I wrote about the “Most Affordable WiFi 6 Router Yet“, namely Xiaomi Mi Router AX1800, just two days ago, as it sells for around $60 on Aliexpress and 329 CNY ($46) in China. But the Xiaomi router did not hold the top spot for long, as Honor Router 3 WiFi 6 AX3000 router was just launched for 219 CNY (about $31 US) in China.
Honor Router 3 (aka Honor XD20) specifications:
- SoC – Huawei Gigahome W650 dual-core Cortex-A53 processor @ 1.2GHz. Note: Huawei announcement about the processor shows a quad-core Cortex-A53 @ 1.4 GHz, so there may be a dual-core version too?
- System Memory – 128MB RAM
- Storage – 128MB flash
- Networking
- Wireless
- 802.11ax/ac/n/a 2×2 & 802.11ax/n/b/g 2×2 MU-MIMO WiFi 6
- Transfer Rate – Up to 2976Mbps with 574 Mbps max @ 2.4GHz, 2402 Mbps max @ 5GHz
- Antennas – 4x 5dBi external antennas
- Wired – 4x Gigabit Ethernet ports with WAN/LAN adaptation
- Security – Wi-Fi access authorization, Wi-Fi anti brute force cracking, WPA3 support, firewall, DMZ, DoS attack protection, etc…
- Wireless
- Misc – Button with Hilink one-key pairing, WPS support; reset button.
- Power Supply – 12VDC/1A
- Dimensions – 242 x 151.9 x 40.9 mm
- Weight – 379 grams
- Temperature Range – 0 to 40°C
On paper, it’s better and cheaper than Xiaomi Mi Router AX1800, but for non-Chinese speakers, it will likely be hard to use due to the lack of translations into English and other languages, at least at the beginning. There are already some reviews in Chinese of the router showing how it performs when tested with a Huawei Honor WiFi 6 phone equipped with Kirin W650 chip (same a GigaHome W650 but optimized for phone), and results seem pretty good.
Despite US sanctions on Huawei, Malaysian website SoyaCincau claims Honor Router 3 will be sold worldwide starting in July 2020. Honor Router 3 WiFi 6 router is sold on Aliexpress for $59.99 shipped. However, considering the $31 price tag in China, I’d expect the price to eventually drop to around $45 to the rest of the world.
Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.
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Huawei processor…I guess the chances of getting OpenWrt on this are veeeery slim. I would never use this or the xiaomi routers with the stock firmware.
Good point. This was exactly what I thought when I saw the specs.
DD-WRT does not even support any Huawei routers at all, however, OpenWRT does support some Huawei routers, but, those are all Atheros, Broadcom, or Ralink based:
https://openwrt.org/toh/start?dataflt%5BBrand*%7E%5D=Huawei
Maybe with “Wi-Fi 6 Plus” they mean the AX3000 standard as opposed to AX1800.
https://consumer.huawei.com/en/routers/ax3-quad-core/
AX3000 implies 2×2 MU-MIMO and OFDMA for more simultaneous connected devices.
If so then I wonder what Huawei would call AX6000? Maybe “Wi-Fi 6 Plus Plus”? 😉
> 3000 Mbps Data Rates
How on earth should this be possible? The 3000 Mbps are a theoretical link rate (that’s constructed by adding the two independent link rates from 2.4GHz and 5GHz band together: 574+ 2402 = 2976)
Under less than ideal conditions the link rate depends on signal strength and is always lower. And the achievable data rates based on the real link rate are again way lower.
The usual marketing bs ?
That’s how all wireless products are promoted. 2976 Mbps rounded to 3000 Mbps.
That’s not the problem. These are ‘best case’ link rates but unfortunately you call them ‘data rate’ or ‘transfer rate’. That’s highly misleading since data rates are way lower than those theoretical link rates.
Or maybe they count like many switch vendors do, by summing all ports’ input traffic with the output traffic, resulting in systematically announcing the double of the reality as if the switch itself was sinking and sourcing that traffic 🙂 I.e. a 1 Gbps full-duplex network cable is a 4 Gbps cable in their model.
The number isn’t the problem. It’s the labelling in this article. No AP or router vendor would boldly call the 3000 marketing BS number data rate or throughput rate since it’s the rather irrelevant link rate.
Thanks for this great article.
This cnx article title is a little « please click me » with this fake price for the readers, isn’t it ? ?
There’s a cheaper seller, which also propose a 256mb version for the same price :
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000923414635.html
Interesting link. So there are two versions:
1. Honor Router AX3 with dual-core processor, 128MB RAM described in this post
2. Honor Router AX3 Pro with quad-core processor, 256 MB RAM
Not for the same price as of now. There is even a premium for the black version.
Don’t you think we can select English as the language in the UI during installation if it is to be sold globally / internationally?
With the exception of the United Kingdom. U.S. sanctions of Huawei does not apply most of the rest of the world, inc. EU.
nytimes.com/2020/02/17/us/politics/us-huawei-5g.html
It might be possible. The New York Times tries to force me to login to read the article though, so I can’t read the article.
> so I can’t read the article
If you’re fine with text only simply use archive.md –> https://archive.md/KBbJk
Thank you, it is very interesting. How much more is Nokia & Ericsson more expensive than Huawei?
Add a dot after the .com and it’ll skip the login, eg:
It works! Good trick.
Does someone have more details about the Wifi part?
Is it integrated in the HiSilicon Gigahome 650 chip?
Is this HiSilicon’s own IP or did they just license some wifi IP somewhere or is this even just a rebranded third party chip?
Having access to a GPL source code release or a picture of the board without the EM shielding would probably help to answer this.
> Having access to a GPL source code
Bastards seem to have thought about that already:
“The router is said to run “Huawei RTOS system” “