Review: Belkin AC1200DB 11ac router

My full review of Belkin's first two-stream (867Mbps) 11ac router, the AC1200DB, has just been published on Computeractive's website (although I actually wrote the review some time ago). It is a decent router, but has no particularly outstanding features. Its street price has come down quite a bit since I looked at it, which does make it a bit more attractive, as it's now one of the cheapest 11ac models available. I think I'd probably opt for it over the similarly-priced D-Link DIR-865L, purely on the basis that the D-Link didn't work well with my SIP phone service (a problem with the SIP ALG, I think - disabling that fixed it).

The AC1200DB's 11ac performance was excellent (I tested it using Linksys and Netgear client bridges), and not far off the three-stream devices I've seen, but 11n performance was very average in my usual noisy domestic test environment (I'm getting used to this - it seems that since the Wi-Fi Alliance enforced 'good neighbour' policies on vendors, 11n performance has plateaued). At the time of testing, Belkin had no matching USB client adapter, but that's now been rectified and I hope to review a sample here in the near future.

Over 160Mbps at close range

Still managed over 40Mbps at 25m

It includes free Norton Contentsafe parental controls, which are all-or-nothing  controls that affect all PCs

Odd choice of wording in the setup wizard!

It can only be used standing up, there's no wall-mount capability

The new Belkin logo features prominently

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