My new router arrived the other day, and it’s a bit of a beast.

Synology RT2600ac

It’s quite a bit bigger than my previous router (Asus RT-N66U), and not quite as stylish. I’ve heard the styling described as functional, but I quite like it. It is a router after all, not a work of art. Besides, it’s certainly better looking than some of the monstrosities other companies are producing these days.

Setting it up was a piece of cake. I’ve had quite a few routers in my time, but none have even come close to the Synology for ease of getting things up and running. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the hardest part of getting it going was screwing in the Antennas and plugging in the wires. For a basic setup pretty much all you need do is connect to the WiFi with the default settings listed in the quick start guide, and then run through the Wizard which pops up. It asks you to pick a mode of operation (router or access point), obviously I picked router. Then it requests you to set a wifi password and enter your ISP credentials, and that’s all there is to it.

The router works great just left like that. However, this being Synology there are are tonne of settings you can tweak, including the usual suspects like port-forwarding and a firewall, as well as a host of advanced features which you don’t often see on routers. Some very useful things they are too like automatic updates, VPN access, NAS like features and Intrusion detection/prevention.

To top it all off the thing is blisteringly fast, though that is part of the reason I bought it - as it came out very well in SmallNetBuilder’s tests, they ranked it #1 for AC router performance. All in all I’m very pleased and would recommend it to anyone looking for a new router.