Hands on with Synology’s RT2600ac monster Wi-Fi router

From the minute you take it out of the box, you can tell the Synology RT2600ac Wi-Fi router ($229.95) means business. Its four removable antennas will never let the unit fade into your furniture, or compete for fashion points with many of the new “cute” units in the market. But it delivers blazing network performance, a powerful, computer-like UI, and some of the very best Wi-Fi coverage I’ve seen from a single device.

Installation and setup

The unit is simple to install and configure. Aside from screwing the antennas onto the base and plugging it in, initial setup can be done through the router’s setup wizard. One nice touch is that it asks you right away whether you’re configuring it as a router or an access point, so you don’t have to jump through hoops to use it as an AP. In my tests, it instantly identified our two ISPs, a cable company and U-Verse, automatically. It also supports PPPoE and various manual IP configuration options. Once set up, configuration and administration is done through a powerful, desktop-like, web interface.

Th RT2600ac is also a mini-NAS

If you already have a Synology NAS, the user interface of the RT2600ac will look familiar. Synology’s Router Manager (SRM) is not exactly the same as its DSM (DiskStation Manager), but it’s close. SRM doesn’t have nearly as many packages as DSM, at least so far, but it does have packages for VPN, DNS, and several sharing services. What makes this similarity particularly powerful is you can use the RT2600ac as a mini-NAS by adding a drive. It supports Synology’s CloudStation Server, which can be used to keep files in sync from any of your network devices using its ShareSync client. It can also serve your media files.

Clearly you won’t have the same volume management and RAID capabilities you would with a standalone NAS. But for the price, you’re getting both a high-performance router and an inexpensive way to back up your data.

Design

The unit’s raised design and passive cooling grills keep it from running hot. On the back is the power switch, along with a WAN port, 4 LAN ports (one of which can be used for a 2nd WAN), power jack, a USB 3.0 port, and a reset pinhole. There are also buttons on the side for turning Wi-Fi on and off and WPS. It has mounting holes on the bottom for a simple wall mount, but the little legs stick out and don’t seem to be removable, so I’m not sure how that would work. The unit also doesn’t include any type of stand for sitting it upright, so it needs to lie horizontally.

The RT2600ac is chock full of the capabilities you’d expect from a flagship offering, with a configurable firewall, port forwarding, VOIP and IPTV configuration options, Parental Controls, Traffic Controls, guest network, DMZ, device connection management, and DoS protection. Updates take just a couple clicks, although the unit requires a few minutes to reboot, so give yourself some time. About the only thing it won’t do is bond two LAN ports together to provide a connection potentially capable of 2Gbps (although there are so many caveats on that type of bonding that you won’t miss this in most cases).

Auto band selection and dual WAN support

The RT2600ac lets you use a single SSID for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz, automatically connecting each device to the correct frequency. But the feature that really caught my eye is dual WAN support. You can use this for some basic load balancing with failover, or for simple failover. For some reason many routers lack this feature. It’s essential for anyone running a small business that always needs to be online, and a nice convenience for those who can afford a backup internet connection for their home.

Impressive Wi-Fi performance

I was able to connect to the RT2600ac using Wi-Fi at a nominal speed of 867Mbps when using a nearby laptop. Perhaps more importantly, I was able to get a usable signal (over 10Mbps) 100 feet away through a dense structure — even with the router in a wiring closet. That’s a larger range in practice than the best Ubiquiti access point, the Orbi, or any of the other individual mesh units on the market. So, if you can put the router in a central location, it may be enough to cover your entire home or apartment. However, the RT2600ac stands by itself in the Synology product line, so if you need additional coverage, there aren’t any plug-and-play mesh options you can add to it. Of course you can always just add APs or extenders and manage them separately from the router.

Synology claims the unit can support 2.53Gbps of total client Wi-Fi bandwidth (800Mbps on 2.4GHz and 1733Mbps on 5GHz). Technically, the router uses MU-MIMO with up to 4 streams to enable that type of peak performance. Because the antennas are detachable, you can even replace one or more of them with your own. This is particularly handy if you want to keep the router in a closet, but locate an antenna or two in a better location.

Intrusion prevention, without compromising performance

The RT2600ac features integrated Snort-based active intrusion detection. Turning it on will probably provide you with hours of fun figuring out all the awkward networking requests made and received by your various mobile devices and IoT products. It’s definitely worth doing as a learning exercise, and a good way to clean up any major vulnerabilities. However, most of what it finds, at least configured with the defaults, will probably turn out to be “innocent.”

The package uses a free Emerging Threat (ET) ruleset, but can be configured to access a paid account. Synology’s less-powerful router, the RT1900ac, has been criticized for slowing down when running Intrusion Prevention. The increased memory (512MB) and beefier dual-core 1.7GHz CPU appear to have addressed that issue in the RT2600ac. I didn’t find any measurable impact on Internet throughput when I turned it on. You do need to add a USB drive to the RT2600ac to run Intrusion Prevention, providing a place to store log files. I simply put an old 2GB thumb drive in the USB 3.0 port, which seems to be fine for this limited use. There is also a full-size, full-depth, SD card slot. In this era of 256GB SD cards, one of those might be enough to serve your entire music library without needing a power-hungry disk drive at all.

Should you upgrade your router to the Synology RT2600ac?

There are a few reasons you might want to upgrade your router to this one, or a similar current-model high-end unit. First, your router might be holding back your broadband speed. Plug your highest-performance computer directly into your cable modem and run a speed test. If you get better results than going through your router, you may want to upgrade. Installing the RT2600ac boosted our tested broadband speed from 140Mbps to 250Mbps, for example. Second, if you’re a little short on Wi-Fi coverage, and don’t want to mess with extenders, the RT2600ac will almost certainly give you more coverage than your current router. Finally, if you want to add some services to your network, Synology’s Package library gives you a straightforward way to add a VPN, DNS, and various file and media sharing services to your router without purchasing additional devices.