I bought the tri-band black model AC2200 3 pack (AC6600 because there are 3) from Best Buy for $199.99 last week (after thinking about getting it for a year), new - on a half price sale. Got the system installed on Saturday & it made an immediate difference in the amount of latency in my connections throughout the house, seems to have better connections with devices than my old Asus RT-AC68U. I’m pleased with the product - but if similar deals exist around say, black Friday, this may not be the best deal (especially refurbished).
I’ve seen the white models on sale a few times before, but the black ones only have been on sale a couple of times that I’ve seen in the last year.
I got mine from the same BB sale. I was able to stop using the 50ft ethernet cable running to my wife’s work from home setup and prioritize her laptop in the app so she always has a good connection. Our old traditional router would give weird dead zones that wouldn’t connect despite strong signal. I assume this is due to our 100+ year old house being a patchwork of plaster, brick, drywall, etc. I put one of these at each end of our 1200 sqft house and it seems to work much better. I’m saving the third one for the addition they’re still building. After I set it up with the same SSID and password as the old wifi everything connected just fine. Cameras, Alexa, etc all seem to work better. They’re also smaller than I expected, little smaller than a Gen 1 Alexa. About the size of a coffee tumbler.
Only con would be going from 4 ports on the old router to just 2 (really 1, 1 has to be internet in so you’re left with 1 out). I had to move our old Philips Hue hub for smart bulbs to the front of the house and plug it into that node. Only other minor con would be the usual big power supply plug. It blocks everything so expect to use a small jumper cord if your outlets are getting full or something.
Good point on the number of available ports. I picked up an 8 port unmanaged switch for $10 or so here a couple of months back, and have that running out of the unit that’s plugged into my modem. That was something I had to think about before going with these.
We also had to readjust things with the oversized power plugs. That was a bit annoying.
And I agree that I was surprised at the size of the towers.