 Welcome to my unboxing of the Buffalo AC1300 slash N900 dual band extreme performance wireless router. Now when Buffalo says extreme performance, what they mean by extreme performance is as extreme as it freaking gets when it comes to wireless. So this is a Wi-Fi router, it is 802.11 AC, which is completely different from 802.11 A, 802.11 B, G, and N. This is significantly faster. So this guy is capable of up to 1.3 gigabits per second. Remember, whenever we're talking wireless performance, we're talking theoretical performance and in the real world it'll be less, but this theoretical performance is definitely faster than your old theoretical performance, I can tell you that much for sure. So that is with ultrafast wireless 11 AC, 900 megabit per second, simultaneous dual band wireless 11 N. So that means dual concurrent 450 megabit per second streams, even if you're using older wireless N equipment with it. However, if you pair it up with newer wireless AC equipment, you will get screaming fast, theoretically gigabit wireless connectivity, which is up until now completely unheard of when it comes to the consumer space anyway. So it comes with a fairly full... Oh, I love these ethernet cables. We have one of these in the Tech Tips room from when we did, from when we showcased a Buffalo product in the past. These are like their sexy ribbon cable ethernet cables. Very nice. Those are the kinds of accessories that I get excited about these days, I guess. I mean, I'm also excited about the 1.3 gigabit per second wireless performance, but okay. Let's cover more of what Buffalo has to say for themselves before we move along. So it's dual band 2.4 gigahertz, 5 gigahertz, gigabit ethernet, USB port for storage, and it is also multi-platform PC, Mac or mobile devices are all supported and they darn well better be, okay? Oh right, so AC is different from N. It doesn't operate on 2.4 gigahertz at all. Now in theory, 5 gigahertz is a bit of a range impediment compared to 2.4 gigahertz. However, the advantage of it is that there is significantly less interference on the 5 gigahertz band. So while you get from a wireless N 5 gigahertz router, you get even more from a dedicated 5 gigahertz wireless AC router. So moving right along, also right, I mean, better antenna technology, better transmission power is also going to compensate somewhat for the reduced range of the 5 gigahertz band operating in. Okay, transfer speeds up to ideal in uninterrupted HD video streaming, concurrent internet access. It's amazing. I mean, I can't wait for 1,300 megabit per second internet access. Yeah, yeah. All right, 24-7 tech support in USA and Canada only. Three-year warranty on this guy right here and we've got all of the usual stuff right here, including what it includes, the wireless, the wired interface. So of course it's gigabit, which it sort of better be if it's going to be like, I mean, if it's going to be capable of gigabit on the wireless side, then it better be gigabit wired too, because that only sort of stands for reason. All right, so let's see what they've included. Oh, it's kind of a neat looking, it's kind of a neat looking router casing. Okay, hold on. So Air Navigator is their connector CD. I've actually found in my experience, I know I usually say throw away the CD, but I found router connector CDs can actually be kind of useful if you're not techie and knowledgeable. So if you buy the router for someone, you can tell them to use it. Also comes with a colored quick setup guide, shows you how to plug the thing into the thing and the other thing and switch the thing on, as well as, oh, look at that, a couple quick tips about setting up the SSID, setting up the key. It's nice to have a handy-dandy reference sheet. I would probably take something like this and like tape it to the unit, because that's what I usually do with the information that I need. Information guide for Android devices. Oh, look at that. Trying to be very complete about things. Warranty statement, regulatory compliance, and supplemental information. Hmm. Fascinating. Okay, so let's have a look at what they've got in terms of included accessories. Screw brackets, a couple mounting hoo-has. So it looks like these guys go in here like, hmm. Hmm. Probably this would be my guess. Okay, give me a, oh no, I get it, I get it, I get it. Okay, yeah, so these clip in right here. If you do want to stand the router up, there's little guides on the inside, so you can see that right there. Just like that. And then it will stand without falling over. So the unit itself has a soft-touch rubberized finish on it that actually looks quite nice. You've got Buffalo's Air Station branding right about there on that side and right about there on the other side. They've got a plastic piece that goes around the top of it. Kind of like, it looks kind of like Mackie, you know, like with the sort of aluminum-y, metal-y looking piece going around the outside of a black thing. Kind of like an iPad or something. It's my tablet, the Air Station. On the front, we've got our connectivity indicators. We've also got an illuminated Buffalo logo. And moving around to the back, we find our four gigabit LAN, our internet jack, as well as our, oh, that's kind of neat, our on-off switch. So you don't actually have to unplug it to power cycle the router, should you need to do it. As well as our power input, our USB port, an eject button for the safe ejection of it, and a router button. Let's figure out what that does. Give me a sec, guys. Apparently, on the entire internet, information does not exist about what this button does, but what I suspect it does is it's a hardware button to change from router mode to just wireless access point switch mode, which would be really useful because then you can take your existing setup, plug this thing in, hit the button. It's not going to create any conflicting IP address assignments, anything like that, and it'll just get you going as quickly as possible. Also, we found something cool. Here's a card in the bottom of the unit that tells you all of your default information without taping things to the side of it, which is pretty cool as well. There's a reset button on the bottom, which if you want to reset the unit, you're going to want to hold that down. That'll reset it back to factory defaults. And in terms of included accessories, we've got our power brick. I think we already covered this, didn't we? So I think that pretty much wraps it up. Now, right now there aren't really any AC devices. So what's the point of an AC router? It's a draft 2.0 standard at this point in time. So why do you need this gigabit wireless speed? Well, Buffalo has a companion product. So this is the AC1300. This is the dual band media bridge. So it has four gigabit ports. And then this guy right here is basically like a huge network card. Think of it that way, like it's a huge external Wi-Fi dongle. So that means you can connect just one device by gigabit ethernet to this guy right here. And then you're going to get your 1.3 gigabit per second theoretical between these two devices and then full gigabit connectivity between this guy and whatever computer or device it's connected to or up to four devices at a time, given that there should be bandwidth to spare. The router itself includes all the usual features and things like QoS. So you can prioritize certain things like media streaming or gaming so that you don't get any lag. And I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out our unboxing and first look at their AC1300 dual band extreme performance wireless router from Buffalo. And don't forget to subscribe to Linus Tech Tips for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos.