Tenda AC3 — 750Mbps 11AC Dual Band Wireless Router

Buying it, and when not to

The AC3 is the entry point into dual-band. It is a 750Mbps 11AC router with three antennas, which in practice means a 2.4GHz radio for phones, cameras and the cheap IoT devices that refuse to see 5GHz, plus a 5GHz radio for the laptops and TVs that actually need throughput. Separating the two is the single biggest improvement you can make over a 300Mbps single-band router.

It suits a two or three-room flat, a small office of a handful of staff, or a shop where the owner streams and the POS terminal sits on the same network. If your customer has complained that video buffers whenever somebody else is on WhatsApp, moving them from single-band to an AC3 usually ends the complaint without touching the cabling.

Skip it if the house needs wired speed between rooms: at this class the LAN ports are not gigabit, so a NAS, a DVR pulling multiple camera streams, or a 200Mbps fibre plan will be throttled at the router rather than at the line. For those, the AC10 is the honest minimum. And if coverage rather than speed is the problem - a long bungalow, an upstairs that drops out - no single router fixes it; price a Nova mesh pack or a ceiling access point instead.