Spread blistering Wi-Fi 6E everywhere
The newest addition to the Asus ZenWiFi family of mesh systems, the ZenWiFi ET8 ($529.99), is the company’s most advanced mesh system to date. Designed to deliver seamless house-wide wireless connectivity, this system offers the latest Wi-Fi 6E technology, which allows compatible clients to connect to it via the 6GHz radio band. The ET8 delivered very good throughout and signal performance in our tests, was breeze to install, and comes with free lifetime anti-malware and parental control tools. It’s our new Editors’ Choice pick for Wi-Fi mesh systems. Blanket 5,500 Square Feet With Wi-Fi 6E Signal The ET8 is a Wi-Fi 6E system, which means it not only supports 802.11ax ( Wi-Fi 6) technologies, but it can also use the 6GHz radio band to deliver faster throughput speeds, lower latency, and more bandwidth than what you’ll get with the more crowded 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. However, only client devices that support Wi-Fi 6E can connect to the 6GHz band. With Wi-Fi 6, you get 160MHz channel bandwidth,1024 QAM, Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) data transmissions, MU-MIMO simultaneous data streaming, WPA3 encryption, and direct-to-client signal beamforming. The ET8 is a two-piece mesh system that provides coverage for homes of up to 5,500 square feet. It consists of two nodes that look identical to the nodes used in the previous-generation ZenWiFi AX XT8 system. They measure 6.3 by 6.2 by 2.9 inches (HWD) and sport a white finish with grilles on either side for airflow. A small LED indicator on the front of the node glows blue during the setup process and is white when the satellite node has a strong wireless signal. A yellow light indicates a weak signal, and a red light means the signal to the router node is lost. The back panel is host to a 2.5Gbps WAN port, three 1Gbps LAN ports, a USB 3.1 port, a power port, and a power switch. You can use a LAN port for wired backhaul or let the wide 6GHz band handle it wirelessly. Each node contains six internal antennas and is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core CPU,512MB of RAM, and 256MB of flash memory. The ET8 is an AXE6600 system, which means it is capable of hitting top data rates of 574Mbps on the 2.4GHz band,1,201Mbps on the 5GHz band, and 4,804Mbps on the 6GHz band. As with the ZenWiFi AX XT8 and ZenWiFi AC CT8 mesh systems, the ET8 system comes with AIProtection Pro software. Powered by Trend Micro, AI Protection gives you free lifetime protection against malicious attacks and uses a proprietary Intrusion Prevention System to scan incoming and outgoing data, block Denial of Service (DDos) attacks, prevent access to malicious websites, and block network access to any client devices that are infected with malware. The ET8’s parental controls offer customizable age-based web filtering, access scheduling, and usage monitoring. You can automatically deny access to sites that contain adult content such as gambling, pornography, and violence, as well as restrict access to shopping, gaming, instant messaging, and media streaming sites.
