[section_title title=Closer Look]
Closer Look
To the main event itself. The TP-Link RE200 comes in a white plastic moulded plastic shell, the front of which is bumpy to the touch. This gives the look of the RE200 a nice white a grey effect which is caused by light reflection. The TP-Link logo is printed into the top half of the RE200 in a light grey colour which looks very attractive.
The bottom half of the front of the RE200 we can see the diamond shape WPS connect button which when powered on is green, along with greyed out power, ethernet, WiFi on, 2.4G, and 5G LEDs to indicate which of the 5 features are active. Again all 5 of these small LEDs glow green when active.
The bottom of the RE200 is where we will find the Ethernet port, this is a 10/100mbps port and a reset button for the device. Holding this in for around 10 seconds will reset it to factory defaults.
The rear of the RE200 is covered with some model information, industry requirements information, serial number and MAC code for this particular RE200 model. It also contains the default TP-Link SSID should you have to use method B (not WPS connection) to set up the WiFi connection with your router.
I bought the TP-Link RE200 AC750 today and honestly it was such a disappointment! I use the powerline adapters and there amazing but this is such a let down. It can’t pick up the wifi anywhere in the house unless it’s in the same room. Makes it kinda useless!
Hey Mick, thanks for letting us know what’s going on with your Wi-Fi extender. I didn’t review the product so I can’t speak for our editor’s experience, but having used a very cheap extender / repeater I can see that what you’re reporting is certainly not what anyone would expect when they buy such a device.
There are a couple of things you can do which may improve the situation…
1) Download a wi-fi sniffer app onto your smartphone to get a visual representation of not only your network but also all other local networks which might be causing interference. If your neighbour has a powerful router running on the same channel as your network it can cause interference and greatly reduce the effectiveness of your wifi setup. There are plenty of free apps that will do the job for both Android and iPhone, the one I use on Android is made by Netgear and called Wifi Analytics. It’ll give you an easy to read graph showing all bandwidth use and armed with that info you can take the guesswork out of finding a clear channel for your network. I’m not saying the Netgear app is the best choice, it’s simply the one I use and because it does everything I needed it wasn’t necessary for me to look further into the alternatives.
2) Try to find out if there’s a firmware update that will improve the effectiveness of the TP-Link RE200 AC750 – It’s important to know that there may be regional variations in the hardware and so you need to download the correct firmware for your region. If you’re in the UK you can find all the support info here https://www.tp-link.com/uk/support/download/re200/ otherwise you can use that link as a gateway to then change to your own region.
3) If none of the above options help, ie. there’s no interference and the device is up to date, it might simply be that you have a faulty unit. It’s never a nice experience to receive a defective product, but I would suggest that you report your problems directly to TP-Link so that they can assist you either by resolving issues that I’ve not considered or helping to arrange a replacement device if it’s necessary.
I hope this reply is helpful for you. Please let us know how you get on if you choose to persevere with the extender… our reviews are only as good as our own experience with any product so feedback from the community (even if it’s ‘bad news’) helps other shoppers when it comes to choosing their next purchase.
My son bought me one to improve lap-top, tablet & mobile internet reception on the ground floor of our 1929 brick built house. The Virgin router is located upstairs. The RE 200 doubled the DL speed from about 20 to 40 Mbps. This made a noticeable improvement particularly to Facetime chats with family & friends.