Review: TP-LINK N300 Wi-Fi Range Extender (TL-WA855RE)

• May 16, 2016
• James Skemp
• review

The following is a review of the TP-LINK N300 Wi-Fi Range Extender (TL-WA855RE), provided to me as part of the Amazon Vine program.

Works, but only at 2.4 GHz

Even in my apartment I have a slight dead zone at the farthest end of my apartment. I’ve tried using a router to extend my connection in the past, but they’ve all required a wired connection to the device itself.

With the TP-LINK N300 you simply need to connect it to your wireless router and then plug it into the wall within range. It can then send out a unique SSID (the default) or attempt to use the same SSID as the wireless signal you’re trying to extend.

It does feature the ability to plug a wired device in, however, it doesn’t require a wired connection to work.

And it does seem to work rather well.

The initial setup is pretty easy. You connect into the device using a wireless device and then pull up the administrative interface. You’ll immediately need to create a new username and password, and can then connect to the wireless signal you want to extend.

Unfortunately I did run into an issue where I was attempting to use spaces in the password and while I was getting an error message it wasn’t telling me what was wrong. Only after removing the spaces (I also had punctuation which was fine) was I able to proceed.

This device only works in the 2.4 GHz space, however, which means that as 5 GHz continues to be the lowest common denominator you’ll get slightly less use from this as time goes by.

The device can be plugged into a standard outlet in either position, which means that you’ll still have access to the second plug, and you could put it into the top position if you needed to plug a brick into the lower one.

I put this into a bedroom and the amount of light that comes off of the device is pretty minimal.

Thus far the only real dig I have against the TP-LINK N300 Wi-Fi Range Extender (TL-WA855RE) is that it doesn’t support the 5 GHz spectrum, which means that speeds will slightly suffer. However, it’s easy to use, and an improved signal is better than no signal at all. 4 of 5 stars.

• review