rather than a repeater. If you have the opportunity to purchase a better router, this is probably the first thing to try. However, FIOS requires use of their router which is rather poor quality so this option was not available to me. Also, if you already have a good router but are experiencing limited range, this is an excellent option for extending the working range significantly.

Can only give this 3 stars, not a reflection on the seller, but on the product itself. First things first-do not try to set this up using a Mac. Once I changed to a PC, setup was amazingly easy. What I didn't realize and this is my bad I guess is that this type of extender makes you chose whether you are on your original home router or on the extended network--I guess you could lump them all together on one SSID on setup but it does slow down your speeds. This is not obvious on the box or in the instructions. So if you are trying to extend your network to cover say a garage or detached area of your home, you have to jump back and forth for the quickest connection. Or have your smart home on two networks. Inconvenient yeah--but may not be a deal breaker...I will say though the speed of this extender is the most fast internet I have ever had in my home. When I spoke to customer service to see if anything could be done he suggested I buy a whole new other thing, which includes taking down my entire network and starting from scratch. Not today. Sorry.If I can change this hiccup without losing speed I will amend this review.

Out of the box, getting to the setup is easy but for a more advanced setup downloading the manual is required. WiFi cloning/meshing was a little more indepth. Out of the box they just want you to receive your current WiFi and push it out as different SSID's. Also the boostband only works for 5Ghz band, And it is limited on what channels on the 5Ghz band it can use, 36-49 and 149-159, nothing in between. Also for this to work as a mesh it needs to be setup as a client, not auto.Once all was figured out it works Very well. I have my Pi hooked up to the wired port and I am able to stream movies from it with out issues.