TP-Link Releases The Only Wi-Fi 7 Router You Can Buy For Under $100
In time, Wi-Fi 7 routers will enter the realm of affordable territory, but it's still early and we're not there yet. Just the opposite, most of the early models are comparatively expensive to more widely available Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 6 options. There is one exception, though. TP-Link's new Archer BE3600 is not only cheaper than every other Wi-Fi 7 model on the market (of which there are not that many), it's the only one that's selling for under $100.
You can find TP-Link's Archer BE3600 for $99 at Walmart. As far as we know, Walmart has exclusive dibs on the BE3600, at least for now, as it's not listed for sale anywhere else that we can find. Furthermore, TP-Link's product page only directs interested buyers to the Walmart listing.
That's budget territory for sure, and naturally it comes with some compromises. For one, it's only a dual-band model with speeds that are not going to blow other Wi-Fi 7 routers out of the water—you're looking at up to 2,882Mbps on the 5GHz band and 688Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. There's no 6GHz band to be found.
As for wired connections, there's a single 2.5Gbps LAN port and three 1Gbps LAN ports.
To put those speeds into perspective, TP-Link's flagship and much more expensive (on sale for $492.98 at Amazon, down from $599.99 MSRP) Archer BE19000 offers speeds of up to 11,520Mbps on the 6GHz band, 5,760Mbps on the 5GHz band, and 1,376Mbps on the 2.4GHz band. It also features a two 10Gbps LAN ports and four 2.5Gbps LAN ports. Same goes for its Archer GE800 that we wrote about last month.
There's no contest on which is the more performant router, though the flagship model also costs 5-6X more. And therein lies the point of the Archer BE3600. It's an affordable gateway to Wi-Fi 7, with speeds and features that TP-Link is banking on being good enough for the budget buyer who wants the latest tech.
It's an interesting proposition, in part because it will likely be a long while before the benefits of Wi-Fi are fully realized. In and of itself, simply swapping out your router for a Wi-Fi 7 model doesn't magically make your devices be any faster. Your devices need to be Wi-Fi 7 capable as well, to take full advantage of the spec.
That said, one of the biggest benefits of Wi-Fi 7 is a feature called Multi-Link Operation (MLO). Without getting into the weeds, this enables devices to communicate over multiple bands and channels at the same time, which in turn can lessen network congestion, improve latency, and improve performance.
