Big thanks to Amazon's return policy because it took a bit to get a good one.
I initially ordered an Asus ET8 (the Wifi 6E) open box. Someone had returned an XT8 in the box (the XT8 and ET8 look exactly the same and the only way you can tell is if you look on the bottom or install it). I returned that and had weird network stalls with the ET8 (wifi would randomly take a while to respond on multiple devices); I tried two versions of the ET8 to make sure I didn't get defective hardware. Then I bought an XT8 which had a an even weirder issue with devices losing network connectivity while still on wifi (no Internet access even though wifi was on until the device's wifi was turned off/on). I couldn't believe there were all the good reviews of the router and tried one last time and the last one has been great. It's an XT8 v2 but it shouldn't matter (did some research and apparently the v1 processor was discontinued so Asus had to switch to a new newer chip...only other hardware change I could see was a new power adapter which is bigger and unfortunately no longer has a 90 degree connector to the router). This would have been a lot more painful if I bought it at Best Buy and had to exchange it so many times.
For software, the Asus app works fairly well. You can configure a lot with it, but if you want to control more things, you can use the OpenWRT web UI to configure things like the DNS IP range, power levels, etc. The app does let you mark devices for gaming or WFH (nice way to think of network QOS configiuration), but you have to set these when you want to use them for a specific purpose (it doesn't remember the device preferences).
For negatives, be aware that the Wi-Fi antenna pattern seems to be more horizontal than vertical (at least compared to my old router). Mesh seems to work fairly well, but it will tend to use the slaves more than the master because the AI firewall seems to run on the master so it devotes more CPU to it. It seems like Asus could have used a more powerful CPU to avoid this preference. You can force yourself to be closer to the router you're next to (if it happens to be the master) by choosing the optimization feature from the app and this will optimize ping times for games even more.
This should tide me over until Wi-Fi 7 mesh routers get more reasonably priced...
| Wireless Type | 802.11ax |
|---|
