Are you looking for a decent router for your home or a small office? Well, Linksys routers have been considered to be among the best value products available on the market. They come with decent functionality and performance, at affordable and reasonable prices. For a budget around a hundred bucks or so, you may have narrowed your options to Linksys AC1200 and Linksys AC1600. The AC1200 is quite considerably cheaper than the AC1600. What are the differences between the two products?
Design
If we put the routers side by side, we can see that Linksys AC1200 is a little bit bulkier. It has two external antennas, allowing you to adjust the directions of the wireless signal projection more properly toward the devices in the network. At the contrast, Linksys AC1600 is quite slimmer, without any external antenna.
Well, although Linksys AC1600 does not have any external antenna, this doesn’t mean that it has inferior network performance and reliability. In fact, it can be quite better than Linksys AC1200 because it already supports the beamforming technology. The feature allows the router to focus the wireless signal towards every connected device on the network, ensuring enhanced stability and reliability. Linksys AC1200 does not support the beamforming technology yet.
Performance
As mentioned before, the beamforming technology of Linksys AC1600 can be a very beneficial feature to promote better connections. In addition, Linksys AC1600 also comes with more bandwidth than Linksys AC1200. The AC1600 can give you 300 Mbps for the 2.4 GHz frequency and 1300 Mbps for the 5 GHz frequency. On the other hand, the AC1200 only has 300 Mbps and 867 Mbps for the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies, respectively. Having more bandwidth means getting a higher maximum speed.
Connection Ports
Another notable difference is the available connection ports. Indeed, each of them has one WAN, four LAN, and one USB ports. However, Linksys AC1200 still relies on USB 2.0. At the contrast, Linksys AC1600 already utilizes USB 3.0. You should be aware that USB 3.0 is a lot faster than USB 2.0. This advantage of Linksys AC1600 is especially very important if you plan to port a network-attached storage via the USB port.
Linksys AC1200 vs. AC1600
Although it requires some extra bucks more than Linksys AC1200, Linksys AC1600 holds numerous useful advantages. For a significantly better and more reliable performance, you should choose Linksys AC1600!
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