TP-LINK TL-R600VPN Gaming Broadband VPN Router, 1 Gaming WAN Port + 4 Gaming LAN Ports, Supports IPsec, PPTP, L2TP VPN Tunnels

Initial delivery Pack came with missing Router but charger,Ethernet cable and manuals inside the box.Box looks very old / used one and torn.There is no seal on the Box.Got replacement which is Brand New with seal and all accessories and router inside box.Installed router as per initial instructions, provided user name and password as per initial Login instructions.This Router TPLink TL-R600VPN having 1 default 1000Mbps WAN & 1 default LAN port with 1000Mbps and 3 WAN/LAN ports which are 100mbps not 1000mbps as they mentioned.Pros:-Brought this router only to use as LINK BACKUP and LOAD BALANCING not for Firewall or VPN.This router having some default firewalls set which are working satisfactorily.I have 3 BB connections AIRTEL, BSNL and ACT.Converted 2 of WAN/LAN Ports as WAN ports and created Link Backup policy working perfectly Primary to Backup and then Backup to Primary without issues.Note:- Before connecting your BB modem cables to this router read review of user "Nightfury2050" in amazon to set different IP address to BB Modems."Many Many thanks to user "Nightfury2050" for this update".******Review after using more than 2 months***All ports are 1000mbps and product Working flawlessly.Link backup or Load balance working without issues.to get 1000mbps on ports , check your your PON or the ISP provided device supports 1000mbps.in my setup BSNL PON "Alphion AONT-100c" supports only and 100mbps.checked with other ISP PON with cat 6/cat5e I am able to get 1000mbps on all ports.Thanks to TP-link Support and the competitive price for this genius.

It's working fine from 1 weekI installed it for 2 wan connections of each 80 mbps, load balance is working fineMy everyday data usage is around 40gbSo, it's balancing both wan connections, same data usage from each connection, no matter to check for 500mb differenceOnly problem I found is, sometimes it's hangingYou need to restart it, problem still exists even after updating the firmware to latest

Works as designed perfectly. I bought it to setup VPN on router, but it do not support all VPN configurations

Good web blocking system

This is a really good product for the price. It has all the features I was looking for. Especially the failover mode from primary WAN to backup WAN. Gigabit ports at this price range is rare for such routers. I do wish that instead of 5 ports (1 WAN, 1 LAN, 3 WAN/LAN) in all, it provided 8 ports (3 more LAN only ports) but I guess budget has its limitations.This model beats out all the other Load Balancing and Broadband VPN routers under 10K. I don’t know why anyone would even buy the 480T+ which is similarly priced but has only Fast Ethernet not Gigabit.

I bought this product on Jun 2020 and I am writing this review after a massive amount of usage through these days. There are massive issues with this Load Balancer router. First of all, the ports does NOT seem to Gigabit ports. I have ISP with 200 Mbps and 250 Mbps speeds. The individual ISPs do give speeds more than 200 Mbps when tested individually from the ISP router. But when the 2 ISPs are fed into 2 WAN ports and the LAN port is then connected to a Wi FI Router, the speed of the aggregation , both in Wi Fi and LAN mode cannot exceed 120 Mbps. This is a massive drawback of this router. The output has severe lacunae in speed and such a massive speed loss can only be attributed to the under powered CPU and Lan ports.

Turns out that you are just about to get screwed if you have 2 modems of the same company with similar or different ISPs. Both modems would have the same access link (eg, 192.168.1.1) if they belong to the same company. Now if you connect the LAN wires to this TIP Link VPN Router, one of the connections won't work. You have to manually set the LAN of one of those modems to a different address say (192.168.2.1), then only it will work. If you read this review, you will save a lot of time, unlike me! I just did trial and error for 6-8 hours!PS: I am not a networking student!

I got this thinking it will support gigabit and I'll be able to combine my connections. Here are a few points to note.1. I am not able to get fallover and primary WAN mode to work yet. Going to keep trying and see.2. Its not gigabit for sure, maximum throughput through lan that I'm getting is around 600-700, thats sad because I have gigabit internet and now because of this I'm not able to fully use it if needed.3. For all the hassle I'd rather just get a Rs 1000 switch and change cable physically when net goes down. Its not completing the desired purpose.4. Setup is relatively easy, would like more controls on load balancing parameters.

Ok the journey to replace my old tp-link 470+ router took almost a month of research and testing. Here is what I found out and I really hope this helps someone save a bit of time. I was a network administrator over 20 years ago. I do not consider myself an expert by a long shot. I have two 4 Mbps DSL lines entering the house (I am not close to any city). I have an email server, file server and our house is extremely automated. There are only 2 of us in the home but myself and my wife are avid gamers. We stream most of our tv/movie content. Our workout room is all connected with video instructors. I have both mac laptops and tablets, windows gaming laptops, VOIP, Xbox and Linux boxes all running off this network. Daily I am downloading 20-100gig games in the background. I also have a mesh wifi covering the 3 floors of the house and the grounds outside of the home. This gives you and idea of what my challenges are.I want to get use of the full 8 Mbps bandwidth for downloads then scale back so we can watch a movie or play a game or listen to music throughout the home all while the game keeps downloading but at a slower speed. When we are not using the network I would like it to speed back up and use the full 8 Mbps again.I tested an Ubiquiti edgerouter 4, TP-Link TL-R600VPN V4, pfsense on an old water-cooled 3ghz gaming computer and on a protectli vault 4 port quad core. Here is what I experienced.First test was the tp-link. It was running in about 20 minutes from when I took it out of the box with the email server port forwarded. I was able to access my email server outside the house and inside even with pointing our phones to the no-ip dynamic DNS address (kind of like a loopback or NAT reflection). It simply worked. But monitoring is near non-existent so I would need a secondary network monitor and SMS connect which it supports but I figured I would test some other routers. It was so simple to setup including QOS that I kept coming back to use this router as the gold standard setup.Second, I spent a little over a week with the edgerouter 4. It gets great reviews, and the network monitoring was the best of the bunch for me with PfSense a close second and tp-link at near non-existent monitoring/graphing traffic. I always knew what was going on and what the edgerouter was doing with its excellent dashboard. After a few days and many hundreds of pages of reading on forums and chatting with folks as the edgerouter has a very helpful community I got it up and running with both wans and the email server. But gaming was not great. Buffer lag and bloat and constant disconnects were simply just unacceptable and after a week I threw in the towel. Interesting the first-person shooters were not the only issue but Guildwars 2 would just drop either myself or my wife mid adventure 3-4 times in an hour and at other times we could go a complete hour before one of use was dropped. This never happened with the tp-link 470T+ in 4 years, the PfSense or the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. It was only the edgerouter. I had to box up the edgerouter and stop all further work with it.The last router(s) I tested was pfSense with both an old 3ghz gaming box and a protectli 4 port fanless box. I will say the PfSense was the my favorite of all interface and the things that the software can do is incredible. It look less than an hour to download and get the box up and running on my old pc. I purchased a dual port intel nic from amazon and with the nic already on the motherboard I was able to connect 2 dls lines and the local ethernet line. PfSense was completely free! Just the cost of the hardware you will need to run it. After tweaking it for a week I got the load balancing working and the QOS dialed in, performing better than the TP-link TL-R600VPN. I was able to get the most bandwidth with pfSense but I never was able to get my mail server working quite right. I thought the issue was my old gaming computer and I purchased a protectli fanless box – the quality is top notch and installing PfSense took just a few minutes. I can’t say enough about the little box and its capabilities. I think it only used 20W total, so it was not a huge power consumer as the gaming rig/router was. But without getting PfSense working I had to abandon the box. As I recall I spent $350 on the box so it became the most expensive router of the 4 tested.Conclusion – I ended up going back to the TP-Link TL-R600VPN. Why? Well it was the lowest power used, it had 5 lan ports, QOS and load balancing. Its port forwarding and virtual servers work great but most of all everything work right out of the box. I mean everything. Dynamic DNS was a breeze to setup. I am serious when I say it was less than 20 min to get the whole router up and running. I realize I could have spent another couple of days or weeks getting the other routers to work but I finally decided why? This is a home network, I have learned all I wanted to at this point and I had a router that simply worked out of the box for a multi WAN install. Is it perfect – no. Can I monitor the network from its own interface – no!I don’t work for any of these folks and I am not in the tech industry. I am a purchasing manager so trust me there will be many who can do better at setting these up but this is my experience and like many others with a reasonable non-professional understanding of networking this review is intended for you.

I grew tired of constantly rebooting my wireless router when it got bogged down by all the devices connected to it, and the diverse data needs of those devices. My theory was that if I offloaded the router / gateway work to a dedicated device, and switched my wireless router to access-point mode, the separation of concerns would prove more reliable.So I searched for a stand-alone wired router that would be appropriate for demanding home use (streaming, work-from-home VPN, Ring devices, Alexa devices, Roku devices, laptops, phones, and tablets; 26 devices in all), but that wouldn't break the bank. After some research this TP Link model seemed to fit the use case I had in mind.Setup was pretty easy; plug the router into my cable modem, plug my desktop system into the router, reboot the cable modem, and everything just worked. That last step was critical though; the cable modem didn't want to assign an IP to the router until I rebooted it. This is not the router's fault -- it's just something cable modems often do.After I connected the desktop system via network cable, I was able to log into the web GUI for the router. It asks you to set a username and password, and that's pretty much all that was needed to get started. There are plenty of settings for more complicated needs. For example, I set up port forwarding for a couple of services on my desktop system, and set up an IP reservation for the desktop.Next I plugged my old router into the new router. This cascading routing worked just fine, though it wasn't my end goal. So I logged into my wireless router and set it to access point mode. The wireless router rebooted, and then I watched the TP Link's list of DHCP reservations, witnessing each of the wireless devices connected on my network reconnecting using the old router as an access point and the new router as the gateway and DHCP server.It works flawlessly in this configuration. Whats more, it seems to provide better throughput then when everything was going through the old router (both wired and wireless connections). My Internet service is touted to be 200 Megabit, but before the upgrade I was seeing speeds in the 160 Megabit range for wired devices. The old router just had too much going on, I guess. With the new router my wired speeds are in the 230 megabit range, and even my wireless speeds reach up that high if I'm sitting close enough to the access point.Things I like about this device: It's small, easy to use, and powerful enough to handle a household of streaming plus work-from-home VPN, plus various other odd devices (Alexa, Hue, Roku, laptops, android phone and tablets, etc).The device's GUI is not exactly simple, but basic operation *is* simple. And after becoming familiar with the web GUI everything that should be there is pretty easy to find, and then some. Configuration options are also a lot more powerful than typical home wifi-routers.I also like that it allows me to hide the squirrel's nest of network cables without also being forced to hide the wireless access point. When you have your router acting as a wired network switch plus a wireless router, you've got to set that thing where wifi propagation will be best. But if you separate those concerns, all the wiring can go to the router, hidden away somewhere, and a single network cable can then run to the wireless access point. Cable management and clutter are easier to minimize.I like the device status page, too. Why can't home wireless routers provide such easy to understand stats? This router's stats make sense and are actually useful. And I like the system log viewer in the GUI. Again, system logs seem way too hard to look at on home / consumer level wireless routers. This devices log page actually shows relevant information.Finally, I'm looking forward to the day when I upgrade my wireless network to WiFi6/AX without having to reconfigure the router settings. I can just set up a WiFi6 access point, and all the wired router's settings still apply. Much easier transition, and less expensive.Routers and WiFi have different product life cycles. It's great separating those concerns, the result is usually better performance and better flexibility.I've done some additional testing. Using the 'iperf' tool I verified that throughput within the LAN reached speeds in the 926-948 megabit range. That's exactly where things ought to be for a gigabit router. I also watched CPU usage on the router while doing iperf tests and barely noticed even a blip on the graph; CPU usage remained quite low.NAT throughput is at least as good as I need it to be, also. I don't know where it maxes out, but my ISP claims to provide me 200 megabit service, and I'm witnessing 235 megabit throughput to the Internet. So the device is at least keeping up with the bandwidth I purchase, and then some. I think the advertised NAT throughput is around 620 mbps. So this should easily support the great majority of home Internet speeds.

I will say I am impressed by this router.The one I received is a Version 2. The TP-Link website lists a Version 3 as well but it's probably so new we won't see them until the version 2 stock is depleted.My home network is pretty much your standard home system; modem, router, 2 computers and an HTPC. I'm not using VPN or any of the remote access features, so what I'm really after here is the firewall to keep the nasties out.Once I plugged the router in and waited a couple of minutes to be sure it was not dead on arrival, I connected it in place of my old D-Link 10/100 router and it worked from the moment I plugged in the cables. I was immediately able to see my file shares and ping the other systems on the LAN. Getting internet access took just a bit more work...Since I run my local machines on fixed IP addresses and a custom LAN address, I first had to set one of my machines to DHCP ("Obtain addresses automatically" in the Windows network adapter settings) so I could access the setup pages. Once in I set the router's LAN address to match my private LAN and rebooted the router. I then set my machine back to it's fixed address and rebooted it. The whole thing worked right away. My file shares were visible, the Windows network dialog found everything and I had internet access on all 3 systems.A little hint at this point: Don't worry about installing the software on the disk. Read the setup guide and use the router's internal web pages through your browser. It's easier.If you are not familiar with networking or it's jargon the setup screens may seem a bit daunting but they're not really all that difficult. The first thing to do is the Quick Setup which is really just to make your first internet connection and set your admin passwords. Be smart and change the admin username as well. From there you can configure the router more specifically to your needs. Just go through all the screens, set what you need and turn off everything you don't need. In my case I set the SPI firewall to on (the default), turned on all the Advanced firewall features for DOS and other attacks, turned off the WAN ping (hidden system) and shut down all the VPN stuff, saving my settings as I went. Then I rebooted the router and everything came up working again.As a final step, I saved my settings to a disk file, in case I ever have to reconfigure.At this point I still had it connected using the old CAT5 (10/100) cables and it said I had gigabit connections on all my systems so I check them and sure enough everything said I was connected at 1gb speeds. Doing some file copies from machine to machine confirmed it, I was getting transfer rates of between 90 and 110 MBps... which is the full gigabit speed. I bought CAT6 cables with the router and will hook them up tomorrow but seeing these speeds with CAT5 cables was a pleasant surprise.The construction quality of this router is excellent. It is in an all metal case, quite heavy and very sturdy. Of course the metal housing also provides good shielding against radio interference. After a couple of hours of heavy use during testing, the case was only a little warm to touch not finger punishing hot like some of the older TP-Link products.One thing I will thank TP-Link for is not using those cursed blue laser beam leds as indicators. The activity lights are easily visible but very subdued so that if you have this device in your bedroom it won't bother you as you try to get to sleep.Although it's not really a big deal I'm not famous on the internal power supply. This is touted as a lightning avoidance measure but the system would be far safer with an external SMPS "brick" as a power supply. It would be better to let a lightning hit or power surge take out the brick than to destroy the internal power supply. That way you just replace the brick... not the entire router. Of course this kind of catastrophic failure is quite rare, so it's not likely to be an issue for many people.Overall ... Nice Router... and barring disaster, I look forward to sticking it in a corner and ignoring it for the next 3 or 4 years.

I am out in a very rural area where our internet is limited to one provider, who limits available bandwidth to the extreme. I have been lucky enough to be allowed to order a second connection as well as install an LTE connection within my network.Using the tl-r600vpn, I've been able to load share my 2x DSL(20x1, 30x2) connections and my LTE(30x10) connection. Giving me speeds/bandwidth I would not otherwise be able to obtain. I currently speedtest in the neighborhood of 75-80down/11-13up. And I can force my twitch stream to only use the LTE connection for upload, without disturbing my gaming on DSL1 and other stuff on DSL2.Positives:-EASY to setup once you understand some of their interface quirks.-Successfully load balances(combines) several internet connections into a much larger combined 'connection' as long as it's not a single-socket connection. ie, web browsing will somewhat use all connections, but a single source download will come across one of your connections.Negatives:-Not very well documented for a home-office/small-office installation for load balancing. One would think that the options provided, that one would have to be enabled and the wording suggests one would. But it works best with the 'optional(s)' turned off with only load balancing enabled.-Policy routing is limited. There are a small number of Policy Routes that you can add to help force services to a specific connection. In my case I use my LTE connection for any uploads or outgoing streams, but the remaining traffic uses the DSL connections. This is port based. But the policy routing table is limited to a low number of rules. I have 3 more port based rules I want to implement, but sadly it exceeds the limit.-SLOW. I understand there is alot going on under the hood, but sometimes a slight change takes several minutes before the change itself will stop interfering with operation. Every configuration change triggers 100% of it's CPU. While this is happening, you can count on miserable operation and slow transfers. But once it's dropped back down, you are good to go. Don't get me started on the 2-3 minute reboots. I have an old wifi router from 2008 that can boot and activate wifi several times before this guy lets you even see the web UI.Overall: I'm keeping it, as it works for my needs. I'd give it 5 stars if it was a tad faster and the policy route entries were expanded. I've got it's older brother(r470+) that I ordered recently when I didn't quite understand the load balancing settings. The 470 seems to have a larger user-base which explained the settings a bit more; which this interface slightly differs. But since this one sports 1gb interfaces.... it wins.

I purchased this hoping for the following:1. Faster downloads with the gigabit port2. Better security with the SPI firewall3. VPN access for when I travelSPEEDI was hoping for a big jump here with the gigabit WAN port, but unfortunately my cable modem doesn't support gigabit so it's connecting at 100Mbps just like it did to my old 100Mbps router. However, I did get an increase in speed. Using speedtest.net as the measurement tool, the old router (no SPI firewall) had a download speed of 11.75Mbps, and when I replaced it with this new one it increased to 13.86Mbps. That's about an 18% increase in download speed with the same connection speed to the cable modem. The irony here is that the old router was a Dynex (Best Buy generic), which I can now guarantee you was made by TP-Link because the configuration screens are nearly identical. So this new router, despite doing more firewall checks on packets and the same network speed, is still faster. Can't complain about that. This router also leaves the door open for a faster cable modem; if I get a modem that has a gigabit port this router is ready for it.SECURITYI was hoping for some granular security features in this router's SPI firewall to let me pick and choose what to check for and block, but it isn't there. It's simply Enable/Disable. That said, the fact that it has a SPI firewall at all is much better than the old Dynex/TP-Link, which only had flood control. This router has flood control as well, but that's not really much by itself.This router also has port forwarding (not tested by me) and a DMZ function for one server. I use the DMZ function for my NAS (which has its own firewall), so it took all of 5 seconds to configure it just like it was configured on the old Dynex/TP-Link. It works perfectly.VPNI haven't yet tested this, but will soon and update this review.TIME ServerOne of the oddest things about this router is that it supports NTP time servers, but doesn't come pre-configured with any NTP addresses. I pasted in 2 time server DNS addresses from pool.ntp.org and it immediately updated, but why doesn't the manufacturer do this by default? Weird. There are lots of free time services out there like pool.ntp.org so it's not like it would cost them anything to do this. If you don't notice this and fix it yourself then all of your logs will show timestamps starting on 1/1/1970, because that's what it defaults to when you first power it up (and after every time it loses power).CONCLUSIONThis is definitely a good router for homes and small businesses. It's well built, has good basic security and has VPN access. Network pros who are used to Cisco IOS devices will probably not like this at all because it's not as flexible, but it's also not as costly. I got mine for $62, and that's one heck of a deal for everything that this router has. You can't even get a LinkSys with similar features for that (Cisco owns LinkSys).EDIT (8/29/2013):I have not been able to test the VPN due to the fact that I use the Virtual Server function to access my NAS over the Internet. When you use that feature VPN isn't possible.