Synology RT6600ax Router Review – Conclusion

The AX6600 is a pretty cool router on paper, but it doesn’t exist in reality. First of all, Wi-Fi speed: Transmission speeds are very slow for both radios and 5GHz-2 radios don’t handle noise well. Even at 2.4GHz, the router does not always handle noise well, especially if the interference partially interferes with the channel. Hopefully this will be resolved by better settings for the internal algorithms, so Synology has to do in this area.

If you already had good experiences with DSM and bought a Synology router based on that, you might be a bit disappointed in the package area. The total scope is limited to five applications, of which parental control and firewall functions can be part of the standard functions of this router. Additional packages may become available in the future, but given the age of SRM, which has been in development for about seven years, we doubt it.

Apart from the tuning issues for the WiFi function, after taking a comprehensive look at this router, we are basically wondering about the added value compared to other cheaper routers. Synology is priced steeply, with around €325 at press time, which is why you’d expect a router that packs many of the positive features of a cheaper chip in one product. The RT6600ax only partially succeeds in this.

If we go back to the questions on the first page, we have to answer them all in the negative. The RT6600ax cannot be used widely due to lack of expansion packs, it is a mediocre NAS alternative because USB performance lags a lot and if you consider WiFi performance important then there are better and cheaper competitors.

While the router is wide and adjustable in depth, and SRM is a nice environment to work in, we’re missing out on some comfort for gamers. In addition, the scalability of the program with the package manager is minimal. With these limitations in mind, a router is interesting to the more experienced home administrator who can determine for himself which settings work well for his network and does not like to face limitations in functionality. For parents who have children whose internet use needs to be limited, this router is also an interesting, if initially expensive, option. The setup options in this area are quite extensive and perhaps the most important: unpaid and cloudless. The options that many other manufacturers only offer in their cloud subscription, are run locally on this router, so the higher purchase price of this router pays for itself in the long run.