It's one of modern life's common frustrations; the faster and more powerful your internet connection gets, the more demands are placed on it, the more you need to upgrade it again.
Between increasing amounts of 4K streaming content, online gaming requiring ever-expanding bandwidth and people introducing more and more IoT devices to their homes all the time, gigabit speeds just won't cut it for a lot of Kiwi households anymore.
As a result, many ISPs now offer "hyperfibre" plans - 2, 4 or even 8Gbps connections to keep power users humming at top speed.
But a plan like that won't solve anything if you choke your connection off at the first hurdle.
D-Link's DPN-BE7212GR is a new, superfast mesh router that will futureproof your home network at a hardware level... Well, for the next year or so, anyway.
First things first; the D-Link BE7200 is obviously a Wi-Fi 7 device. If you've been holding off upgrading to Wi-Fi 7, it's probably time to consider it. Most new smartphones and computers support Wi-Fi 7 now, taking advantage of a faster and more stable connection.
Importantly, the BE7200 is a mesh router, in fact, it's EasyMesh enabled - a new standard I haven't come across before now. As far as I can tell, EasyMesh is supposed to work like Auracast does with bluetooth speakers; any manufacturer can build their device using the protocol, meaning you can then create a mesh network using devices from different brands.
In my case, D-Link supplied a second identical BE7200 so you'd think linking it with the primary (or master) router would be a cinch. That's true if you want to add on wireless mesh nodes. Trouble is, because I have data cabling running through my house, I wanted to create a wired mesh network instead. After looking up every option in the D-Link Wi-Fi app, I actually had to ask AI how to do it. It wasn't complicated, but it did involve plugging certain cables in certain holes in a certain order. Other routers take care of all this pretty much automatically.
However, speaking of cables and holes, this is one area where the BE7200 really excels. Not only are there two 10G ethernet ports (1 WAN, 1 LAN), there are four additional gigabit ports, giving you the potential to really spread your high-speed fibre supply around your home to where its needed most.
As an example; I'm on a 4Gbps connection which comes into an ONT modem in the cable cabinet in my garage. That 4Gbps all goes into the BE7200's 10G WAN input. I can send it all upstairs to my mesh-connected router for Wi-Fi up there via the 10G LAN output port. I can also send 1Gbps directly to my daughter's gaming PC, my Mac in my office and my media server. Even after all that, I still have a gigabit port left over - perhaps for a TV or streaming box. At last, a router that literally can handle more internet than I have to fill it with.
The garage is a terrible place from which to try and push Wi-Fi to the rest of the house though - and this is where I'm confused by my testing. As you'll see by my video below, despite D-Link's claims to be able to "push through walls," the speeds I recorded on my phone were pretty average around the rest of the house. Even standing next to the primary router, I thought I might have recorded faster speeds.
And yet, it works. Since I swapped over to my new D-Link Wi-Fi 7 mesh network, I've had no dropouts, everything loads instantly (or as good as) and there's been no buffering or crashes, on any device connected to the new setup.
I'll take reliability and performance like that over a number on a screen any day.
I can only speculate why there's a disparity between the two. For a while now, D-Link has placed a lot of emphasis on its networking devices' ability to handle multiple streams, downloads and uploads from multiple devices simultaneously - although interestingly, the BE7200 is only a dual-band device - no dedicated third frequency for backhaul. Yet despite that, it all goes like a bomb.
One tiny peeve; the lights. Like most routers, there's a row of status LEDs on the front to indicate connection, power, Wi-Fi etc. Fine. Except you can't turn them off. What's worse, the ethernet ports at the back light up and flash constantly when connected as well. Other, similar devices - including other D-Link routers - let you turn annoying lights like these off from the app. Let's just say you won't be setting this up in your bedroom any time soon.
You can create separate networks for IoT devices, as well as a guest network if you like and you can also install a VPN on the router itself.
This all adds up to a lot of router, with a lot of features, for a pretty reasonable price. For me, the most important things it has a lot of is all those ports at the back. If you're looking to beef up your connection to 2Gbps or more, make sure you have a router that can deliver.
Click here for more information and pricing on the D-Link BE2700 10G Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Router.
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