Aztech's new AIR-706P AC1900 router has built-in mesh networking capabilities

Aztech's new AIR-706P AC1900 router has built-in mesh networking capabilities

Aztech has released a new router called the AIR-706P, which has built-in mesh networking capabilities.

To begin, it is a dual-band AC1900-class router that supports speeds of up to 600Mbps on its single 2.4GHz network and speeds of up to 1,300Mbps on its 5GHz network.

And like most routers, it has a single Gigabit Ethernet WAN port and four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. It also comes with two USB 3.0 ports, handy for connecting to printers for print-sharing or external storage devices for file-sharing.

What's unusual, however, is that it comes with built-in mesh networking capabilities. If you have multiple AIR-706P routers, you can create a mesh network where you can expand your Wi-Fi coverage under a single SSID.

One thing to note, however, is that the AIR-706P uses a star topology for mesh networking, meaning a single router needs to be designated as the main router and this main router handles all communications between nodes.

In other words, nodes cannot communicate with each other so there will be some restrictions as to how wide you can expand your Wi-Fi network.

Also unusual is what Aztech calls "Pivotal Antenna". The antennas can rotate to face the direction that is experiencing low signal to boost performance. I'm curious to see how effective this is.

The Aztech AIR-706P router is available now and is priced at S$269.

Aztech also says that it will be launching mesh nodes to fully capitalize on the mesh networking capabilities of the AIR-706P router later this year.