Page 2 - Physical Look - Hardware
Just like the TP-Link Archer C3150, this Archer C2300 follows in a very similar design, albeit on a smaller scale. As such, the entire body is black, with some silver accents in various places, including the silver border around the entire router. The top panel shows off some glossy and matte finishes, with the glossy area near the front of the device and the matte near the back. I really wish they moved away from this glossy take, as it is a fingerprint and dust magnet, making it quite hard to keep this router clean. In the middle is a bar split in half horizontally. The top of the bar is where all the notification LEDs exist, while the bottom is a single large button. These LEDs include indication of the Archer C2300's power, 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz, Internet, Ethernet, WPS connection, and both USB ports' status. Otherwise, you can see the matte area has a grille to allow for air to pass through the device for cooling purposes. TP-Link has also kept branding to a minimum, with just the company's logo on the left side.
As you can see from the photo, the TP-Link Archer C2300 is intended to lie flat on your desk rather than aligning vertically for space saving, though you could prop it up if you so desired. In terms of dimensions, the router is 216mm in width, 164mm in depth, and 36.8mm in height without any antennas attached. This is smaller than the Archer C2300 in all dimensions. In addition, the three antennas can add up to 140mm in height when configured like the photo above. Internally, we have a dual-core 1.8GHz Broadcom BCM4906, 512MB of RAM, and 128MB of flash memory.
Turning the TP-Link Archer C2300 around, we can take a closer look at the three dual band antennas attached to the router, all at the back, along with some of the ports and switches. These antennas are matte black with zero other logos engraved. As for the ports, from left to right, we have a 12V DC power input, a power switch, one Gigabit uplink port, and four Gigabit Ethernet ports. The rest of the inputs and outputs can be found on the left side of the device, as we will see soon enough.
You might be wondering, what is the purpose of all these antennas? As per the Editor-in-Chief Jonathan Kwan, the use of multiple antennas for communications has been the foundation of many modern wireless technologies; ranging from short range unlicensed bands such as Wi-Fi to long range licensed bands like LTE cell phone networks. The fundamental principle lies in the fact that multiple antennas allow the designer to enhance performance using beamforming and diversity techniques. Beamforming, in the simplest explanation, allows power to be directed towards a certain direction. Diversity exploits multipath -- where the same signal can arrive via different paths due to reflection and refraction in the propagation channel -- to enhance the received signal quality. Multi-user MIMO, otherwise called MU-MIMO, lets multiple antennas from multiple users to communicate with multiple antennas on base station. Obviously, the more antennas on the access point the better, but we are bound by the laws of diminishing returns.
As the name of the router is "TP-Link Archer C2300", this is advertised as an AC2300 router. This means it operates at 600Mbps on the 2.4GHz band via one 40MHz channel with four streams, while a single 80MHz channel, with five streams, on the 5GHz band provides 1625Mbps for a total of 2300Mbps theoretical throughput. In addition to this, the TP-Link Archer C2300 features a higher modulation rate of 1024-QAM, which is advertised as NitroQAM by Broadcom. We will evaluate the performance of this router in just a moment.
Just like its bigger brother, the TP-Link Archer C2300 includes more inputs and outputs on the left side of the router. On this side, we have a switch to toggle the Wi-Fi on and off, reset pinhole, Wi-Fi Protected Setup button, USB 2.0 port, and a USB 3.0 port. These ports can be used for plugging simple devices like flash memory. Personally, I like the fact TP-Link placed these ports on the side, as these ports and buttons are more frequently accessed than the ones at the back, and should be easier to access at this location.
From the underside, you can see more of the TP-Link Archer C2300's ventilation holes. Four plastic feet can be found protruding out here with one in each corner. These lift the bottom of the router off the ground by about half a centimeter. It would have been nice to see more clearance, as laying the router on any softer or plushier surface will mean these vents will not have a lot of airflow. I sometimes found the router getting a bit warm when resting the router on carpet rather than a hard surface, though the extra heat should not be too concerning. There are also two wall mounts to let you hook the Archer C2300 off the ground and onto the wall if you so desire. A label exists in the middle to display information like the serial number, default SSID, as well as the default wireless password. Obviously, you can change these later on, but these are the defaults for getting started. The link to the configuration page for this router can also be found on this sticker.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. Physical Look - Hardware
3. Configuration and User Interface
4. Performance Tests
5. Conclusion
