Tenda A15 AC750 review: Small, but mighty

With its pocket-money price tag, the Tenda A15 is the cheapest Wi-Fi extender we’ve seen. It’s also the smallest: even with its two little aerials on the sides, it will plug into any socket without obstructing neighbouring plugs.

Tenda A15 AC750 review: Performance

While a compact design is convenient, it tends to go hand in hand with a low-power radio and small antennae – and those in turn have an impact on performance. The A15 claims a maximum data rate of 433Mbits/sec on the 5GHz channel, while every competing product promises at least double that.

It was hardly a shock, then, to see the A15 place well down the table in our speed tests. Over 802.11ac it gave us less than one-third of the overall speed of Netgear’s remarkable X6S. In fact, the very fastest download rate it managed to give us (7.3MB/sec in the kitchen) was around half as fast as the Netgear’s worst performance (14MB/sec in the utility room).

When we switched to the crowded 2.4GHz band, the A15’s little aerials struggled even more. Nowhere in the house did download speeds top 1MB/sec, and in the utility room the connection was just 250kB/sec.

Tenda A15 AC750 review: Features

So performance is unexceptional, but the feature set matches those of more expensive extenders. There’s a WPS button for fuss-free setup, and an Ethernet socket at the bottom, so you can connect wired and wireless clients: it’s only rated at 100Mbits/sec, but the wireless performance we observed makes that rather moot.

Delve into the web portal and you can also flip the configuration around and use the A15 as an access point for a wired router. And for additional security, it’s possible to blacklist specific clients, although you can’t set up a whitelist or an access schedule.

READ NEXT: Our full review of Netgear’s outstanding Nighthawk X6S Wi-Fi extender

Tenda A15 AC750 review: Verdict

The A15 isn’t the greatest extender in the world, but for the price it’s really rather impressive. 5GHz performance is more or less on par with the TP-Link RE365, which costs more than twice as much. If you just need to boost the signal to the far end of your home, and don’t care about 2.4GHz support or superfast download speeds, there’s no need to pay more.