If you go to a store dealing with tech gadgets, you will find great routers for around HUF 15-30 thousand, almost full extra products that are good for almost everything. There is, however, a narrow group of users, which includes those for whom “almost” and “almost” are not enough. They want the best and are willing to pay for it. The Cudy AX3000 WiFi 6 CPE router, or as it is called in short, the P5, was made for them.
Outside
The router comes in a sophisticated box, which contains the router, the power supply, a network cable and four antennas. The four antennas were placed separately in the box because they are to be used to connect to the mobile network, i.e. they are not accessories that everyone will need all the time.
The router itself is a black rectangular box with decorative ventilation grilles on the upper part. The task of these is to release the air heated by the hardware, to release the air that enters through the grills on the lower part – cooling was therefore solved passively by Cudy engineers. If required, the P5 can even be mounted on the wall, in which case you can freely choose whether the part containing the status LEDs or the mobile antennas and Ethernet connectors face upwards. The two antennas on the device, which provide WiFi coverage, cannot be removed, but they can be rotated and tilted to optimize the signal strength depending on the environment.
Four indicator LEDs on the front panel show the current statuses, which in turn inform about the operation, the Internet connection, the WiFi network and the signal strength of the mobile network (if at least one SIM card is in use). In the case of mobile signal strength, blue, purple and red color codes indicate the reception quality, which helps a lot in finding the ideal position for the router. The device is connected to the mobile network using the four rear antennas, as mentioned earlier, these are not installed at the factory. Thanks to the standard SMA connectors, you can not only use the included antennas, but it is also possible to connect an outdoor antenna to the device. In addition to the antenna sockets and the two nano-SIM sockets, there are also four gigabit Ethernet ports on the back, and of course the power supply is also connected here. The Cudy P5 also has a WPS button, a Reset button and a separate power button.
It can be deployed anywhere
We have also had very expensive network routers, but the Cudy P5’s price of almost HUF 160,000 raises the eyebrows of even the most experienced, at least a little. It is not a small amount of money, but in return we can say that the router is full of extras, it really supports all existing services.
It is a powerful device in terms of hardware, with a dual-core 1 GHz system chip and 256 GB of RAM ensuring that network communication is always continuous. The LAN connectors are gigabit, and although there is no separate WAN port on this router, the fourth connector can be switched to this mode as well, if you want to put it behind the modem/router provided by your service provider. Our minimal sense of deficiency may be due to the lack of WISP mode, although there is no doubt that this will almost certainly never be needed: the speed of the gadget could not really be served by a wireless Internet connection. And it is absolutely certain that the Cudy P5 will be the fastest on the network, so it makes no sense to use it in a role other than the central router. Mesh mode is supported, so the router can connect to other Cudy Mesh devices without any problems, just as other Mesh-capable devices can connect to it.
The WiFi is of course according to standard 6, which provides a speed of 2.4 Gbps in the 5 GHz range and 600 Mbps in the 2.4 GHz range, even in parallel – thus the theoretical maximum data transfer speed 3 Gbps. Of course, in real conditions it is somewhat lower, but general experience shows that the speed of WiFi 6 in a normal-sized apartment competes with the speed of a wired connection.
The special feature of the router is that it can be used not only in a home environment, but practically anywhere where there is mobile coverage: the two Nano SIM slots also immediately mean that you can connect to two services with the router. In this case, the principle of redundancy applies, that is, one of the SIM cards serves as a backup in case of any failure with the primary mobile data connection. A SIM card can also be inserted into the router if the main source of Internet access is wired, since redundancy can be ensured in this case as well.
During use
In the description of the Cudy P5, it is stated that four times more clients can connect to the router than in the case of an average product. Due to the lack of capacity, we did not have the opportunity to test this limit live, it is certain that the router handled the 39 devices in the test environment without any problems – of course, the majority of the connected products were some kind of smart gadget, i.e. a device that does not generate a lot of data traffic. However, it was not a problem to serve four devices with a Full HD stream from a NAS connected wirelessly to the router, downloads were lightning fast, and of course the Internet experience was not interrupted even for a moment.
We put the router into operation by connecting to the WiFi network it created. The data required for connection (SSID and password) are printed on a sticker on the bottom of the router. The interface can be accessed at 192.168.10.1 and the default password is “admin” – this must be changed during the initial setup. After the first login, a wizard appears to guide you through the most important steps; for example, the name and password of the 2.4 and 5 GHz network can be set. If you also want to change the encryption, you can do that later. Cudy P5 can be used as a WiFi router, access point and WISP router. The repeater function is not included in this gadget, but we have already explained that this cannot really be considered a shortcoming in this case. In addition, there is also the possibility that if there is another product at home that supports the creation of the Cudy Mesh network, then the P5 will also be part of it.
After closing the wizard, the router can be used immediately, but it also has a lot of extra features that you might want to check out. The DHCP server includes, for example, an address reservation option, and there is MAC filtering, port forwarding, and your own DNS can also be set. If you want, the WiFi encryption can be changed to WPA3. The gadget offers a wide variety of VPN services, and with ZeroTier there is even a way to give the remote network its own IP address range and subnet mask. The DDNS service replaces the fixed IP address, with which the device is always accessible via the Internet.
Among the convenience functions, parental control and the timer can be interesting, and in a corporate environment, secure remote management can be set up with the help of the TL069 module.
We borrowed the Cudy P5 router from Hama for the duration of the test. Recommended end user price approx. 160 thousand HUF.
Source: geeks.hu
