TP-Link Archer BE400 BE6500 Dual-Band Wi-Fi 7 Router Review - Wi-Fi 7 On A Budget

Introduction & Specification Details and Close-up

While plenty of Wi-Fi 7 routers will proclaim their greatness, often that's greatness that comes with a cost, and it's one that's directly financial. If you want the absolute best Wi-Fi 7 performance, it will cost you.

That's not the same thing as saying all Wi-Fi 7 routers are expensive, however. The TP-Link BE6500 (AKA the TP-Link Archer BE400 in some markets, and indeed under the hood as this exact designation) is a lower-cost gaming router for those on a more constrained budget. As you might expect, that does get you a slightly less feature-rich and speedy router, but for smaller homes or apartments, this might be all that you really need.

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Specifications & Close Up

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Alex's Test System

• HP Omnibook Ultra Flip (Intel Core Ultra 7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD)
• Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra

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Design

The TP-Link BE6500 is a remarkably easy router to unpack and physically set up, and that's largely because out of the box, it's all preinstalled with its array of six antennas already fixed into the main router body. If you can unwrap plastic, you're basically set. One feature here I didn't notice for a while is that the individual antennae are all plastic wrapped as well, though this feels like overwrapping to me.

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Router unpacked, you also get a few slender pieces of paper covering warranty status, GPL licensing requirements, a sticker to let you append your own wireless details on the router if desired, a quick note about Wi-Fi 7 compatibility issues, and a slender quick installation guide. You also get a single short flat RJ-45 cable and a supplied power adaptor.

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The power adaptor is on the longer and larger side, which can sometimes be problematic if you're using a low wall plug or don't otherwise have much space, but there's nothing here that can be called all that complex.

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The same is true for the TP-Link BE6500's visual style, though once you do pack in more than a few antennas, there's not much you can do to avoid the cyber hedgehog look. It's a basic black router with a single indicator light strip at the front and a small TP-Link logo facing outwards.

Further Routers & Access Points Reading – Our Latest Reviews

• TP-Link Deco BE11000 Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi 7 System Review - Superior Performance
• ASUS ROG STRIX GS-BE18000 Wi-Fi 7 Tri-Band Gaming Router Review - Fast and Highly Configurable
• D-Link DWR-933M Wi-Fi 6 Mobile Hotspot Review - Cheap, But Not Fast

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Spin it around, and you'll find a single USB-A 3.0 port on the right-hand side, while at the back it features a single 2.5Gbps WAN port and four Ethernet ports. The leftmost of these is marked out as the solitary 2.5Gbps-capable port for gaming, while the other three are more mundane 1Gbps ports.

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There are buttons for LED control, WPS, and a typical reset hole to the left, while the right-hand side is where the power plugs in next to the on/off switch. The TP-Link BE6500 is a lower-cost router, and there's not much here that feels premium, though that's not out of scope at this kind of price point.

Software

The TP-Link BE6500 can be set up either via web browser or via smartphone app, though confusingly, TP-Link hasn't opted for a single app approach for its array of routers and mesh systems.

Buy something like the recently reviewed TP-Link Deco BE11000, and you'll need the TP-Link Deco app, but for the TP-Link BE6500, you'll instead need the TP-Link Tether app if smartphone configuration is your style. I do appreciate having the flexibility of web configuration, but in order to test out its robustness, I opted for the smartphone setup routine when first configuring the TP-Link BE6500.

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Setting up via the app does require a TP-Link account - as a reminder, burner email accounts are easy to set up as needed to assist with privacy - and the app then walks through the process of connecting up your modem and configuring your Internet account, while also setting a fresh administrator password and creating your primary Wi-Fi network. Most app-based router configurations do tend towards the easy side, and TP-Link Tether is no different in this respect.

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Like many router manufacturers, there's a mix of onboard services and also cloud-based subscription services for parental control, time-based access features, and anti-virus software. The app does rather push those to the forefront during the setup process, which does feel on the pushy side; they're not a terrible inclusion if you do happen to want them, but very annoying if you don't when they're shoved down your throat like this.

The Tether app also offers the ability to more directly identify connected client devices; if you've ever had curiosity about some of the ways that smart devices, especially, can connect to networks, being able to pin them down more directly could be useful, but it does warn you that it does so by sharing some of your data with third-party services. I'd rather stay private, so I didn't enable this.

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The Tether app keeps it simple with tabs for Gaming performance, Security, Family controls, and a More tab that hides most of the rest of the TP-Link BE6500's

Advanced features. It's nice to see that while the Tether app keeps it simple if you just want basic configuration, those who need more subtle tweaks aren't locked out. I'd still opt for a browser-based setup for those kinds of optimisations, but here you can take either route.

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Web configuration is also supported, though the TP-Link BE6500 did get cranky with me when I tried to log in there while already logged into the Tether app. That's not a bad approach to ensure general network security by only allowing a single authorized administrator at one time.

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In terms of gaming features, you can configure prioritization for gaming applications via bandwidth allocation and port forwarding, as well as Game Server Acceleration via the paid WTFast service - another subscription hook, though it's not enabled by default.

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Performance

At a speed level, TP-Link rates the TP-Link BE6500 as being capable of up to 688Mbps over 2.4GHz networks and up to 5,764Mbps over 5GHz. That's nowhere near the peak speeds of Wi-Fi 7 in any way, but that's very much reflected in the price space that the TP-Link BE6500 occupies. This is a router built for the mass market at a more affordable price point, bringing just the base level features of Wi-Fi 7; if you want faster speeds, you'll have to pay a little more in other words.

The TP-Link BE6500 only operates on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands with no support for 6GHz operation, but it does support the use of MLO (Multi-Link Operation) to combine those bands into a distinct Wi-Fi 7 compatible network for devices that support it. Setting up an MLO network is not automatic, however, and if you opt to enable it, it does require a router reboot before it's active.

TP-Link suggests that the TP-Link BE6500 is a suitable unit for a small home of around 3 bedrooms; my own domicile is a little larger than that, but this gave me the opportunity to see just how far its network could stretch.

I've used the same location for Wi-Fi network testing for some decades now, and I'll always point out that the nature of Wi-Fi network testing is by definition subjective. What I test in my location takes my environmental factors into account - more on that shortly - but possibly not yours, so what I try to do is present a picture of performance at three ranges; close to the router, effectively in the same room, then a mid-range point a couple of rooms away and then a far point, which is my more brutal challenge scenario.

That's because it's located in my home office, built on an extension to the property, which means there's a hidden wall between it and the router that used to be an external property wall. It's hidden, but it's also very effective at blocking most Wi-Fi signals, which is why it's such a brutal test. Your own circumstances will vary, but the point here is that the far location represents those areas that might otherwise be Wi-Fi blackspots in a home setting.

I did hit the issue when first testing that none of my devices could see the 2.4GHz network if it was left to its default automatic setting; forcing it to channel 6 did resolve this, and it's an issue I've hit before with TP-Link routers. While many newer devices will work on 5GHz without an issue, and the TP-Link BE6500 only presents the one primary SSID (plus its secondary MLO network if enabled), many smart home devices, such as robot vacuum cleaners, are often 2.4GHz only.

The first testing stop was to check the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) at each location.

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Here I hit an immediate but not unsurprising snag. The TP-Link BE6500's networks could be seen in the close and mid-range locations, but only the MLO network was punching through the wall to the far location, and even then at a rate that suggested that signal strength was so low as to be likely unusable. I'd often find, while testing the TP-Link BE6500 in the far location, that even the MLO network would blink out of existence as far as it was concerned. This isn't a new problem for this area, but it's worth pointing out if you've got a particularly bad Wi-Fi blackspot in your home; the TP-Link BE6500 may not be able to pierce through to it.

For a lot of gaming and productivity uses these days, Internet connectivity is a must, so my next test shifted towards testing Internet speed at each location. Here, I used two devices to test, in order to allow for differences in antenna pickup: an HP Omnibook Ultra Flip (Intel Core Ultra 7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra. They're both Wi-Fi 7 capable, but both can (and do) provide slightly different Wi-Fi performance.

Here's how they compared in each location using Ookla's speed test. I've expressed the speeds here as a percentage of the fixed line speed at the time of testing to avoid any comparative issues around fluctuating broadband speeds, but in this case, it was via a 1000/100 Aussie Broadband HFC NBN connection.

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The TP-Link BE6500 performs well in close and mid-range spaces, with an expected drop-off at the mid-range, and a very small boost to performance when using the MLO network. I could not get the HP laptop to stay on the MLO network long enough to complete even one speed test in the far location, and while the Samsung could generally see the network, its results weren't particularly useful unless you're a big fan of very slow downloads and lots of video buffering.

I should point out that this was exactly what I expected, as this area is absolutely a dead zone for the vast majority of Wi-Fi routers. I could get around this with the TP-Link BE6500 by enabling EasyMesh and adding a few nodes to punch through to the far area, but it's not like those nodes are included in the box, so I'm focusing on standalone performance instead.

To test out local network performance, I ran a file copy test between the HP laptop and an Ethernet-connected NAS, reading and writing a 1.34GB video file between both systems at each available location. As the HP couldn't reliably see the TP-Link BE6500 in the far location, that meant that I only got test results for the close and mid-range spaces.

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Those results aren't the fastest, but they're appropriate enough to the TP-Link BE6500's more mid-range ambitions and price point.

Final Thoughts

The TP-Link BE6500 doesn't sell itself as a top-of-the-range gaming router, and that's certainly not what you're getting here.

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It is instead a more affordable unit with performance that scales down accordingly. If you're trying to fill a larger dwelling, or one like mine, where there are some more evident absolute Wi-Fi blackspots, you may be left wanting, especially at longer distances, unless you're using it as the base of a mesh network, or you're willing to use a few Wi-Fi extenders along the way to help with signal propagation.

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However, if you're using it in a smaller home or apartment, it could be a decent way to get reasonable performance without making a notably hefty dent in your wallet.