ASUS ZenWiFi BT8 (3-Pack) Tri-Band WiFi 7 Mesh, 14 Gbps, 8850 sq.ft, Dual 2.5G Ports, Security and Parental Controls Included, Smart Home Master SSIDs, 4G & 5G Mobile Tethering

Asus gets it right.
Used to run asus routers, loved them then jumped to another brand for mesh as asus’s offerings weren’t strong yet. That router went end of life so back to alot of researching. My gripe with how the router market has developed is that they have either dumbed down all the admin features so you don’t have many choices (or only make available in their business models for another $1,000), or make you pay subscription for basic firewall capability, or are made by a Chinese company where you may get some features you don’t want (backdoors).Well, after researching Asus’s offerings for mesh have matured a lot, and their philosophy to let you admin stuff the way you want hasn’t (good thing) while not charging you for firewall and security protection built in. Yeah, it may be a more expensive product than others but do the match on that subscription or having to buy a firewall to put in front of it and its a deal.Anyhow, setup was super smooth. Performance is delightful. Speed is super fast and very stable. Note, I have two levels, basement, storage, and 2 foot thick brick walls that my last mesh router hlcould barely give me a signal through (getting 200 maps in my “bad spots now). The freedom only admin controls also means I can create segments, manually prioritize, create white lists, and not only have an iot network but choose which satellite and band they connect to (others force this and created so many headaches and security issues).I stretched my budget on this but given i rely on this and generally keep my routers until end of life, this wifi 7 router is pretty cheap after I do the math per year compared to competing models with a cheaper up front cost but more expensive size in long run that limit function. Anyhow, super happy. Happy to be back at Asus.

Poor connection between units. Signal drops between units all the time. Devices on wifi randomly slow to a crawl. No joke, I have better more reliable coverage with my Orbi RBK20 setup from 2018! I need a mesh system with 2.5g ports minimum and USB C for a media server so I was super excited for this but it is either not ready software wise or the hardware has faults that they can’t program around. You can see people with the same struggles on forums so it’s not a case of me just getting a lemon.Asus used to be one of the best in the business but over the past five or so years their quality has taken a noticeable turn for the worse. I’ve build custom PCs for two decades now and Asus was my go to motherboard and router brand but now it looks like I have to find a brand to replace them with.TL;DR bad hardware and software – don’t buy. Also, way too expensive for what you get – 1 gigabit ports shouldn’t exist at this price point.

Performance looks great on paper but that is about it. It is often too slow to be usable.When I first set this up, and intermittently, I get decent speeds. My ISP is 1Gbp and I’ll be getting up to 800-900Mbps using speedtest.net over WiFi.However, often it gets unbearably slow and not even restarting will fix the issue. So slow that I can’t even watch a Netflix show without it having to stop to buffer periodically. When I test this with a WIRED connection (you read that correctly, nothing over the air), I am getting consistently around 8Mbps. The performance is 100 times slower than my 10 year old WiFi 5 router that I have switched back to. There are a lot of negative reviews (which I should have listened to). I wonder if the positive reflect long term use? If you are just doing some light web surfing you may not notice, but you can do that with a much cheaper router.I had the same issues with the ZenWiFi BD4 and “upgraded” to the BT8 thinking it was because the BD4 was just underpowered.This is almost certainly a firmware problem. I’m using the latest BT8_300610258273. Forums and Asus support itself recommends doing a factory reset after updating (which I’ve done) but this is extremely tedious, and it hasn’t fixed the slow speed issue. Hopefully it will be fixed at some point but it has almost been a year since release and it’s clearly still in Beta.Support: Asus support has been terrible. One day I got kicked off five times because of a problem on their end and had to start the entire process over again with a different agent. I may have gotten unlucky but I’ve read elsewhere people who have had the same problem.

Excellent system. I have been running this system for about 2 weeks and haven’t experienced any software/firmware issues that apparently plagued asus bt series routers when they were first released a year and a half ago or so.This system has eliminated all dead spots in the house and the speeds are incredibly fast using wireless backhaul.I highly recommend.