TP-Link AC1200 4G+ Cat6 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router
TP-Link AC1200 4G+ Cat6 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router, 4G Network SIM Slot Unlocked, with MU-MIMO technology, No Configuration required, Guest Network & Parental Control, UK Plug (Archer MR500)
Full Gigabit Ethernet ports provide reliable, warp-speed connections for high-intensive wired devices such as your smart TV, game console, NAS, and more. MR500 also provides a WAN port compatible with cable, fiber, and DSL modems.
Boost Your Broadband Speeds with 4G+ Internet
Whether you’re bingeing HD movies, downloading entire libraries of data, or gaming online, MR500’s boosted 300 Mbps download speeds fulfils your devices’ needs.
More Data Streams with MU-MIMO Technology
MU-MIMO technology enables multiple devices connect to the internet at the same time, reducing wait time, increasing Wi-Fi throughput for every device, and boosting the efficiency of each data stream.
Easy Setup and Management
Set up Archer MR500 in minutes thanks to its intuitive web interface and the powerful Tether app. Tether also lets you manage its network settings from any Android or iOS device, including parental controls and access control.
| Weight: | 320 g |
| Dimensions: | 20.2 x 14.1 x 3.36 cm; 320 Grams |
| Brand: | TP-Link |
| Model: | ARCHER MR500 |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | TP-Link Direct Business UK |
| Dimensions: | 20.2 x 14.1 x 3.36 cm; 320 Grams |
For the most part, better or equivalent speeds to my previous fixed line BT broadband and with the benefit of a monthly data SIM I’m not longer tied into 12/24m contracts with above inflation increases every March. Winning all round, so far.
On the box it says “Get a SIM card and PLUG & PLAY”
And it really does exactly as it says on the box !!
There’s plenty of videos and written guidance on the web
So if you have the courage and welcome the challenge……….go for it, “it’s not rocket science”.
Having bought my second TPLink router here in the UK. I found that the signal from my mobile provider (Tesco) kept on dropping out.
This was a pain because each time I had to reboot it.
I contacted TP link UK chat support and they patiently talked me thrugh updating the settings.
Great 4G router. You just need to make sure the SIM card you will use doesn’t require a PIN so before you use it insert the sim in a phone and deactivate the PIN
Will try to update with some actual numbers – but as of writing I don’t have the box with me. Though when I’ve used this, it will improve my mobile hotspot connection over wifi considerably. More importantly for me is the ethernet connection which improves even further.
The only thing is you have to connect to internet and put in your pin number for your sim card if you have one if you have no pin number it should work fine my one working fine
Needed a backup to ensure resilience when wfh. I had expected complications, but I was wrong. Plugged pre paid data sim in. Turned on. Had more reliable than fixed Wi-Fi.
It arrived a couple of days early, I literally plugged my SIM in and it was online! It gives decent coverage and speed up to now and I’m really happy with it.
Did well for 9 months but for the last week now only 3mbs down from20. Nothing has changed…just the weather…too hot?? Now I changed the firmware and the weather is cooler and all is gooood … 35 mbs
Purchased asi need wifi in.my workshop. Poor signal area…… but it works great. Put a giffgaff sim in it, and it was up and working in minutes! Impressed I am.
Sky kept upping prices so I bought this with a SMARTY sim and have had such a good signal on it. Stayed connected all the time and is considerably cheaper!easy to use
Only tried one other( more expensive) This one works really well.Couldnt get wifi on our phones and tried 3 other network providers, went with voxi. Can stream football,Netflix and prime with ease. Would definitely recommend
Fine for our occasional use in a church (only used at weekends and occasional use during week).
We combined the router with a sim deal from Gif-Gaf which only costs us 10 per month.
With our data volume consumption, it provides a price and we are well within the 20gb data tarif.
I have tested this out for a month now. It has been a brilliant replacement for Virgin Media. I obtained a Smarty sim card for it. There are however other suppliers.
The unit has good WiFi coverage and covers into my garden from the loft where the hub is situated. (Better Than VM).
Sometimes I get slow internet but not too slow, this I must say is due to the 4G network and Not the Hub
This is the best choice I have made, saving me money in the long run.
I have been a supporter of usb broadband for many years but its always needed setting up and a USB stick. Well this TPLink is fantastic. It’s totally unlocked so any nano sim just fits and away you go. Really impressed.
Bought to replace another router which picks up wi fi signal but this one didn’t find signal so back to original returned item
Well please with this product, it works first time. easy to set up and works with my mobile phone SIM.
Quality is good and the signal etc is excellent.
10 out of 10 would definitely recommend.
Tp-Link routers gives excellent internet coverage on laptop, phones and allows us to watch Netflix, Amazon Prime, powers the Alexa. We are in rural Aberdeenshire (no BT landline/broadband) and we are amazed by this gadget. Thank you Tp-link for keeping us connected.
Good speeds, no problems with it so far. Very rarely cuts out but could be the SIM card
This is a router that you can put a SIM card in, and create your own WiFi.
Whether you’re in a hotel, student accommodation, on holiday or your own home, then this is perfect.
I’m able to buy an unlimited SIM from smarty for 16 a month, and can watch the sports channels on now TV, Amazon prime, BBC iPlayer, itvx and other streaming sites.
I get 75% signal strength, as I don’t live in a big town. However this is perfect.
Within 5 months the savings from not buying fixed line broadband has paid for the router.
Highly recommended this router. Although do make sure you’re in a good mobile reception location.
Originally bought the Netgear Nighthawk for over 4x the cost of this one. It wouldn’t connect with any of the SIM cards I put in it.
Bought this and within 5 minute of inserting my Tesco Mobile Sim I was online. Saving myself a fortune against landline rental and broadband costs. Paid for itself in 3 months and saving me approx 30 a month after that.
Just as quick if not quicker that landline broadband.
Used a little and eventually swapped it for a Huawei one, cannot recommend it if you rely on 4g as you main home interne
This wasn’t the cheapest one around (68) but it is made by a well known and reliable company. Nice design, not bulky and comes with power cable so it’s not portable. Very pleased and delivered next day, even when I had chosen free standard. Thanks Amazon definitely recommend
It has all the features of my older Archer C9, but uses less power (smaller PSU) , DDNS service including NO-IP and tp-link , built in VPN , PPTP and OpenVPN
In my area it is using the dual 4G towers to get a 100% signal at 70Mbs using antennas supplied. I may change to external ones with a bit more research to improve further.
As a test, I started 2 x UHD playback from BBC on separate TVs while connected to V.Media Cable and then pulled the VM box network cable (used as a modem only), the router changed over without any video interruption or buffering, to 4G operation.
That was the 3G/4G fallback in wifirouter mode. It can be used purely as a 3/4G router if needed.
I used a new Vodafone sim card which needed no configuration, just insert and it does the rest.
choose a plan where you only need to top up 5-10 every 90-120 days to minimise costs, could be any network with 3 or 4G but check network for best coverage in your area
I did have issues with mine as the network in my area is prone to outages and I live in a bit of a dead zone so it just didn’t really work out for for my use case but you shouldn’t really hold that against the device.
Setting up is a doddle and I am far from IT savvy. I simply inserted the Smarty SIM card I already had in my mobile wifi box, plugged in to the mains and let the router pick up the 4g signal. Two minutes later I have internet access. No faffing about with complicated (for me) configuration. I then went around positioning the router in various places in the house to find where the best 4g signal reception would be and where the wifi would reach all the necessary rooms. I have an old and long cottage with thick stone walls so it took a bit of time and there were a few areas with weak wifi reception. So I used a couple of TP-Link range extenders I already had which boost the signal to acceptable levels in more distant rooms. I get between 15 and 50+ Mbps download and 4-10 Mbps upload speeds. After 4 days they’ve been reliable and stable. Importantly, I get 40+ Mbps to my home cinema setup which means I can stream 4K programmes.
I will give it a month or so to be sure it’s reliable then most likely I’ll terminate my Airband service. A Smarty unlimited data SIM costs about 18 per month, a lot less than the 38.50 per month Airband now want to charge me.
A more powerful wifi signal would be the only thing I’d want from the TP Link router and perhaps a longer mains cable. Otherwise I think it is an ideal way to get cheap fast broadband in an area too far from the exchange to get fibre broadband. For those with a weaker 4g signal, an external antenna might be useful and that seems to be a fairly straightforward thing to install.
I’ve managed to connect my smart tv, iPhone, homepods and laptop.
It was fairly easy to set up (make sure you access the admin interface on your computer and change the wifi password!!). You can also install an app on your phone to access the router’s admin menu.
I thought this takes a nano sim card but it doesn’t, it’s actually the micro card that it takes but they’ve enclosed an adapter to put the nano in then slot it in to the router. Please note you’ll have to insert an unlocked sim card in to the router (i.e.: a sim card which doesn’t require a pin number to work) but if you don’t have one, you can disable the sim card’s pin through the router’s admin menu on your laptop.
Speeds are ok-ish, watchign HD content on tv is ok but you do get some pixelation and buffering at times. If you can afford the 5G routers, go for one for those but they’re so much more expensive sadly.
The router offers ethernet connections as well (which is fab) as well as dual band, 2.4GHz and 5GHz (which I assume is why it’s so expensive!). You can disable either bands or have them both at the same time (then the devices choose which one they connect to).
Bizarrely it comes with a very short charging cable.
Overall:
Good if you can’t get a broadband connection where you are but you have very strong mobile network signal but very expensive (I paid 119, I expected a good 4G router would be around 50-60 max).
We live in a rather underprivileged area as regards broadband. Despite being in London, we cannot yet get fibre broadband and BT “copper” broadband is limited to about 5mbps – and it’s so unreliable, we are unable to reliably watch streaming films or sport.
So, I decided to try mobile broadband with this router. While we are surrounded by masts, only one is in direct line of sight but is fairly distant. So, after some experiments, I opted for a Poynting external ‘directional’ antenna. Having further experimented with a few provider SIMs, surprisingly, I found O2 to give by far the best service (I had assumed it would EE). Then, some fine tuning of the antenna was necessary to get the best signal and speeds.
I opted for a Tesco “SIM Only” unlimited data plan – being the most cost effective contract without hidden data limits (and it uses the O2 network).
This router itself is easy to setup and provides fast and consistent service. We consistently get 4G+ downloads of 70+ mbps. Indeed, in the evenings we get over 100mbps. Signal quality is 75%. That is excellent – 4G+ really works for us!
Another reason for getting this particular router is the capability of setting LTE bands manually. Given the number of masts in our area, there are unusual problems with reflected signals and, at certain times of the day, the router would automatically switch to another band. This not only slowed down downloads, it also interupted streaming viewing – particularly annoying during a football match…..
By manually setting the LTE bands (we use 40, 40), this problem was eliminated and we are rather chuffed.
With the 4x gigabit LAN ports, integration into our home network was easy. This allows access to our printers, home NAS, Blu-ray player, TVs and Humax YouView box. Connection to a DECO Mesh setup extends the router’s fast 5GHz WiFi to everywhere in the house – including the all-important but distant kitchen!
As such, this particular router is ideal for our requirements and we are very pleased. It did take some time and thought to get the home environment set up correctly but, it was well worth it.
Goodbye BT, your high prices and poor service!
NOTE. If you require a 4G+ router that allows manual LTE band selection for aggregation, there aren’t many available choices. This, IMHO, is the best at a reasonable price. However, beware, the V1 version of this router does NOT feature this functionality unless you get a special Beta version of the firmware from TP-Link support. So, opt for the V2 device – which is also a few pounds cheaper.
The V2 device also has the useful option for scheduled reboots. I set ours to reboot at 4am every other night. That can help in keeping things running smoothly.
I previously purchased a V1 of this router for my daughter’s house. Like most users, she doesn’t need the manual LTE band setting capability. Her router has now run without any issues or need of a reset for over 9 months. I wrote a separate review for that device.
The Router has 4 Ethernet connections and can handle 32 devices connected via WiFi, this is enough for us as we usually use WiFi and have only 2 devices hard wired to the Router, both Solar Battery System and our Video Surveilance System work best with fixed IP addresses assigned to their MAC address.
It’s very easy to set up the Router to do exactly what you want it to do; for details on full features like Firewall, VPN, Channel Forwarding, Parental Control, Guest Network, Data limit notification, Whitelist, Blacklist, etc etc please do check the User Guide PDF which Amazon.co.uk has available in the “Product Details”
This Router offers many features you will not find on any consumer products but on professional equipment only, yet you won’t need a CCNA to setup your Router at all. From my point of view, the User Interface is nothing short of excellent and I think even a layman will be able to do a full setup -with all bells and whistles- like a pro.
I placed a SIM card (2nd smallest setting “Micro”) into the Router, connected my computer via Ethernet cable, and logged in to the router. After updating the APN settings with what I found for my mobile phone service’s mobile internet settings, I just registered the 2 MAC addresses for reserved IP addresses, left the WiFi channel on automatic, changed WiFi network name and password and all our devices in the house were good to go. I have rarely seen a switch going that smoothly.
The benefits of having a SIM card Router are, you only need a power socket and therefore it can be placed almost anywhere in the house, and there is also absolutely no hassle if ever moving house.
The signal I receive with my SIM card gives currently 35MB/Sec Download, 12MB/Sec Upload, this is sufficient speed to watch a 4K movie on our Amazon Fire TV Cube and at the same time a Youtube video on another device, we even threw in a Skype Video conference for good measure. No lag, no interruptions, no issues at all. This all on a mobile internet connection? I’m seriously impressed! But I am from a generation that used acoustic coupler and speeds of 600 BAUD on dial-up.
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PS.
My thanks to Vodafone Ireland. Your policy of existing, loyal customers being charged 50 per month while new customers pay only 30 for 12 months (on a new 12-month contract), is forcing customers to be not loyal and switch provider. You geniuses managed to burn at least this bridge, as I switched to a 7.99 per month SIM card offering 100GB Data and I will not be coming back, ever. Let’s call it out: this Router is paid for within 3 months and then I’ll be constantly saving 22 monthly compared even to your new customer deal. No more hassle of moving provider or trying to persuade you to appreciate loyal customers while being told to be grateful that I have a 10discount and pay only 40 per month. Thanks for making my decision that easy, especially if there are great Routers like this TP-Link available – compared to your outdated and meager Huawei HG658c, on which you also frequently erased my settings via remote access.
Several friends will finish their contract with you soon and they were all impressed with the Router and my monthly costs, it seems you just lost yourself a few more cash cows continue to promote customer dis-loyalty. Bye-bye!
The other reviews saying that it was a true plug and play type of thing didn’t really match my experience. One issue is due to no fault of the hardware itself – we get our broadband through Sky, who it turns out actually go out of their way to try to stop you from using your own kit. As I’m not totally without technical ability I managed to circumvent all this, but if you’re looking for the “plug and play” experience but have Sky as your broadband provider I’d have to recommend against a device like this. Incidentally if anyone wants to know what I did to make this work feel free to leave a comment.
Secondly, while it seemed to work fine initially (and was actually our sole source of broadband for a while for reasons I won’t go into), one day about a month later I switched over to 4G and was surprised to find the speed we were getting had slowed right down. It was at roughly the same speed we got through the fixed line broadband, which was horrifying when you consider the entire reason I’d bought into all this. Worse, it would completely drop every now and again. It still worked fine in home broadband mode which you would have thought would have placed the blame squarely on EE, or at least the 4G hardware inside the unit, but as it turns out it was actually the most basic of things – I had to choose a different wi-fi channel for the router. Nothing at all would have suggested a problem with the wi-fi – everything was showing good signal, even when the net had completely dropped. However setting the channel manually, and setting the bandwidth to 20hz made the 4G connection literally 10x faster and stopped the drops. Bizarrely, it would seem that if left to its own devices, the device will sometimes automatically set the wi-fi channel to something that interferes with the 4G. That’s astonishingly stupid.
So yeah, in summary, even if all the evidence points to something else, try messing with the wi-fi channel if you have problems as the auto channel detection is apparently rubbish. However, that aside, the product is now working perfectly and I am more than happy with it day to day.
UPDATE: Removing a star. Internet drops have started to rear their head again in spite of messing with the wifi channel. It is looking like the same issue myself and others have reported – all signal bars are fine, yet the internet keeps going down for a few moments, and more frequently than is acceptable. And again, only in 4G mode. Being pretty sure this wasn’t EE’s fault (the signal, speed and reliability we get on our phones is outstanding) I started wondering what was unique about the 4G setup versus switching to broadband. This led me to the DNS server – for reasons I won’t go into, in 4G mode it was using TP-Link’s default DNS server, and in broadband mode it uses Sky’s. Wondering whether the TP-Link DNS server was flaky I switched over to Google’s DNS (8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 if you’re interested) and since then, the connection seems much more stable. I couldn’t get it to drop once while stress testing it last night – but I won’t say emphatically that the problem is resolved because I said that about the wifi channel didn’t I? Something for people to try though, if you have the same problems.
I’ll update again when I’m satisfied the problem is resolved, or if I needed to do more work. Starting to envy the people for whom this was “plug and play” – it hasn’t been my experience in the slightest.
FINAL UPDATE: Well, it’s been a good nine months and things have definitely settled down, so I’m re-adding a star. 4G is generally slower than our mobiles, but it’s fine and definitely faster than our awful Sky broadband. To recap, using Google’s DNS was ESSENTIAL, and you may also get better results by altering the wireless channel and bandwidth settings. In reference to the comment on this review, I haven’t marked it down for any of Sky’s issues at all.