ASUS ZenWiFi Pro XT12 (2 Pack) - AX11000 Wi-Fi Mesh System: up to 557 Square Metres of Coverage, Security Functions, Parental Controls and Two 2.5G Ethernet Ports

Product Information

The ZenWiFi Pro XT12 is traditional Tri-band hardware. As such, it works great in a fully wireless mesh setup. You should get it if you live in a large home and are too lazy to run network cables. For now, in my trial, that was not possible yet. No matter how much I tried, I couldn’t link them together. The AiMesh setup process would just fail every single time. And I tried many times. QoS settings are extensive and can ensure that anything from web conferencing, through video streaming to gaming can be prioritised on various devices. In terms of speed, the 11,000 Mbps on the marketing material was nothing more than wishful thinking but also because in Singapore, the common standard offered is 1 GBPS (1,000 Mbps), which is decent but a far cry from the 4,804Mbps ASUS mentions for its 5Ghz band.

Business and prosumers will like the idea of being able to use up to 12 SSIDs to group users and devices onto separate network segments – each with different levels of access. However, the access controls for these segments are very broad and nothing like (again) the Synology, which offers numerous, IoT-optimised, firewall and sharing configurations for each network. Nine of the SSID networks are essentially forms of guest networks. Wi-Fi standards: Wi-Fi 7 | Wi-Fi 6E| UNII-4 (5.9GHz) | Wi-Fi 6 | What is Wi-Fi? | Wi-Fi antennas (dBi) | Wi-Fi broadcasting/signal power (dBm) Long gone are the days when upgrading your home router involved a crash course in networking. The ZenWiFi Pro ET12 and XT12 streamline the entire setup process down to roughly three minutes. After you find the right spots in your home for each mesh networking node, plug them in, and set up the main router, they’ll automatically sync up to create the wide coverage area afforded by mesh networking tech. Hardware specifications: ZenWiFi Pro ET12 vs ZenWi-Fi ET8 ZenWiFi Pro XT12 vs ET12: The third Wi-Fi band changes everything Guest WiFi: Create a guest network with a WiFi schedule and access rights to control when and how guests can use the network.Getting connected: Dual-WAN vs Link Aggregation | Dual-band vs Tri-band vs Quad-band | Fiber-optic vs Cable | Getting your home wired | Multi-Gig explained | Cable modem activation | Routers explained | Mesh explained It can be hard to get the wireless performance you expect in today’s hyper-connected homes. The ZenWiFi Pro ET12 and ZenWiFi Pro XT12 let all your devices enjoy the stable, high-performance wireless internet you demand. As mesh networking systems, these wireless routers make it easy to deliver that bandwidth to every corner of your home. It’s in a relatively new market segment for prosumers and SMBs that was recently brought to the fore by Synology’s RT6600ax. The problem is that while the Synology is much uglier, it offers even more features, similarly impressive performance and costs (gulp) around one-third the price of the XT12, depending on where you are in the world. ASUS ZenWiFi Pro XT12 includes ASUS RangeBoost Plus — the latest, most powerful version of RangeBoost — which improves coverage for all WiFi devices including legacy devices. In combination with ASUS RF technology and other exclusive ASUS technologies, RangeBoost Plus dramatically improves WiFi signal range and coverage by up to 38% [i] . The two-node configuration supplied should be sufficient for coverage up to approximately 6000 square feet. Coverage can be extended even further for larger homes using any ASUS AiMesh-compatible router. Futuristic design If you only need a single unit, my take is the ET12’s support for the 6GHz band is more valuable than the XT12’s support for UNII-4 (or the fact it has a second 5GHz band). But either will do just fine and you’ll save some dough going with the XT12.

Per Asus’ naming convention, X is short for Wi-Fi 6 (802.11a x), and E is for Wi-Fi 6E (802.11ax e). The letter T signifies that these are Tri-band broadcasters — they both have three Wi-Fi bands.

Effortless Setup and Management

Technically, we’re supposed to be able to use the XT12 and ET12 hardware together in a single mesh system, per the way AiMesh works. And eventually, that likely will be the case. The message I got when adding the ZenWiFi Pro XT12 to my GT-AXE16000 Wi-Fi 6E (or the ZenWiFi Pro ET12). While this might change, it’s not a good idea to mix Wi-Fi standards in a mesh system, anyway. Up close it scored 627Mbps, which is fast but about 100Mbps slower than other top Wi-Fi 6 rivals. Next to the secondary node it scored 609Mbps – which represents only a 3% drop-off and the fastest speed we’ve ever seen from a test by a secondary node on a mesh!