When the internet goes down, the blogging wanes.
In the tech world, an 8-year lifespan is pretty good. I had last replaced our router in 2018. By that point I had owned Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, and Ubiquiti. Linksys was terrible, D-Link was historically reliable but bad at updates, Netgear had a good reputation but I think I got a lemon, and Ubiquiti was more commercial-grade but consequently not user-friendly. So I had decided on Synology, a brand whose interface is relatively easy to understand but also offers more professional features for those daring enough to try.
Eventually though, its aging hardware could not keep up with the proliferation of devices I’d added to the home network in combination with increasing internet speeds. Busy days led to repeated crashes. It needed replacing. But as I was impressed with the service record, I decided to stay in the ecosystem and upgrade to their latest flagship, the RT6600ax.
Setup was more or less what I was accustomed to, and full network configuration took 3-4 hours. The only thing giving me lingering trouble is that my Roomba won’t connect to the wifi now. I’ll tackle that problem later.
But the big gain was that, finally, they added VLAN network segmentation to the ethernet ports. Long a point of irritation, I had to connect untrusted devices to the guest wifi. It did the job, but at the expense of having dedicating wired connections. But now, I can isolate all work computers with not one, but two subnets, with CAT6. Huzzah!
So far, recommended.
–Simon