ARRIS SURFboard mAX W161 AXE6600

Tried this out for my Shield TV in order to run Steam Link smoothly without running a wire. The first thing to know is that this thing is very finicky for positioning. This is largely due to the 6GHz frequency. If you get a good link with this you'll have very good performance and excellent latency for a wireless connection. The trade-off is that 6GHz has a lower effective range and is much more affected by solid objects in the signal path. Case in point: I had the router-side unit on a set of shelves (with most of the network hardware). This was on the second shelf and the shelf below had a couple other devices on it. The living room/den is immediately below the above-mentioned room. The client-side unit plugs into my Nvidia Shield box, also on a small TV stand/shelf. Set up this way, performance was good but I had occasional dropouts on Steam Link. (The two rooms are right above one another, and they are almost vertically aligned). This turned out the be curable by moving the router-side unit to the bottom shelf in that room, and moving the client-side unit from the shelf to the top of the TV stand, right behind the TV. The dropouts went away completely and now Steam Link works flawlessly. It is minutely more latency than a wired link, and noticeably better than using 5Hz Wi-Fi. But that just goes to show how finicky the 6GHz band is when it comes to physical interference with the signal. Mileage may definitely vary. This is definitely something to consider if in a similar use case to mine: An adjacent room, where a reliable low-latency link is needed, but an Ethernet run or even MoCa are not practicable. (My landlord will not let me install a MoCa filter, so I cannot use MoCa, and the way this place is wired is not conducive to a PowerLine type arrangement (though I have never found that to be ideal in this use case). I don't like that this wants a cloud sign-in but that's par for the course these days- at least it's not mandatory. The blue light on the front turns red when it lacks an Internet connection. While it phoning home to check that is kind of meh to me, it's kind of nice to have that up-or-down light. The light can also be disabled. I have the client-side unit's light disabled, but the router-side unit I leave on as it's a nice way to quickly know I have to yell at my cable company again. Price is steep for what it does, especially since you can get a 2.5G MoCa kit for half of the price which would absolutely perform better. But if that's out of the question, as was the case for me, this is a great option so long as you understand and work around the inherent limitations of the 6Ghz band.