Meet the D-Link COVR-X1862 Mesh WiFi system with WiFi 6

Main features

This new WiFi Mesh system from the manufacturer D-Link is included in the mid-high range of WiFi Mesh systemsTherefore, we can achieve a great wireless coverage and a very good real speed, whether we connect to the node that acts as a router, or to one of the extension nodes of the first. In addition, D-Link has equipped this equipment with all the technologies incorporated in the previous COVRs that have given us such good results, but improving both efficiency and speed, thanks to the incorporation of the new WiFi 6 standard.

The manufacturer D-Link sells this WiFi Mesh system in two different packs, on the one hand we have the D-Link COVR-X1862 that includes two nodes exactly the same, either of them can act as a main router or as an extender node. Also, they are coming preconfigured to interconnect with each other, without having to make complicated configurations, we will simply have to take the first device out of the box, configure it, and once configured we can turn on the second node and in less than two minutes we will have the WiFi Mesh system configured and ready to cover our entire home with coverage.

The second pack we have is the D-Link COVR-X1863, in this case, we have a total of three nodes, one of them will act as the main router and the other two will act as extender nodes. Of course, these three nodes also come preconfigured so that they interconnect with each other, without doing any configuration.

A very important detail is that this D-Link COVR-X1862 allow a total of up to four nodes to be connected in the same Mesh network. This means that, at most, we can have one router plus three extender nodes. Therefore, if we need to cover many floors or areas of the house, it would be a very good option to buy two packs of D-Link COVR-X1862 because the maximum is four nodes.

Wireless features

The main features of this new D-Link COVR-X1862 WiFi Mesh system is the incorporation of simultaneous dual band with AX1800 class WiFi 6. In the band 2.4GHz we can achieve a speed of up to 574Mbps, thanks to its two internal antennas in MU-MIMO 2T2R configuration, at 40MHz channel width and the WiFi 6 standard. 5GHz band we can achieve a speed of up to 1,201Mbps, thanks to its two internal antennas in MU-MIMO 2T2R configuration, at 80MHz of channel width and the WiFi 6 standard. This model does not have support for 160MHz of channel width in the 5GHz band, so we must have it very much in mind.

The D-Link COVR-X1862 includes all the wireless features of WiFi 6, such as MU-MIMO to transfer data to multiple clients simultaneously, OFDMA To globally optimize the wireless network, the BSS Coloring to reduce interference with other neighboring WiFi networks (if they also use WiFi 6 with BSS Color) and the Beamforming to focus the wireless signal on the clients and provide them with extra coverage and WiFi speed. We also have the «Smart Roaming«, That is, WiFi roaming using the 802.11k / v standards to move from one node to another without interrupting the wireless connection. We also have the «Smart Steering«, That is to say, the usual band-steering so that the router places us in the 2.4GHz band or in the 5GHz band depending on the coverage we are receiving from the main router or the extension nodes.

Other very important functionalities regarding WiFi is the incorporation of a WPS button to synchronize WiFi clients with the router without entering the WPA2-Personal key, in addition, this router supports WPA2 / WPA3-Personal and even WPA3-Personal only, to have the best possible security. Something that has caught our attention is that we can use WPA3-Personal only in the network, the nodes will interconnect without problems, something that does not happen with other WiFi Mesh systems when we activate the “WPA3 only” mode.

Wired Features

Regarding the wired characteristics, each of the D-Link nodes has One Gigabit Ethernet port for the Internet WAN and other Gigabit Ethernet port for LAN. This WiFi Mesh system allows backhaul over EthernetIn this way, we can interconnect them via cable to achieve the best possible performance by having a 1Gbps trunk bandwidth, instead of using the 2.4GHz or 5GHz WiFi network that is shared with WiFi clients.

In all nodes we have an «Internet» and a «LAN» port, but in the case of using a node as an extender, the Internet port will function as a LAN without problems, however, in case of interconnecting them, we will have to connect the network cable to the nodes through this «Internet» port. It would have been desirable for each node to incorporate an additional Ethernet port, especially for the main router, because we may need to buy a switch to expand the Ethernet ports.

Firmware and main options

The firmware of this new D-Link COVR-X1862 includes a lot of very interesting features for a Mesh WiFi system. For example, we have the possibility of configure the device as the main router, What bridge to use our operator’s router and have an improved WiFi network, and we also have the functionality of extender which basically will act in WiFi repeater mode but without Mesh functionalities. Without a doubt, the best options are router and bridge mode, to make the most of this high-performance WiFi Mesh system.

Other features are that it incorporates a parental control based on time and content, we also have a L2TP / IPsec VPN server and we even have full compatibility for WPA3-Personal. The rest of the available configuration options are the same as always that we know in the rest of the manufacturer’s routers and WiFi Mesh, in this case, nothing has changed. What has caught our attention is that we will have a button in the main firmware menu to block Internet access to each and every device.

Once we know the main characteristics of this new WiFi Mesh, we go with the unboxing of the equipment.

Unboxing and first impressions

The first thing that has caught our attention about this WiFi Mesh system is that they are physically very similar to the COVR-1102 that we have previously analyzed. The only externally appreciable difference is the upper part where we will have the equipment status LED, the rest of the housing is exactly the same as the previous model, therefore, we will have a really interesting design that will go unnoticed in our home. Of course, these teams do not have external antennas, so we can place it in the room without problems that too much is seen through these antennas.

Inside the box we can see the current transformers of each node, and a flat Cat5e network cable. The incorporation of this type of flat network cables gives a “premium” touch to WiFi Mesh, thanks to these cables, we can easily connect our operator’s router or our PC to the node.

In the following video you can see all the details about this new D-Link COVR-X1862, we will explain the main features of the WiFi Mesh system and we will show you in detail all the contents of the box. In addition, we also tell you some characteristics of the firmware that the router incorporates.