TP-Link Deco BE85 (BE22000) Review – Wi-Fi 7, Ready or Not, Here It Comes!

TP-Link Deco BE85 Review – The first generation of Wi-Fi 7 routers and mesh routers are here, whether your devices are ready or not. TP-Link Deco BE85 is here for your home and will give your devices performance that you’ve never experienced before.

Not only do these mesh routers have insane transfer speeds, they also have very strong wireless signals and reach all the previously dead corners around my house.

TP-Link Deco BE85 Review – Unboxing and Packaging Contents

TP-Link Deco BE85 Review – Setup

Setting up requires a Deco app to be installed on your smartphone, but once you do, it’s a very easy and painless process. Simply turn on any of the units (there is no Alpha/Main unit as such) and select the model from the app. Just follow the step-by-step process, which only takes about a minute or two.

To add the rest of the units, you don’t even need to add them one by one and go through all the steps again. Simply plug them in at various locations around the house, and they will automatically join the established network. Really intuitive and painless.

Gone are the days where we needed to manually hook up a laptop or go to a specific IP address using our web browser. That would freak many non-technical users out.

TP-Link Deco BE85 Review – Design and Features

The Deco BE85 review unit I have here is the 3-pack model. Each Deco BE85 unit is bigger and heavier compared to other mesh routers that I’ve reviewed here at Craving Tech. There is a small LED situated at the bottom of the unit to display network status. If you place it on a surface, the light will reflect/bounce off the surface slightly, creating a nice, faint underlighting.

The system operates on three bands: 11520 Mbps (6GHz), 8640 Mbps (5 GHz), and 1376 Mbps (2.4GHz). It supports up to 22 Gbps with 12-stream Wi-Fi, which is a notable feature especially for households with plenty of connected wireless devices all trying to fight for bandwidth.

For wired connectivity, each unit consists of many High-Speed Ports: 1× 10 Gbps Ethernet/Fibre Combo WAN/LAN port, 1× 10 Gbps WAN/LAN port, and 2× 2.5 Gbps ports. To utilise the 10 Gbps port, you’ll need a Cat6 Ethernet Cable. So if your house is running older Cat5 cables, there probably isn’t much point in having this fast port. Either way, double-check to make sure you can indeed utilise these high-speed ports if you are planning to get the Deco BE85.

They are backward-compatible, of course, and I had no issues running these at home with my good old Ethernet cable.

I’m amazed at how far the wireless signal can go with these mesh routers. The internal, 8 High-Gain Antennas are definitely designed to maximise coverage and improve signal strength across large areas. On many wireless and mesh routers I’ve reviewed, there’s always been this one spot at the far corner of our land where signals get shaky. More often than not, it becomes a dead zone. The Deco BE85 performs really well though, and I was able to get a 500 Mbps transfer speed (using the Wi-FiSweetSpots app) in that very same spot.

Wi-Fi 7 introduces 320 MHz ultra-wide bandwidth, 4096-QAM, Multi-RU, and Multi-Link Operation to provide speeds 4.8× faster than Wi-Fi 6 and 13× faster than Wi-Fi 5 (source: TP-Link What is Wi-Fi 7?). MLO (Multi-Link Operation) allows a device to send and receive data across different frequency bands and channels simultaneously. Traditionally, on older Wi-Fi standards, a device could only connect to either 2.4GHz or 5GHz, meaning the other channel’s bandwidth would be wasted even though it’s unused.

Refer to the image below (taken from TP-Link’s explanation on how MLO works).

The MLO has its own wireless SSID, and my gaming PC, iPhone 15 Pro, and Google Pixel 8 Pro had no trouble connecting and utilising this Wi-Fi 7 goodness. MLO is excellent for bandwidth-hungry applications like AR, VR, video calls, online gaming, etc.

Look, Wi-Fi 7 has many other advantages and technical advancements to ensure your network is faster and more reliable than ever. Feel free to check other sites or documents explaining what they are and how they work.

Apart from the Wi-Fi 7 features and excellent wireless signal strength, the mesh router has the usual goodies like QoS, plus TP-Link HomeShield, which includes a few more extra features like Network Protection and Parental Controls. You can even add an extra layer of protection to your home network by setting up a separate Wi-Fi network for IoT devices and tweaking how they connect to your network by isolating them.

For Parental Controls, blocking sites like porn or social media is straightforward. When I tested this, the parental control worked like a charm on a few devices I selected from the list. I wasn’t able to access blocked sites like Facebook.com or Instagram.com, though somehow I could still get to Twitter. You can add your own custom sites to block using the Deco app. Sometimes, you’ll get a page saying it is blocked and you can request access from the parents. Other times, the browser will just show that it’s unable to connect to the page. Note that Advanced Parental Controls can only be accessed through a Premium subscription.

While each unit has two internal cooling fans, it’s quite warm to the touch, but I’ve never experienced any shutdowns or even a slowdown in network performance.

TP-Link Deco BE85 Review Conclusion

Some questions remain. How many of your devices can take advantage of Wi-Fi 7? Do you really need that awesome, fast transfer speed over the wireless network? If all you do is browse the web or watch Netflix on a 100 Mbps NBN connection (or even the more popular 50 Mbps here in Australia), then it may not be worth all the bells and whistles considering the price.

However, if you are transferring lots of large files frequently over the network, like to your NAS, or have tons of devices connected at home (I have around 22-30 wireless devices hungry for bandwidth), or if you usually have the latest and greatest tech (like the new Google Pixel 8 Pro that supports Wi-Fi 7), you won’t be disappointed. The performance is rock-solid and fast, like checking the live view on my Ring Video Doorbell Pro 2, which feels instantaneous.

For Wi-Fi 7 early adopters, TP-Link Deco BE85 is an excellent unit that will future-proof your home network for many generations to come.

TP-Link Deco BE85 retails for A$2999.95 and is available at retailers around Australia like Officeworks, Bing Lee, The Good Guys, and Harvey Norman. Also available on Amazon if you are not in Australia.