[Review] EDIMAX BR-6478AC AC1200 Multi-Function Concurrent Dual-Band Wi-Fi Gigabit Router

The EDIMAX BR-6478AC Multi-Function Concurrent Dual-Band Wi-Fi router houses a white plastic material with a rounded design. It is a mid-range router and it comes with full Gigabit RJ-45 LAN ports and WPS support, USB connectivity for storage devices or printer is not available and the dual 3 dBi dipole antennas limits its range and theoretical throughput to 867Mbps. Inside it, there are two 2T2R wireless radios – with a Realtek RTL8192CE chipset handling the 2.4GHz band and other Realtek RTL8812AR (mounted on a mini PCIe slot) for 802.11ac operation. CPU functions taken care by the RTL8179D SoC (most likely MIPS), backed up by 4MB of Macronix flash memory and 64MB of Nanya DDR2 RAM. The bundled EW-7822UAC 802.11ac USB 3.0 adapter uses the 2T2R RTL8812AU chipset, and has a foldaway antenna for optimum signal performance.

On the front-panel there are LEDs for power, WAN, each radio and each LAN port and on the rear are four color-coded Gigabit LAN ports, a Gigabit WAN port, reset button and a toggle switch to turn the wireless radios off and on. There are two-sturdy antennas fastened to the top – 2x3dBi dual-band external antennas and it blazes in 11ac mode when paired with the EDIMAX Ac1200 Wireless Dual-Band Adapter. it is a lightweight router that comes with mounting brackets so that you can easily wall-mount the device. The EDIMAX router has a well-organized interface and opens to display system status: uptime, LAN and WAN IP address information, plus info on the wireless network such as the channel each band operators on and security.

In the box there is a quick installation guide and a disc that includes the user manual and the install guide in multiple language and once it’s powered up you can connect to the router’s “edimax.setup” SSID. Once connected it opens a browser and takes you to the web-based setup page. Setup walks you through ensuring you have the WAN connected properly & then detects the internet connection. Now you have to give each band a name and a password of eight characters this completes the configuration and the software also gives the option to back up the configuration. The initial setup is very basic and good for novice users, but power users may want to the change the level of encryption. By default, the security is a set as WPA2 (AES), although there’s no enterprise  class-security and those users may want to tweak other settings and can do so via the web-based management interface. It would be an almost perfect networking equipment for high-throughput tasks if EDIMAX could get the software up to par with the hardware.

The EDIMAX router includes creating a guest network, WPS, access control by MAC address, VPN passthrough and ability to turn the wireless radios on and off by schedule. Security features include an SPI firewall which offers protection from DoS threats and URL and keyword blocking. If you want to enable any security feature, then it requires a reboot of about 30 seconds and if you are making any setting changes requires a system restart. To enable URL filtering, you must first turn on the firewall and to setup QoS, you have to manually set the amount of download/upload bandwidth to give to specific types of traffic: SMTP, POP3, FTP and so on. In addition to this, there’s another feature, called iQoS which allows you to drag and drop icons representing different kinds of traffic such as gaming, media, etc., onto a bar that sets the traffic from highest priority to lowest. The router offers some advanced capabilities like port forwarding, virtual server, DMZ and of course, UPnP.

Conclusion

Hardware is impressive, attractive design and initial setup was fine & frankly speaking I encounter some issues with the features first like setting up security, long reboots and QoS setup. It balzes fast in 802.11ac mode but you’ll need USB adapter to get that performance and it is best suited for power users who absolutely need high-performance intra-network video streaming or other demanding tasks.

Below you can find the detailed specifications of EDIMAX BR-6478Ac router

Specifications of EDIMAX BR-6478AC Router

Functions	Supports router, access point & range extender modes Guest network IGMP proxy and IGMP snooping DDNS and DHCP Port triggering for special applications Virtual server and DMZ hosting MAC/IP filter and URL blocking iQoS for smart bandwidth management Static routing UPnP architecture VPN pass-through (IPSec/PPTP) Wi-Fi schedule control
Hardware Interface	1 x RJ-45 gigabit WAN port 4 x RJ-45 gigabit LAN port LED indicators: power, internet, wireless, WAN LAN/ACT, LAN LNK/ACT 3 x 3dBi dual-band antennas WPS/Reset button Wireless on/off switch
Management	Multi-language user interface Supports remote management System status and security log Firmware upgradable Smart iQ Setup, no CD required Supports for smartphone, tablet or laptop setup (iOS 4 or Android 4 and above required for smartphone or tablet setup)
WAN	Supports WISP connection mode Supports RJ-45 cable/xDSL modems WAN protocol: PPPoE, static IP, dynamic IP, PPTP and L2TP
Output Power & Sensitivity Gain (5GHz)	Output Power 11a(54Mbps): 12±1.5dBm 11n (20MHz, MCS7): 12±1.5dBm 11n(40MHz, MCS7): 12±1.5dBm 11n(80MHz, MCS9): 10±1.5dBm Receive Sensitivity 11a(54Mbps): -70±2dBm 11n (20MHz, MCS7): -681±2dBm 11n(40MHz, MCS7): -64±2dBm 11n(80MHz, MCS9): 54±2dBm
Output Power & Sensitivity Gain (2.4GHz)	Output Power 11b(11Mbps): 16±1.5dBm 11g (54Mbps): 14±1.5dBm 11n(20MHz, MCS7): 13±1.5dBm 11n(40MHz, MCS7): 13±1.5dBm Receive Sensitivity 11b(11Mbps): -84±2dBm 11g(54Mbps): –70±2dBm 11n(20MHz, MCS7): -65±2dBm 11n(40MHz, MCS7): -63±2dBm
Security	64/128-bit WEP encryption, WPA and WPA2 security QoS for critical operations SPI anti-DoS firewall
Memory	4MB NOR Flash 64MB RAM
Humidity & Temperature	10-90% (non-considering) 0-40oC
Power Adapter	DC 5V, 2A
Dimension & Weight	196mm x 114mm x 36mm
Certifications	FCC/CE