Review on 🔒 Enhanced NBG6817 Zyxel Armor Z2 AC2600 Router with StreamBoost, MU-MIMO, and Beamforming Antennas by Darnell Evans

Don't be fooled by the marketing on the box or the weird alien design. This is an excellent router. For 1400sqm this router offers excellent coverage, true SQM/working Streamboost/MU-MIMO and a reasonable out-of-the-box setup. Again, if you want to run your own firmware (OpenWRT), given the convenience of the hardware (CPU/chipset and amount of flash available: 4GB), that's a good choice. This router also has the same hardware as the Netgear X4S but costs about $30 less. As always, we recommend turning off 2.4GHz if that's an option for you and running your entire home network on 5GHz. Pros: + Download speeds increased by around 20-25% for the same wired connection depending on what part of the house I was testing. out. I thought my max Wi-Fi download speed was around 260Mbps. Hit 325+ with this router.+ The main reason for the upgrade is online gaming, which suffered when the rest of the household got Netflix 4K /Online stream used. StreamBoost/MU-MIMO really works. If you've used a router in the last ten or two years, you've probably seen the QoS setting (which usually requires NAT Boost to be disabled). This QoS is wrong and routers with SQM (Smart Queue Management) or Dynamic QoS actually help multiple users on the same router. Please ensure you have the latest firmware (as of December 2018) if you are using an inventory management solution. + Incredible value for all of the above features for $150. + 2 USB ports (USB 3.0 and USB 2.0) + Design: Design might be off-putting (sorry for the pun), but it was considered "cool" in my family. Cons: The user interface (even in expert mode) feels a little sluggish and disappointing (in terms of exposed features). OpenWRT is an option that allows you not to use any software stack. Would love to see USB 3.1, but that's a nitpick. Overall: Design/Form: 5/5 Software/UI: 4/5 Use/Setup: 5/5 Performance: 5/5 Value: 5/5 Highly recommended router. I will update the review if needed, but so far very satisfied after using TP-Link, Asus and Netgear products for a long time.