ASUS ZenWiFi Whole-Home Tri-band Mesh WiFi 6E System (ET9 2PK), Coverage up to 5,500 sq.ft, 7800Mbps, new 6GHz band, AiMesh, Lifetime Free Internet Security, Parental Control, EasySetup, Instant Guard

I add this ZenWifi to my existing ASUS GT-AXE16000 as a mesh node. It is ethernet backhauled, but works great. Setup took about 5min and no issues after that. Now each floor of my house has a strong 6E signal.

I've been very happy with this setup since I used it to replace my older ASUS router that I was using and had for over 5 years. This combo has allowed me to have very good to excellent wi-fi reception throughout our 225+ year old house from second floor to basement. The Wi-Fi 6 can be a bit finicky at times.

ZEN Wifi ET9 has Firmware issues with FW 25265 Kernal; Can’t add zero mac! their latest version, and FW 25160 Google cameras don’t connect. FW 25215 is good. ASUS doesn’t have an easy way to report issues without spending a great deal of time going their CS hoops.

The setup was simple. Router needed to update to latest firmware out of the box. That was quick and easy as well. Had to use ChatGPT to tweak some of the functions and make it talk with all of my HomeKit accessories because they all operate on a 2.4ghz network. Once that was all configured, router works great! Great coverage and better than ever internet speed. The router that was supplied couldn’t handle my speed consistently and give optimal stability. This router might be overkill, but now my home ecosystem has room for expansion.

My ISP decided to make my range extenders obsolete with a firmware update and offered a monthly fee solution to provide new ones. Decided to take it out of their hands and just port forward their router to my own. Bought this kit and so far it works great. I am able to create 3 separate networks. One for stuff I don't want anything else to access, one for guests and one for all of our IOT devices. Love the web interface, made setup pretty easy. Get great signal throughout the house with just the two access points and it is faster than the router from the ISP by quite a bit. Definitely recommend it, will update if I encounter any issues.

This ET9 is very impressive compared to Linksys MR9000 + Linksys Extender (3rd floor). My setup: Large home, 3 floors, router in corner of basement and 2nd node 3rd floor. Using 6 Ghz as front/backhaul wireless. The 2 nodes are approx. 50-60 feet apart going through wood/ceramic floors, and standard walls. 2nd node has 2 bars vs the full 3, to middle of house on 3rd floor. I now get 300 Mbs anywhere in the home which is much faster the 60-90 Mbs I was getting on 3rd floor with Linksys Extender and front of house 3rd floor was getting 10-20 Mbs. What I didn't like at first is that it used the 2.4 Ghz bands even if I was close or far from the router (node 1). So here I thought its like other people claiming it doesn't go higher than 150 Mbs.....I turned off the 2.4 Ghz band completely and BINGO....got my ISP speed. So my 4 star is based on this. I would have expected the router figure out which is the faster band and then downgrade to 2.4 it couldn't connect to 5 or 6 Ghz. Test here was with my iphone 13. Other thing was I could not change my subnet to their default without using a standard web browser on a laptop. The firmware both devices upgraded just fine. The inital app setup on iOS didn't even list the ET9 router. I found this odd. Why would it list all the other new ones but not ET9. After selecting "other" then eventually it finds ET9 and shows the pretty picture of the router. Scary at first but you need patience with this for sure. Not recommended for your average non-IT person. This router has some super nice features and I still haven't played with all settings or even optimized it yet. Why brake something when its pushed my ISP speed and have zero issues, so far. So if you are like me that had a ~$150 router and kids/wife always complaining, get this Mesh. Like I said, very powerful antenna's in this little box. UPDATE: So the past 2 1/2 weeks I've been trying to fix this ET9 system as its dropping packets and has timeouts during ping sessions to Google for example. I've traded over 22 emails with Asus support, and about 5-8 different people saying, "Were sorry...blah blah..." and the problem is not fixed yet. I'm probably out of my return policy to Amazon now and stuck with 2 $600 bricks for door stops. They have no clue what the problem is. Smart Connect is crap, they asked I don't use it. Why not? I used it in my Linksys $100 router and no issues. Here we need to premium costs and told don't use that setting. Then why advertise it? If you have XBOX - same issues. It seems when you have a constant need for a connection it drops 10-15 seconds. There are like 30 parameters on the Wifi advanced page and you'd think they would advise on that. Maybe 1 of them are wrong. Worked fine for about 3 days, then...BANG!!! dopped connections...no changes, no power outages...Hate to say it, I think I need to go back to Linksys where although firmware is crap, at least their wifi technology is much better than Asus from my perspective.

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.

I bought this mesh router after 10 years with an Orbi mesh system. I prefer the ASUS units. Super-easy to deploy with outstanding performance. Connections can weaken when the two units overlap in the middle of my house. Bonding my stationary devices to a specific ASUS unit helped their performance. The iOS app is helpful for checking settings.