A Wireless Router That Means Business: Synology RT1900ac Review

[PAGETITLE=Introduction][Top Ad] We’ve taken a look at many different devices over the years, from many different manufacturers. While we all have our areas of expertise, we’ve shared in the responsibilities of what to cover and how to best cover it. One company that we continue to look at is Synology. Known the industry over for its robust and stable NAS offerings, the Taiwan-based company grabbed our attention last summer with the announcement of its wireless router, the RT1900ac. This is a natural progression of brand development if you think about it,expanding out from storage attached to your network to the device that controls the network. The announcement of a router from Synology was, and is, exciting news. With wireless technology continuing to outpace that of connected devices in the home, the market has been able to bear products from a myriad of companies. What excites us most is the software running on the RT1900ac. DiskStation Manager (DSM) has been the crown jewel of Synology's offerings for years. Being, in our opinion, the easiest and most intuitive to navigate for novices and advanced users alike, DSM has been the gold standard for quite a few years. This isn’t to say that the hardware has been neglected. The aesthetics of its offerings have been top-tier for as long as we’ve been covering the company at Techgage. What we mean is that as good as the hardware has been, the software that runs on top of it has been the true Synology experience that has been sold to consumers for years. With all that it’s learned, Synology has branched out into an entirely new yet related market: home networking. With it comes Synology Router Manager (SRM). The RT1900ac, as the name implies, is a wireless AC router providing combined speeds up to 1900 Mbps. For the uninformed (read: an alarming amount), this sounds like a ridiculously fast offering - and for home networks it sort of is - but we must always keep in mind that the advertised speeds are theoretical. Oh, and there is some marketing addition that takes place too. Because, numbers. See, wireless AC routers are almost entirely dual band. I can’t actually think of, or find any, that don’t at least offer a simultaneous 5 GHz and 2.4 GHz radio, so any advertised speed is going to be the sum of at least two numbers. There are some that are tri-band, but that’s for another review. The 2.4 GHz band offers either 450 or 600 Mbps speeds. The 5 GHz AC band offers 1300 Mbps. You add those two numbers together (dependent upon the wireless n radio used) and you get either 1750 or 1900 Mbps. You can guess where the RT1900ac gets its name. It’s dumb, but it’s marketing and it’s how every company brands their routers. We can’t fault Synology or any of the other manufacturers individually for how we ended up with this naming convention. Anyone looking for a new router for their home or small office needs to understand that they will never see speeds of 1900 Mbps to and from one single device. You won’t ever actually see speeds of 1300 Mbps for that matter. As long as you understand this going into any router evaluation for yourself, you’ll be all the better prepared to make a decision on what to buy. Out of the box, the RT1900ac feels like a quality device. The physical demands of a router are not great, but there is little-to-no flex in the router and the unassuming styling of it should allow it to fit in with any home décor, regardless of where it’s positioned. With three external, MIMO omni-directional high-gain dipole (2.4GHz / 5 GHz) antennas, the RT1900ac looks like almost any other dual-band router with external antennas. My personal router is, and has been, the ASUS RT-AC66U. The RT1900ac resembles that one quite a bit. All this proves is that there are only so many ways you can position three antennas on a small black box. Packaged with the RT1900ac is a power cable of almost laughable length, an Ethernet cable, a stand for positioning the router vertically, and an adapter for North American, two-prong, power outlets. The router itself has the buttons, lights and switches that we have come to expect from a device of this nature. With a button for WPS activation, a switch for toggling wireless broadcasting on or off, a USB 3.0 port for attaching storage, and an ejection button to safely remove said storage, the RT1900ac is rather pedestrian in physical offerings. One curiosity however is the addition of an SD card slot. Synology states that this allows for quick sharing of pictures taken on a camera with anyone who has access to the router. In theory this seems like a nice addition that might help set Synology’s first offering apart from the competition, but in practice, I will be interested to see how many people actually use this. I do like the idea of using the router as a syslog server, storing the logs on extremely cheap SD storage. Synology RT1900ac Router CPU Model Dual core 1.0 GHz Broadcom CPU Memory 256 MB DDR3 Antenna Type 3x3 MIMO Omni-directional high-gain dipole (2.4GHz / 5GHz) Antenna Gain 2.4GHz 3.5dBi, 5GHz 4.6dBi LAN Port Gigabit (RJ-45) x 4 WAN Port Gigabit (RJ-45) x 1 External Ports USB 3.0 x 1 (5V, 1.5A power output SD Card Reader x 1 (SDXC UHS-I, SDHC) Button and Switch WPS, USB/SD eject, Power, Reset, Wi-Fi On/Off RT1900ac Wireless Capabilities IEEE 802.11ac 1900 Category IEEE 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac Simultanious dual-band Wi-Fi 2.4 GHz: 600 Mbps (256-QAM supported) 5 GHz: 1300 Mbps Beamforming Yes Schedulable Wi-Fi Yes WPS 2.0 Yes L3G/4G Mobile Dongle Support Yes The RT1900ac, on paper, is missing nothing we'd hope to see in a quality router. The hardware is just one aspect of a router, though, so let's dive into a look at the software and performance. [PAGEBREAK][PAGETITLE=Setup & Testing][Top Ad] Assuming the performance of the RT1900ac will keep pace with that of its competitors, the most revolutionary aspect of the router is clearly the SRM operating system that drives the user experience. When we first connect the RT1900ac and power it on, we must go through an initial setup procedure. All will be happy to know that this is a simple process and can be done in under a minute or two. By setting up a username, password, SSID and wireless password, you can have your RT1900ac up and running in no time. The setup procedure also provides the opportunity to setup the router in wireless router, wireless AP, or wireless client modes. That’s it. With the RT1900ac configured with an administrative password and SSID, we can log into the router and begin the actual configuration. This is where the user interface experience that Synology has gained over the past handful of years becomes clear. The Taiwanese company threw its entire developmental might behind the development of the UI and for anyone with the smallest amount of experience with its superb NAS OS, DSM, the similarities leave nothing to question. Organized in the same fashion as its DSM, Synology has made the home screen of the RT1900ac as desktop-like as possible. With the ability to add and remove icons from the home screen, there’s even a semblance of customization. Like with DSM, there are applications that can be installed to the RT1900ac. While currently there are only five, we expect that number to increase as the product matures. These are obviously geared towards functionality that a router might be expected to provide… and a few that are not. The three obvious packages that are provided are DNS, VPN, and Radius servers, while the other two deal with how physically-connected media is shared across the network. All of these packages are available for devices running DSM and a few make perfect sense to have on the router as opposed to a NAS. Beyond configuration, there is a good amount of diagnostic and sysadmin-focused functionalities as well. If desired, the RT1900ac can be setup as a syslog server (in my opinion this is best left to a NAS). For parents of children who are old enough to use a computer, detailed parental controls can be enforced through the RT1900ac’s interface. As with any device on the edge of your home network, security functionality is baked into SRM as well. With the ability to set detailed firewall rules, open or block certain ports, and even create your own internal security certificate, the RT1900ac likely has more functionality than most users could possibly use. In our time with the RT1900ac, there was one released update. That update, from beginning of the download to logging back in, took a little over 3 minutes. While downtime for any upgrade should be planned to be the least impactful, it’s good to know that the process of updating to the latest version of SRM won’t take too terribly long. If Synology treats SRM the same way as DSM, updates should be regular and only released with necessary. A wireless router facilitates one primary function in the home: mobile access to the Internet and other devices on your home network. With all mobile phones having wireless capabilities, one area that Synology and other router vendors have been quick to embrace is mobile apps. For example, I have an iPhone; Synology has an entire suite of apps that I can run on my phone to interact with its NAS boxes. The RT1900ac is no different. Introduced alongside the company's new router is the DS Router app. In it, configuration and management of the RT1900ac is possible. One of the more useful abilities made possible through the DS Router app is the quick opening and closing of ports that have been forwarded. For instance, I have a handful of ports opened on my network for remote access while I’m traveling for work; one being RDP. If, for whatever reason, I need to quickly close port 3389 to prevent remote access to my home network, it’s as simple as moving a slider from on to off. Remote management of the RT1900ac is something that Synology has done right with its iOS, Windows and Android mobile apps. Overall, the software solution is top-notch, both on the router...

A Wireless Router That Means Business: Synology RT1900ac Review

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