On September 16, 2019, the Wi-Fi Alliance announced the launch of the Wi-Fi 6 certification program. At that time, the price of the WiFi 6 router was basically maintained at more than 1,000 yuan ($140). On February 13 this year, Xiaomi released its first WiFi6 router, the Xiaomi AIoT router AX3600. This product was sold out at its launch. And the price of 599 yuan ($84) played a huge role. Now, Xiaomi has brought the Xiaomi router AX1800 to consumers, which is also a WiFi 6 router. This product directly lowers the price to about 300 yuan ($42). Also, it allows more people to enjoy the latest technology on the market at a lower price.
Appearance
In fact, this router looks similar to the Xiaomi router AC2100. But the Xiaomi router AX1800 is more ‘square’. On the other hand, corners of this router look similar to the Xiaomi AIoT router AX3600. So in some sense we can say the Xiaomi router AX1800 is like two Xiaomi AIoT routers AX3600 with the antenna removed.
The Xiaomi router AX1800 adopts a cuboid shape design. The whole body is made of black engineering plastic material. The surface has been matte treated. It looks very textured. The four sides are divided by four grilles, making the appearance of this product less monotonous. So when placed next to the Xiao Ai Speaker Pro, we can clearly understand which of them is this router. The front of the router is equipped with two indicator lights, which represent the Internet and the system. There is also a gold text logo on the fuselage. And the Mi Router AX1800 is printed on the other side.
A good heat dissipation system is an important prerequisite for the stable operation of the router. The rectangular body of the Xiaomi router AX1800 comes with high-quality metal heat sinks and a tower structure to optimize heat dissipation. Large areas of heat dissipation holes are left at the top and bottom of this product to achieve large channel convection and keep the router in stable operation at all times.
Hardware
Some flagship models last year have already supported the WiFi 6 network. With the full popularity of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 mobile platform this year, WiFi 6 has become the standard for flagship devices. If you are using a product equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 mobile platform, then the Xiaomi router AX1800 using the Qualcomm IPQ6000 SoC will be a better choice.
This is because the router SoC and the phone SoC are from the same chip manufacturer. Through the end-to-end solution, it not only provides the best performance but also it guarantees the compatibility and stability of the device when used together.
The Qualcomm IPQ6000 SoC also uses a 14nm process technology. It comes with 4-core 64-bit A53 1.2GHz CPU + single-core 1.5 GHz NPU. The addition of the NPU freed the CPU that originally needed to process and forward continuous small data packets from this work. It provides users with better network performance. As the network acceleration engine of the processor, NPU can theoretically increase the router throughput by 21%. Also, it can reduce the CPU data occupation by up to 95%.
In the actual test, we used an Android flagship machine equipped with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 mobile platform. We have upgraded the broadband at home to 500 megabytes. So it can better demonstrate the speed advantage of WiFi 6. According to Speedtest results, under the 5G WiFi 6 network environment provided by the Xiaomi router AX1800, the download speed reaches 624Mbpss and the upload speed is 37.7Mbps, which can fully tap the bandwidth limit.
However, the advantages of WiFi 6 are not only in speed. The Xiaomi router AX1800 supports OFDMA technology. OFDMA has the advantages of high bandwidth, high concurrency, low latency, low power consumption, combined with hidden dual-band high-performance antennas and four Qovro high-performance independent signal amplifiers. The Xiaomi router AX1800 can complete the data transmission of up to 8 devices in one session. And the network delay can be reduced by 66%. Compared with the mainstream WiFi5 AC1200 router, the wireless rate can be increased by 52%. Also, the signal strength can be increased by 4dB, and the theoretical coverage can be increased by 50%.
We used the WiFi evaluation master to test the Xiaomi router AX1800 to see what performance this product can provide to users in the best condition. After connecting to the 5G WiFi network, we conducted a comprehensive test at a distance of one meter from the router. As you can see from the picture, the average delay of the Xiaomi router AX1800 is 15.7ms, the packet loss rate is 0%; the signal strength is -23dBm, the connection rate is 1200Mbps; the webpage response speed is 0.01s, the loading speed is 20.4Mbps, and the full load time is 0.16s; the broadband download rate is 456.2Mbps, the upload speed is 42.5Mbps; the buffer time for video on demand is 0.16s, and the number of freezes 0, the buffer rate is 131.2Mbps. We can that after testing, the actual performance of the Xiaomi router AX1800 is consistent with the official introduction. When broadband is connected to the device, it makes full use of every megabyte of bandwidth.
Functions
The Xiaomi router AX1800 continues many excellent functions of the previous generation products, such as children’s Internet protection, visitor WiFi, anti-rub network, WiFi optimization and many other functions. Users can also directly set the corresponding options on the Xiaomi WiFi App. And Xiaomi router also has built-in Tencent game acceleration. As the name implies, it can accelerate the domestic and overseas service games of mainstream game platforms such as smartphones, PCs, PS4, XBOX, Switch, etc.
It is reported that Xiaomi’s IoT platform has 235 million connected devices, and Xiaoai’s monthly active users are 60+ million. 4.1 million users have 5 or more Xiaomi IoT devices.
The router, as the infrastructure for networking devices in the home, plays a vital role in the smart home ecosystem. The Xiaomi router AX1800 is equipped with 256MB of large memory. It theoretically supports 128 devices to be accessed at the same time. It also supports one-click network distribution for Xiaomi IoT devices, eliminating the tedious manual input of account passwords. At the same time, the Xiaomi WiFi App can also monitor the security and privacy vulnerabilities of mainstream IoT devices to protect the network security of the smart home ecosystem.
What’s more important, the Xiaomi router AX1800 is still a product that can continue to evolve. For example, many Mesh networks required by many large-sized users will be upgraded and supported before June 30. Through Mesh networking, multiple devices can bid farewell to the dilemma of a single router signal, which can easily handle a variety of complex apartment types, and the entire house signal is seamlessly covered.
The bottom line
The emergence of the Xiaomi router AX1800 has lowered the threshold for users to use the WiFi 6 network. If you have relatively high requirements for network speed, the fiber optic broadband in your home has been upgraded to 500 megabytes or even gigabit broadband. Usually you use the network to watch videos, play games, and upload files. In this sense, the Xiaomi router AX1800 is more than enough. If you are a serious digital enthusiast, there are a large number of devices in your home that need to be connected to the Internet, and the more expensive AX3600 should be more convenient.