Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

ASUS offers a compelling product series with the ASUS ZenWiFi AX Hybrid (XP4) Mesh router. First off, the combo of ethernet over power combined with an ETH hardline and WIFI6 is golden. For 250-300 EUR you get two devices offering a very nice experience. As to how ASUS utilizes and (if) mixes on the powerline/hardware connection, however, remains to be a bit of a riddle. MESH set up itself a little icky as well, it would not scan and detect the extra mesh unit, even after a reset. Then all of the sudden it presented itself. Here again, the 2.4 GHz band results were poor, however, the 5 GHz band at a channel in the 55 range, offers extremely good performance. LAN WAN performance however is excellent. Our 600 Mbit/s downstream and 40 Mbit/s upstream maxed out completely. 

Performance

Unfortunately, the results on the 2400 MHz were mediocre at best. We cannot precisely pinpoint what was going on there but some packet loss was observed. The 5 GHz band initially was a bit mediocre as well, offering something in the range of 400 Mbit/s at 10 meters from any of the two routers. The setup is done automatically and once we noticed that the router forced channel 100, we reconfigured it towards channel 56. Once reconfigured we pushed almost 800 Mbit/s  on average of throughput, and that is beyond anything we've ever measured. We cannot say if this was aided by the 1300Mbps Powerline adapters integrated into the XP4s or by the backhaul that automatically selects the optimal connection between wireless and Powerline, but yeah they are some of the finest results we have obtained. Powerline (PLC) performance we did not add into our charts as there's no subjective manner to test it, however, we took one node mesh to our garage roughly 10m and a floor away from the router making sure it was out of range of WIFI, and with no Ethernet jack connected the device was 100% dependent on the powerline, that worked, however, we'd get stuck at only 20 to 40 MBit/sec performance speeds. Still, if you need to juice up your electric car in your garage with a bit of WIFI, this would be ideal to receive your free OTA updates.

Overall

The ASUS ZenWiFi XP4 AX Hybrid WiFi 6 Powerline Mesh WiFi System gives a highly full and feature-rich system for roughly 300 USD. There isn't much more you could ask for from a router that has Wi-Fi 6, Powerline technology, triple backhaul options, and a bevy of ASUS-exclusive features such as free AiProtection and parental controls. The system is designed to be user-friendly for novice network users while yet allowing access to all of the complicated settings and features necessary by networking experts and professionals in training. Because of the easy and well-designed App, the speeds of up to 800 Mbps in our tests over WIFI6. With the mesh setup, you can create excellent coverage throughout your household, and if needed expand with more mesh units.

Concluding

Asus's WiFi Mesh router includes dual-band AX1800 with WiFi 6, which means it is a medium-high range WiFi 6 product. Additionally, it has a single jack for the Internet WAN as well as two additional Gigabit Ethernet ports for the local area network, making it ideal for fast connections. It is possible to communicate using this WiFi Mesh system through WiFi at 5GHz, network cable, and also PLC Powerline at speeds of up to 1,300Mbps, however, the speed is heavily dependent on the condition of the electrical network in your home. However having the built-in Powerline Adaptors is a feature that we have not seen before and is well worth the price tag, one could argue that it is a touch overpriced in contrast to the competition but again you do receive two fully-fetched routers. The GUI btw could use an update. The Asus ZenWiFi AX mesh router is a nice piece of equipment, while we did have some issues at the 2400 MHZ band, the 5 GHz when properly configured oozes performance. The mesh extends your range on an extra floor. it remains wifi though so you'll still have dead-spots in some zones. Nice to see is that each mesh unit can connect two LAN devices as well, which helps a little with privacy and even faster connection. These are however gigabit jacks.  Currently, you can find a kit for as little as 250 to 200 EUR/USD, and that does mean proper value for a complete Wi-Fi 6 mesh router system with a dedicated backhaul powerline band. So there you have it, your home cable router likely will never be able to give the same level of performance, and it is also difficult to upgrade. With this setup, you could even add a third or 4th device depending on the complexity of your house and place you need to fill with WIFI. As a result, we are absolutely persuaded of the extra value provided by the ASUS ZenWiFi and encourage you to experiment with it at your leisure.

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