 Today I have the Linksys E3200 high performance dual band end router. So dual band is mostly useful in scenarios where you have a lot of wireless networks lying around and there's actually... Oh, you know what? I'll be back in a minute. Okay, guys. So here I have a pretty cool little app called Wi-Fi Analyzer. This is an Android app. So I want to explain why dual band is often necessary. So if there are a lot of wireless networks in your area, then you can definitely benefit from dual band. So check this out. This particular app only analyzes the 2.4 GHz range. And you can see that where I live, there's actually only a couple of Wi-Fi networks. So you can see these two curves are centered over channel 6. So that means that both the corner house 2, which is my Wi-Fi, and TELUS, whatever this is, which is I guess a neighbor, are both running off of channel 6. So what you can do to get away, to get the best performance, is to take your Wi-Fi network and put it on maybe channel 11 or 12, which will get you away from interference. And incidentally, that one's also some Wi-Fi network called library. So what happens is once this starts to get really crowded with different Wi-Fi networks running on the same channels, performance can be affected. So that is when it might be useful. There we go. Just put that away for now. To get a dual band router. So what you want to do is you want to configure your router then. And you'll have to make sure that you have dual band compatible adapters and devices. But you want to configure your router to run in the 5 GHz band. So what that means is you can remove yourself from all of that interference that's occurring on the 2.4 GHz band and get the best possible performance out of your router. So inherently, 5 GHz does not perform better than 2.4 GHz, but in a scenario, let's say you live in an apartment building or in a densely populated area, in a scenario where lots of the 2.4 GHz band is already taken up with other traffic, you can get away from it and you can get the true performance that you are trying to achieve. Now this is not a concurrent dual band router. Concurrent dual band means you can take both of those channels and you can run them, send them, receive data on both of them at the same time and get a performance boost that you can get. This is more of like a which one you want to use. So 300 plus 300 megabit speed, that is on both of the available bands. Superior range, speed boost, gigabit ports, a USB port, that's very cool to have included, as well as an HD 3D ready, that basically means it's fast, parental controls and easy setup. This is a big one because Linksys routers are out of all of the ones that I have seen. Oh, hold on. Give me a sec guys. Because out of all the routers that I have encountered, Linksys ones are the easiest to setup things like parental controls and guest networks and things like that. Now I made a mistake. This is a dual band concurrent router. So that means the scenario I gave you guys where you want to get away from interference, that is still true, but the scenario I gave you guys where you want to use both bands to send and receive data at the same time for a performance boost, that does apply to this router. So let's have a look at the back and see if there is anything else. There you go. So it's a continuous dual band, double the network bandwidth to avoid interference and maximize throughput. So that's a shorter way of saying that long story that I gave you. Fast data transfer rates, enhanced MIMO antenna array. So like all of the recent Linksys products, it has an internal antenna array, but it does support multiple in, multiple out, that is MIMO. Speed boost plus, yeah, signal strength across greater distances. All of this I think we've pretty much covered so far. Gigabit ethernets are included. This is something that I would consider an essential feature for any modern router because if you are using the wired connections, which are here, then you're going to want to achieve the best speed possible out of them and 10 hundred just doesn't cut it anymore. We're getting internet plans that are getting close to 100 megabit per second. So you want your internal network if you're transferring large files, watching HD videos over the network, whatever the case may be, to definitely be gigabit. So on the back we've got our USB port which supports storage so you can set up a storage device on there for your home network as well as for remote access. Gigabit ethernet ports times four as well as your WAN port, your WPS, so that is your one-butt, one-touch wireless setup, your power indicator and your 12 volt input. On the sides you see ventilation holes. So these are just for passive cooling. You can actually see, can you see those heat sinks in there? Yeah, you can. So you can see the heat sinks in there. So those are just going to be passively cooled from air coming up through the bottom of the unit and then coming out the top of it. You also have included an AC adapter, one network cable as well as the Linksys E-Series setup CD. This is one of the cases where I actually kind of do recommend running the CD, especially if you're not experienced setting up routers. It can be kind of handy. It just walks you through it. It takes you to the correct IP right off the bat and then walks you through the setup wizard. So I think that's pretty much it. Thank you for checking out my unboxing and first look at the E3200 from Linksys by Cisco. Don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer