Xiaomi Mi Router AX9000

Xiaomi has been in the network game for a long time now. As with most product spaces it enters, the Chinese giant tends to make the biggest splash in the lower end of the market, bringing strong value offers and routers are no different. The original Mi Wi-Fi AC router was a runaway succes with its attractive price and it’s still dutifully serving thousands of homes around the globe. But right now we are about to focus on the exact opposite end of the spectrum with the Mi Router AX9000.

The AX9000 is a flagship monstrosity of a router that looks like a space ship, weights about as much, glows all over with LEDs and we are pretty sure it will be among the members of the ruling council once the robot uprising begins. Joking aside, it is one hell of a premium unit, offering Wi-Fi 6 support, a cumulative 9000 Mbps of bandwidth, and a tri-band setup. Some of its other features include a 2.5Gbit/s port, a USB 3.0 one and a file server, 12 independently-amplified antennas, mesh networking support and basically the full slew of Wi-Fi 6 technologies, including 4×4 160MHz channels, 4K QAM and OFDMA.

If you are familiar with rourter hardware then the Mi Router AX9000 might have suddenly started to sound like a bargain, despite its $260 price. And if you are not you are probably wondering why on earth would anybody pay this much for a router.

For the latter group we have to first explain that Wi-Fi 6, despite its different name, is just the next generation of the wireless standard previously reffered to as 802.11ax. The router is still backwards compatible with older Wi-Fi standards, like 802.11ac or 802.11n and will work just fine with your legacy devices, while providing a welcome boost in transmission speeds to newer ones with Wi-Fi 6 support. You can read more about the Wi-Fi naming change from a few years ago here.

Switching to a more powerful and better-equipped router like the AX9000 can also bring about some straightforward upgrades, like better coverage and improvements in perofrmance when you have a lot of clients around your home. We’ll get more in-depth on that in a bit.

Hardware and design

First let’s bring our attention back to the Mi AX9000 itself and do a hardware tour. The Mi AX9000 is probably best likened to a space ship or some extremely modern fighter jet. It ships AX9000 in a massive, black styrofoam briefcase with an internal cutout to specifically house its massive body, along with a niche for its rather big 12V@4A power adaptor and a short Cat.6 UTP ethernet cable.

From the moment you hold the 3.6kg box you can tell that the AX9000 means business.

The AX9000 alone weighs just over 2kg – 2,050g and measures 270 x 270 x 174 mm, making it one of the most massive routers you can find, so need to make sure you have room for it at its designated location.

A big chunk of that weight is due to the massive cooling solution that the AX9000 requires. The good news is we never actually managed to hear its fan, even with a heavy workload. Xiaomi has automatic fan control for it, so when the AX9000 isn’t being strained too hard, the fan switches off and the only uses the massive heatsink inside for passive cooling.

The four massive antennas, circling the AX9000 are its other defining hardware feature. These fold in for storage and out for use. They are optimized to be vertically positioned but go beyond 90 degrees, which can be useful if you live in a multi-story building.

Each of the those antennas has three separately-amplified internal antennas – for the three bands the router supports. One of these is a standard 2.4 GHz antenna, which can support channels 1 through 13 and a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 1148 Mbps. Then there is a 5.2GHz band, which is what most 5GHz routers and access points tend to have. It handles the lower channels – 36,40,44,48,52,56,60,64, with a max bandwidth of 4,804 Mbps. The third band, which is more of a rarity, is technically 5.8GHz and can do channels 149,153,157,161 and 165 with a max throughput of 2,404 Mbps.