Review on ASUS ZenWiFi AX6600 XT8 2PK: Tri-Band Mesh WiFi 6 System for Whole Home Coverage, 5500 sq.ft, AiMesh, Lifetime Internet Security & More by Issac Smart

Coming from an Orbi RBK50 that I tried last week. I have a 1GB up/down connection. On the Orbi, I couldn't go over 500Mbps over Ethernet, let alone Wi-Fi. With this Asus product I get over 900 Mbps over Ethernet and 600-700 Mbps over Wi-Fi. It exceeded my expectations in terms of speed. The only problem I have is that my devices don't switch between nodes. Three times in the last 24 hours I've lost Wi-Fi on two phones and an iPad when moving from a room with an AiMesh node to a room with a router connected to my modem. On one device it switched to an unconnected Netgear hotspot which I use to connect plugs and switches to the network. With the other two devices, my connection just dropped completely. I had to turn Wi-Fi off and on again for it to come back. I'm not sure why he did it, but obviously moving forward is a problem. I bought this device because it looked like the perfect solution to eliminate dead spots and keep Internet speeds consistent throughout the home. For that it seems to work fine. But if it can't easily switch between nodes as I move around the house, it's not a very layered network. Edit: There are many things to like about this router. The speeds are amazing and I get decent WiFi throughout the house. I updated the firmware a few days ago. Unfortunately I have no problems after the update. The first problem is that it spontaneously restarted a couple of times. The second issue is that my Wi-Fi speed doesn't drop on different devices connecting to the point I configured as a router. Restarting the devices I'm having issues with seems to fix this. Obviously I haven't had this setup that long, but these issues only started appearing after a firmware update. I am contacting ASUS to try and troubleshoot. I have a few weeks before the return period is up and I really want this to work. For a router that requires devices to move seamlessly between mesh points, this is definitely not a good thing. I have two knots on opposite ends of my house. There are several walls between them, but they are on the same level. I called them the living room and the office. When I'm in the office and my phone stays connected to the living room, the internet speed on my phone is almost non-existent. This doesn't make sense unless the nodes themselves have a lot of power. A regular router gets me decent speeds throughout the house. I would think that each of the nodes would be at least powerful enough to broadcast to the whole house. The only way to get it working is to manually disable Wi-Fi on my phone and then reconnect. There are also times when devices just completely disconnect from WiFi and never reconnect. So I'm still very hot and cold about this system. When it works, it works well. When it doesn't, it's very frustrating and annoying. All in all, I wish I'd just stuck with Orbi. While the Orbi's overall speed is slower, it performed much better when switching between nodes, and the Orbi's antennas seem to be MUCH BETTER than on this thing. Update 05/06/2020: I'm sorry. I jumped on this router because it looked like it would be awesome, but that couldn't be further from the truth. In addition to all the problems listed above that remain despite firmware updates, they now cause other problems. Just today my DVRs couldn't connect to it. When I added the network again, four access points with the same name were listed. The only thing that caused it to come back was restarting the router. Lasts 15 days. It keeps crashing various devices. My phone, my iPad, my Macbook, they all fell down. It still refuses to switch nodes when I move around the house. I'll move far enough away from an AP that it should switch, but it doesn't and the speed drops to zero. My wife's phone often just turns off when it's far enough away from the site it was connected to and she has to turn Wi-Fi off and on again to reconnect. There is nothing solid in this system. Since it was so expensive I had to run it into the ground before replacing it. I can't justify throwing it out and replacing it somewhere. I wish I could. Maybe one day they will release an update that actually fixes these issues, or maybe it's the hardware and nothing can be done. Anyway, I'm sticking with this for the foreseeable future.