As mentioned in my last post, I was in the hunt for a new router to replace the aging Buffalo WHR-HP-G54. I’d found that it wasn’t capable of handling fibre broadband speeds (hardly surprising… given that it’s running a 200MHz single core CPU with barely a few megs free of the 16Mb RAM).

I ended up dropping by PC World and picking up the TP-Link Archer C2 for £49.99 (a few quid more expensive than it was at Scan, but PC World was closer, so I was saving petrol money and around 30 minutes of my time for the round-trip).

So… first impressions…

• It’s a bit of a brute! I’ve owned much smaller routers in the past. It’s not quite as beasty as the Linksys we once had, but it definitely takes up a little more desk space.
• Mmmm… shiny! The pattern on the top of quite nice. I think they call it “piano black” when it’s all glossy.
• It will attract dust and fingerprints worse than a monitor screen :(

So on with the setup! It actually went really easily. The router has a decent wizard process to follow where you select the connection type (I picked PPPoE and provided my login credentials), the wireless settings (enabling security… of course!) and then it was all up and running. One minor complaint is that it didn’t prompt me to change the login details from the defaults of admin/admin. I did however manage to do that myself through the configuration pages.

So did it solve the issue I was having with the downstream speeds being restricted? Hell yeah! A quick speed test afterwards gave me a result of 68.6Mbps downstream and 18.8Mbps upstream. Which was nice.