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I've been searching the forums and the Internet in general, today, as I have gotten my first notice from Comcast that, lo, I am over my 1 Terabyte limit, this month. It has been inching toward that m...
Not trying to dispearage any company, but I wanted to share were I ended up on my journey. I litterally bought and returned almost every router on the market over the past month. I ended up with one that I really am thrilled with.
Here is what I tried and the quick response.
Asus - AX Mesh, AX88U - Has all the features I wanted. Firmware was buggy and unstable.
Netgear Orbi AX6000 - Best performance, great setup. No family mode (which was important for me), no bandwidth control.
Netgear XR700 - Dumaos is awesome, no mesh solution. 3.0 Dumaos looks great, but never came to market. This was my second choice.
Netgear Nighthawk AX12 - Great wifi, no bandwidth control, or parental control (none of the new wifi 6 units have it).
TP-Link AX6000 - Great features, slow ethernet for some reason. No Mesh.
And the winner is...
Synology RC2600ac
RSM is amazing router OS. Gives you all the control you could want.The QoS is outstanding. Since I've been using this, not issues on my uploads maxing out, inspite of fully saturating the line. Excellent parental controls (simiarl to circle), excellent bandwith monitoring and limiting. Excellent Mesh support. Dual WAN, VPN support, NAS support, Package Center (apps). It's amazing. I didn't find it origionaly because it came out in 2017 and I was only looking at recent units, but it's still the best IMO. Wifi 5 vs 6 had virtually no impact on my real world needs. I can get 540Mbps on Synology wifi. Using two of there MR2200ac mesh units. The best compliment I can give is... it just works!.
I feel for the wifi 6 hype. I have a 1Gb internet and new phones. But wifi 5 at 500Mbps there is nothing I'm doing on my phone that needs more bandwith right now. All my desktops are wired 1Gb connections. This router gives me full 1Gb internet speed on LAN and 500Mb on wifi. I'm golden. Blown away by the ease and power of the Synology ecosystem. I ended up buying my first NAS too and it's amazing. Enjoying moving all my movies and files to it. DSM software is even better.
I'll wait for Syology to come out with a wifi 6 solution before I upgrade. I'm happy as can be with the current setup.
Again this is my situation, with a large family and lots of home workers (concurrent zoom meetings), I needed bandwidth control, family control, fast performance, and monitoring. Not everyone needs that. If your biggest concern is pure wifi speed and no other needs. For mesh I'd say the Orbi AX600 (amazing signal strength). For single router, Nighthawk AX12 fastest speed.