Pricing
At the time of this review, the AmpliFi Instant home mesh WiFi system kit can be yours for £201.04 in the UK and $179.99 in the US. If you’d like just the router without the extra mesh unit, then it’s £117.29.
Final Thoughts
The Instant was the first AmpliFi unit I had the pleasure to test in person, and it was a pleasure. The AmpliFi Instant promises easy installation, setup and configuration – and they offer it. It’s quick and easy to get started for anyone with a relatively modern smartphone.
The benefits of a Mesh setup is clear. Ordinary routers need either a lot of power to reach all corners or your home or you’ll have slow or dead spots. With a mesh system, you can cover the entire area and never notice when you move from one unit to the next. I tested this by playing YouTube videos while walking all over my house. No interruptions or hiccups while it switched from one to another access point.
The performance wasn’t record-breaking, but it isn’t advertised to be so. So all good here. During our tests, we did see a good performance and throughput on both bands. I also moved around to all places of my home, every corner, and behind every object of some size. I had perfect connection everywhere.
A Minimalistic Design, But…
The only thing left to talk about is the physical design and that’s something else. The AmpliFi Instant is tiny and will blend into any environment. The white design and rounded edges allow it to match modern homes as well as traditional. A thing that I really like is the display on the router. Not only does it show a lot of useful information, it’s also a touchscreen and as such, doesn’t require physical buttons for the control. This is another feature which helps with the simplistic design.
The design does have one downside and that is that there isn’t room for a lot of ports. You get one LAN and one WAN port on the router and one LAN port on the mesh units. Naturally, you can split those up with switches which shouldn’t hinder the performance. You won’t find any USB ports on this device either, so there are no direct sharing functions. I actually like this as I rarely use them and not having them makes the interface and configuration simpler.
Pros
- Looks great
- Real easy to set up
- Solid wireless performance and range
- Touchscreen
Cons
- Not the fastest available WiFi with 867Mbps 5Ghz
“The AmpliFi Instant whole-home Wi-Fi kit allows for easy setup and full coverage of your home. Should it still not cover it all with the basic kit, then you can expand with more mesh points. And it does that looking awesome!”
Thank You, AmpliFi, for this sample
