Yesterday, in China, Honor revealed their first Wi-Fi 6+ router at an incredible price of just 219 Yuan (£25/$31). I think this would make it the cheaper Wi-Fi 6 router on the market, albeit in China.
In the UK the cheapest option I can find is the ASUS RT-AX56U at £135.49 on Amazon or the Netgear AX4 (RAX40) from various retailers.
Even if you factored in VAT, Duty and transport logistics, this would easily be cheaper than all UK models.
Honor Router 3 Specification
At that price, it is to be expected that this is not a top of the range router, but it is certainly worth considering so you can get the benefits of Wi-Fi 6 without the steep entry price.
The router is powered by in-house Lingxiao dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz paired with 128MB of RAM and flash memory each. The power consumption is rated less than 12W with 12V DC / 1A power input.
It runs Huawei RTOS system can be controlled using Huawei Smart Life app available on both Android and iOS.
It is capable of operating in both 2.4GHz (574Mbps) and 5GHz (2402Mbps) modes simultaneously with a maximum transmission rate of 3976Mbps. The router features a total of four antennas with a gain of 5dBi.
Other features include transmission protocols such as 802.3, 802.3u, and 802.3ab. It also has three modes, including Wall Penetration, Standard and Sleep. As for security, it comes with features like WPA3, firewall, DMZ, DoS attack protection, etc.
You also get other common features such as speed limit, bandwidth limit, parental controls, gaming acceleration, Wi-Fi relay, guest network, MAC address filtering, VPN, and more.
Wi-Fi 6+ vs Wi-Fi 6 vs Wi-Fi 6E
You may not have heard of Wi-Fi 6+ before, but back in February, Huawei announced their new proprietary technology that claims to be superior to traditional Wi-Fi 6. However, the actual specification is no different to normal Wi-Fi 6 with both standards hitting 2400mbps with the 160Mhz channel.
To make the most of Wi-Fi 6+ you will need a compatible client device from Huawei/Honor such as the Huawei P40 Pro.
Ironically the just launched Honor MagicBook Pro and Huawei Matebook X Pro lack Wi-Fi 6 of any kind. Which is annoying because I feel a laptop benefits from fast Wi-Fi speeds more than a phone.
Just to confuse you some more, there is also the up and coming Wi-Fi 6E. The new naming conventions were supposed to simplify Wi-Fi, but now we are back to appending letters to things.
Wi-Fi 6E add 6Ghz to the available spectrum, which I am sure conspiracy theorists will lose their mind over. This was always the plan for Wi-Fi 6, and Broadcom recently announced a client chipset with it, but we probably won’t see that until the end of year at least.
Honor Router 3 vs Huawei WiFi AX3
With Huawei being the parent company of Honor it comes as no surprise that a lot of their hardware has similarities. In some cases, devices are identical in everything but the branding. This has been true for the Honor MagicBook 14/15 and Huawei MateBook D 14/15 as well as the Huawei Nova 5T and Honor 20.
The same is true here with the Honor Router 3 and Huawei WiFi AX3. In this case Huawei has two routers a dual-core model and the quad-core Pro model. From what I can tell the two Huawei models are identical almost everywhere but the processor, though it looks like the Pro model may also have TrustZone Security in addition, likely due to the increased processing power.
The Honor Router 3 will, therefore, be identical to the dual-core Huawei WiFi AX3
UK Availability
Neither Honor or Huawei release their routers to the UK, but you can pick them up from grey import sites such as BangGood.
I recently order the quad-core Huawei WiFi AX3 and will hopefully have it within the next couple of weeks allowing me to see how well a £70 W-Fi 6 router competes with some of the UK’s most expensive models such as the Netgear RAX120.
