Review: Synology RT2600ac

Synology is a company that is very well known for its NAS drive. The company also make some really good routers and the latest RT2600ac is a brilliant example. The new RT2600ac is security-oriented high-speed Wi-Fi router that is designed to be installed in either an office or a home setup. The router comes with support for MU-MIMO and offers the latest 802.11ac wave 2 standard.

The Synology Router RT2600ac packs pretty much everything you’d want in a new high-performance router. Under the hood, the RT2600ac comes packed with a 1.7GHz Qualcomm IPQ8065 dual-core processor combined with 512MB of RAM, which is designed to power its onboard firewall, QoS, and file serving capabilities without much trouble.

The router comes with 4×4 802.11ac wave 2 dual-band Wi-Fi capability thus allowing it to reach a maximum performance of 2.53Gbps when multiple clients simultaneously transfer data across your wireless network. Inside the box, you get some documentation, the Synology Router RT2600ac, four antennas, an Ethernet cable, and a power adapter.

While the RT2600ac might look boring to some, it makes up for that in its performance and features department. On the front of the RT2600ac, we get an SD card slot which can be used for additional storage. The router also has a 4×4 dual-band (2.4GHz, 5GHz) antenna array, as mentioned before, which allows for its MU-MIMO and beam-forming functionality.

At the top of the RT2600ac is a big Synology logo with a lineup of status indicator LEDs. On the edges, you get a whole bunch of buttons such as WPS, Wi-Fi On/Off, and USB/SD eject. There’s also a USB 3.0 port well for those who want to add some basic networked storage with an external hard drive. At the rear, you get the power switch, the DC power in, reset button, USB 2.0 port and five gigabit Ethernet ports.

Synology is well known for some amazing software that it bundles with its devices. And that holds true for the RT2600ac router. The router is accompanied by the Synology Router Manager (SRM) application that offers a look that matches Synology’s very own DSM (DiskStation Manager) software. The software gives the router a polished and easy to use interface that’s as pretty and easy to use as it’s powerful.