Synology RT2600ac WiFi Router Review: A New Market Player
The RT2600ac is a very well built Wi-Fi router with a great deal of features. The amount of custom features of this device reminds me of QNAP and Drobo NAS Operating Systems. What really sets RT2600ac from most routers out there is the SRM (Synology Router Manager). SRM is user friendly OS that allows deep customization of RT2600ac. This Wi-Fi router is Synology’s second attempt to become a market challenger. Synology’s first Wi-Fi product was RT1900ac which was released earlier last year. The RT2600ac is the second iteration and is packed with superior hardware and features when compared to the RT1900ac.
The RT2600ac supports MU-MIMO and latest 802.11ac protocol. Combined bandwidth is reachable to 2+Gbps which is supported by 800Mbps (2.4GHz) and 1733Mbps (5GHz). In addition to blazing speeds RT2600ac has a 1.7 GHz Dual Core CPU and Gigabit LAN Ports.
Some of the advanced features could be found in RT2600ac such as dual WAN load balancing or fail over. This features alone puts RT2600ac in a small to medium enterprise usage. Another advanced feature that I found is support for 4G or 3G connections (requires a special dongle). The only draw back at this point in the product life I found is the lack of installable packages. List of supported/installable packages is very short and I strongly believe that growing this list would be a big plus for RT2600ac.
My time spend with RT2600ac was a short however, I have tested pretty much every setting available and I haven’t had any issues with operations of this device or features it has to offer. Since this router supports MU-MIMO(Multi User – Multiple Input, Multiple Output Technology) I had no issues with streaming media to more than one device or gaming on multiple platforms at the same time. Currently RT2600ac retails for $239.95 USD and that plays very well with competition. This is Synology’s second wireless router and so far, I am impressed. Great product. If you want to have stable and secure network, this is the router to buy!
