ASUS ZenWiFi Whole-Home Tri-Band Mesh WiFi 6E System (ET9 3PK), Coverage up to 7,800 sq.ft, 7800Mbps, New 6GHz Band, AiMesh, Lifetime Free Internet Security

I bought this on a temporary price drop and the two devices I have that support 6E have their own channel.

I purcahsed this to replace my ASUS ROG GT-AX11000 router. There was nothing wrong with my old router really, but it just couldn't really cover my entire house that well so I decided to get a mesh system. So overall the ET9 system works pretty well. But I don't really understand how ASUS determines what node a device connects to. I have devices that are maybe 10 feet away from a unit, and if I go into the ASUS app, it'll show that the device is connected to one of the router nodes over 30 feet away on a completely different floor of my house. It's a regular thing too. I have a lamp that is maybe 70ft away upstairs that will connect to my primary node in my living room rather than the node that's about 20ft away upstairs. You can bind devices to specific nodes in the ASUS router app, but if you have a lot of devices you want to do that to, it can become very time consuming. You have to go to each device, tell it what node you want it to connect to, and then it will run a test to see if that's a good path or not. If it is, it'll say it's been bound to that node. If it's not, it'll tell you it's not optimal and ask I you want to bind it anyway. The entire process takes maybe 30-50 seconds to do. Which doesn't sound bad, until you have to do it for 50+ devices and possibly multiple times if you want to test different nodes. Again, it can be time consuming. But that's tech for ya. Also, the speeds are pretty good. We have a 1GB fiber connection, and if I do a speed test about 10 feet away from my primary node that's connected to my modem, I get about 600-700MB downloads on my iPhone 15 Pro Max. On the other nodes that are about 30 feet+ away in other rooms, I will get similar speeds. That being said, if you want to get the best speeds for all devices, you will need to spend some considerable time inside the web interface on a computer (NOT the ASUS router app. They do NOT offer the exact same functionalities as far as customization goes) to adjust all the settings. Yes you can just set everything up so you have wifi and connect and go. But if you want the best coverage and speeds, you'll need to do some serious tweaking in the settings between channel and band settings, and other things like enabling/disable airtime fairness, beam forming, etc. Don't think the default settings will be what works best for you. Unless all your devices were made yesterday with the latest wifi standards, you'll have some adjusting to do. I've had our system for going on a month I think and I'm JUST getting everything settled and have spent easily several hours adjusting settings. And even then, not everything works perfectly. But that's likely due to the devices on the network not wanting to play nice. Everything works great, with the exception of some wireless IP cams we have from different brands. We do have a hard drive connected directly to our primary unit that has a bunch of movies and stuff on it that we use to stream to our TVs throughout the house. The system does well with this, however occasionally it'll say the hard drive isn't connected. Sometimes restarting the system will fix it, other times I have to go into the settings and change the system from USB 3.0 to 2.0. But it doesn't happen that often, I'm just mentioning it incase someone else has the issue and needs possible solutions. Overall it's a good system. Again, just expect to spend some time adjusting settings (again, in the WEB interface, not the ASUS app) to get the best performance.

This should have been super easy. I had no plans to use the wireless back haul. Connected directly using Ethernet cables from the main unit to each satellite. When the first satellite was plugged in everything worked fine. But the moment I plugged in the second satellite the whole system would go down. Unit automatically tried to switch to wireless communication between each satellite, but if you tried to connect to the WiFi it would repeatedly connect/disconnect every few seconds. Completely unusable. I rebooted the system multiple times and tried everything I could including updating firmware but it just doesn’t work. Maybe if you’re a computer networking specialist you could figure it out. But as an average consumer these are dead in the water. Returned.