We were recently blown away by Synology’s push into slot the Wi-Fi 6 router market. The company’s RT6600ax might have looked dull and ugly, but its performance, features and price changed everything. Now Synology is back with the Subaru-sounding WRX560 which offers similar headline specs and features, but in an even-cheaper, more family-friendly package.
Our primary gripe with the RT6600ax was that, for all its slick apps and interfaces, it was still a bit techie for the average Joe. The WRX560 quickly addresses this. Set-up is the simplest we’ve yet seen: the phone app instantly found our device, asked what we wanted to call our Wi-Fi network and asked for a password. Done. It also addresses our secondary gripe with the RT6600ax – the WRX650 looks much better!
The phone app is well-featured, intuitive and fast. The first two of four tabs seamlessly interlink to show you what’s on your network, the bandwidth used, plus you can organise basic QoS priorities and pause each device. You can also easily set up a guest network and give a QR code to visitors to connect to it.
The Safe Access tab addresses our previous issues about managing employees with parental controls. It enables you to very-easily set up extensive access and firewall controls for kids, adults and devices. This involves creating profiles which assign internet access scheduling, time-limits and content filtering for individual (or groups of) devices plus content filtering (including real-time access to online threat intelligence databases) for kids, employees and guests. There are default categories, but they’re all configurable. It’s one of the most well-featured and easy-to-use filters we’ve seen and, unlike rival models, it doesn’t require a subscription.
The Settings tab provides access to the usual prosumer router settings, but accessing them via the web-browser provides the best experience on the market thanks to the Synology NAS-like GUI. All Synology’s home and SMB add-on packages are available, including advanced VPN, server tools and download managers. The only annoyance is you need to add USB storage to install and use them.
Other features include support for 10 SSIDs to segment devices and people on your network and provide different firewall controls to isolate or combine them. This is great for smart homes, SMBs and home offices where hackable IoT devices can be locked down and not used to access your important and sensitive data. One of the four network ports offers 2.5Gbps for LAN or WAN connections and other Ethernet ports can be combined for load balancing. It’s a fully featured business router if you need it to be.
It also smashed through our performance tests, managing 791.5Mbps up close, 375Mbps two rooms away and an amazing 216.7Mbps down in our longer-distance ‘down in the garden’ test. The latter rivals top triple-node mesh systems! That’s despite only operating on one 2.4GHz channel and one 5GHz channel.
As such, the combination of price, features, value, ease-of-use all mean this should be on the shortlist of anyone looking to purchase a Wi-Fi 6 router.
Synology WRX560 at Amazon for $219.99