Is a price war brewing in the field of mesh Wi-Fi routers? If so, TP-Link may have fired the first cannon. The company debuted a new base station design this year, selling three-packs under the name of the Deco M4 for $180. Now, it has decided to go for Google Wifi's jugular, selling two-packs of those new stations exclusively at Walmart for $100.
The company has gracefully called its latest offering the Deco W2400. As with the M4, the stations are advertised to provide up to 1200Mbps of bandwidth over dual-band 802.11ac. Each base station can act as a router, a unique access point, or a network extender. The W2400 can handle up to 100 devices at a time, each of them manageable down to time limits and content filters via TP-Link's Deco app. The system can also take commands from Amazon Alexa and IFTTT recipes.
The big deal here is that the W2400 undercuts the M4 by $10 per unit, meaning that it's a better value to buy a pair of W2400 packages for $200 than a single M4 set for $180. And at 3,000 square feet, the W2400's coverage range is double Google Wifi's single-station package for just about the same price.
It'll be interesting to see if we get a marketplace response from any of the other mesh Wi-Fi players.
Buy: Walmart