Amped Wireless R20000G High Power Dual Band Router Review

Amped Wireless R20000G – Final Thoughts

We expected the Amped Wireless R20000G High Power Dual Band Router to be a solid overall performer going into this review. The R20000G has a pretty good pedigree and comes from a family of networking products that have slowly been gaining a larger share of the home networking market for the past few years. The R20000G has very impressive specifications and presents itself as a full functional router. In our battery of tests – as well as our real-world use – the router performed quite well overall.

Unlike many of the other routers we have tested, Amped Wireless makes accessing a shared USB drive really easy to use as well when you use this router. We took a thumb drive and connected it to the back of our Amped Wireless R20000G. After making sure the routers firmware was properly setup, we were able to map the USB as a network drive using same procedures you would use when mapping a regular drive: Start/Computer/Map Network Drive. From here, select a drive letter, then enter in the folder field AMPED_USBpublic. This makes for a really cheap and easy way of getting a NAS up and running on your network. In our case a USB thumb drive was perfect and did the trick.

After using the Amped Wireless R20000G for a couple of weeks, one of the things we noticed is that the R20000G does have quite the amplifier built in to the unit. Our wireless tests showed that the Amped Wireless Router wasnt the fastest in our battery of speed tests, but we did observe a pretty robust range of use. Amped Wireless markets the R20000G Router as a WiFi device that has tremendous range and power. While this doesnt necessarily equal speed, the range that a router performs is very important for many users.

We set up a quick test to measure power at range for a typical neighborhood. We set up a number of routers and turned both their 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz radios on and measured the signal power at a distance. The first distance was about 250 feet through two walls made of mostly wood. The second location was approximately 1000-feet away and the signal passed through glass. This quick and dirty head-to-head test resulted in some pretty enlightened results:

Test Results: When looking at the test data, we note that the number closest to zero has the stronger signal (ie -20 is stronger than -100). The Amped Wireless R20000G shows a tremendous ability to keep a signal as well as throughput at distance. We were hoping there would be more separation between the brands when we went to extreme distances. We didnt see an advantage of the Amped Wireless R20000G over or flagship Negear R6300. The R20000G did however best routers in the same general price range such as our ASUS and TP-Link.

You can purchase the Amped Wireless R20000G Dual-Band Router from your favorite retailer for as little as $159 and even though we have some concerns with routers wireless speed, Amped has put together a pretty stout package. The R20000G is being marketed as a High Powered wireless 600mW Gigabit Dual Band Router that has up to 10,000 square foot extended range. Our tests show that a 10,000 square foot range (or 100 foot line of site) really is possible with many of the routers in our suite. If you need that kind of range, these routers will give it to you. The question is, will you be happy with the cost and the features that you get.

The R20000G does have a number of features not found on low-end routers that make it a smart purchase. Not only to you get substantial wireless coverage, but you get a Gigabit ports, guest networking ability, built-in parental controls, upgradable firmware, all in a small, unobtrusive small package that will fit nicely on your desk. Those looking to use an external USB hard drive for a psudo-Network Attached Storage (NAS) will be pleased with the simplicity of the GUI to allow this. While we didnt run any speed tests on the USB ports, the feature was actually usable and convenient.

Amped Wireless ships the R200000G with a 1-year limited manufacturers warranty. We had some issues with our initial router setup and accessing the user interface menu. We called Amped support and were able to talk to a live person within about a minute of calling. Our issue turned out to be some corruption in our IE browser that had nothing to do with the Amped Wireless hardware. We certainly appreciated the great customer support and the ease in which we were able to get a human being on the phone.

Legit Bottom Line: Overall the Amped Wireless R200000G High Power Dual Band Router is a great router with tons of features, a nice looking GUI, and solid wireless speeds. While Amped Wireless is marketing R200000G as an Extended Range device, we didnt experience a tremendous step-up in range over our other top-of-the-line routers.