We first brought you news of the new AC standard for WiFi a few months back, but come the middle of August, you’ll be able to buy it in Australia. Belkin’s AC1200 DB Wi-Fi Dual-Band AC+ Gigabit Router is also known as model number F9K1113 and sells for A$279.95 RRP. Given this is the top tier of consumer wireless routers, the price is reasonable all things considered.
The AC1200 DB is up to 2.8 times faster than current 802.11n WiFi, operating at 300Mbps on 2.4GHz + 867Mbps on 5GHz. This kind of speed allows for uninterrupted HD streaming to multiple devices simultaneously. Given the AC router provides a signal intelligently to the devices around it, mobile devices will require less power to receive the high-speed data.
This does raise one issue with being an early adopter of 802.11AC.. most of your devices (game consoles, TVs, mobile phones, tablets, laptops) don’t yet support the new standard. This will happen over time, especially with some of the worlds biggest manufactures already signed up to support it.
MultiBeam technology provides a high-powered signal for maximum coverage across the entire home. Even better is the fact that AC knows where the devices around it are located and provide higher power in that direction. DLNA is supported to push multimedia throughout your home and IPv6 compatibility makes sure you are future-proof when it comes to IP allocation.
A great feature of the Belkin AC1200 router is its backward-compatibility with previous generations of Wi-Fi, this means you can buy it now and it’ll just get better over time. As Wi-Fi surges forward, there are some devices that don’t support WiFi at all. For those scenarios, there’s 4 Gigabit ports available for maximum network speeds.
Image credit: ChipChick
