The Gryphon AX is a Mesh capable AX-class router made to provide secure networking for home deployment
The market for advanced wireless networking technology has exploded since many got the unexpected opportunity to spend more time at home. Unfortunately, this also revealed that Wi-Fi solutions that worked acceptably for personal use weren’t suitable as business tools when connection and performance issues became apparent. As a result, homeowners have been tempted to invest in technologies created for the commercial space and pay business prices for that privilege. Today we’ll be looking at the Gryphon AX, a wireless router that uses the latest AX and Mesh technologies focused on residential deployment. Is this the solution for your home and family, or would it create more problems than it resolved? The Gryphon AX comes as either a single device or a dual-router bundle, costing $279 and $479 directly from the Gryphon website. Currently, Gryphon only ships to customers in the USA, and the AX isn’t available through online retailers in other regions. But, as other Gryphon hardware is available through Amazon and other channels globally, the AX should be available elsewhere eventually. Out of the box, the Gryphon AX comes with just a single short Ethernet cable and a small wall socket mounted power supply. It’s a US standard outlet design with two blades and no earth, so users outside that region will need a converter to connect it to their local standard. Hopefully, Gryphon will make an international PSU soon that supports a grounding line for safer installations of devices that remain connected and powered for long periods. The outward appearance of this router is a message about simplicity, though the designers didn’t entirely follow this through by making it purely a box. The angled sides give it an architectural vibe, and the lack of any button to sanction connection, along with a single LED above the logo, demonstrate that this design has had anything considered superfluous removed. At the back is just two ports, one to connect to the internet modem and another to the LAN. The lack of other LAN ethernet ports dictates that an Ethernet switch will be required unless you only own one wired device. There is also no USB port to distribute a printer or storage device, should you be expecting that. But these aren’t the only things missing. When you pick up the router to see the label underneath, the critical pieces of information that it lacks is an admin login and password. Therefore, to set up and configure this router will require a mobile device, phone or tablet, and the installation of a Gryphon connect application to that device. Without the application, a device to run it on, and presumably the Gryphon server to accept enrolment, this hardware won’t work. From a technical standpoint, this is a Tri-band MU-MIMO Wi-Fi 6 specification router that sports six internal antennas and most of the clever technology that these things offer, like Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) data transmissions and signal beamforming. All these activities are managed by an ARM-based quad-core CPU with 1GB of RAM and 512MB of flash memory. The three bands are a single 2.4GHz channel with 591Mbps of capacity and two 5GHz bands, one with 1,237Mbps and the other with 2,475Mbps. These all add up to a 4300AX rating, but the Gryphon AX only has a 1Gbit backhaul to the internet and LAN, so a single device or client can’t exploit all the theoretical bandwidth available. What it can do is allow more devices to interact with the system without impacting the performance of others dramatically. And, should you deploy more than one of these,5GHz channels can provide a wide node-to-node backchannel that doesn’t require LAN cabling. The most notable omission from the wireless networking capability is the lack of a 160MHz channel, often used to provide a last resort for challenging installations.
