Synology RT2600ac wireless router — my AirPort Extreme replacement!

does this router make a good Airport extreme or time capsule replacement have a look at 15 of my favorites analogy arty 2680 features how's it want ladies and gentlemen boys and girls this is Jeff Benjamin with 95 Mac I have in the house right here the latest router from Synology yes indeed this is the RT 2600 AC inside this box the direct sequel to the RT 1980 and this thing has a whole host of interesting upgrades and features and we're going to explore some of them in this video now now I am replacing an apple airport extreme so this is really sort of a different ballpark for me to be playing in right now but I am excited about some of the features that this offers and one of the things that really stood out to me was the web-based interface you can actually manage this router directly from your iPhone if you want to of course you can manage it from the web on your Mac and it's really straightforward and has a lot of powerful features but it's also very user friendly and that's what I appreciated about this and that's what I appreciate about technology products in general with like DiskStation manager and things like that it's so simple straightforward but there are lots of powerful features if you want to take advantage of those so let's go ahead and unbox the RT 2600 AC right now and let's see what's inside here here is the top of the box pretty simple packaging there now I'm just going to take the lid off if I can here we go all right so here's what's inside the box you have the router here and then you have accessory box right here so let's go ahead and open up the accessory box first of all and let's see what's inside here I want to guess there's a power adapter and I was right so you have a power adapter so you have a cat5e cable here okay so let's go ahead and move the router so here is our Synology router inside here so we're just going to unwrap it so here you go folks this is it again this is the RT 2600 AC on the bottom here you have these two feet you have a couple of mountain holes you have two rubber feet down here on the back you have a power button you have a DC input reset will hold their two spots for the antennas and then you have USB 2.0 port you can use that actually for 4G hotspot you have a LAN port this is your primary winning port you also have a secondary LAN port which is actually a LAN port but can be used as a LAN port if you have two internet connections for instance so you had to cable connections for whatever reason to cable modems you could actually have both of them hooked up for redundancy so this also acts like a LAN port as well so if you want to connect four devices over Ethernet you could if you wish to do so so pretty cool features there for this phonology RT 2600 AC so on this side you have another spot for an antenna you have a USB 3.0 port so you can connect USB drives and basically make this its own little nads if you wish to do so there's also an eject button here and then on the opposite side you have two buttons here you have a WPS button and a Wi-Fi button and you also have another antenna thread so that's four antennas total you have several indicator lights you have a status life you have 2.4 gigahertz you have five yogurt see a twin one when two and then one two three and four of those your LAN LAN lights there so again like I said you could have a second LAN port which will take away from one of the land ports you have on your Synology RT 2680 now there are a few additional things in this box that you might just need and of course I am talking about the antennas so you get four in 10 is inside here there's one two three there's one hiding down here for and then you also have a quick installation guide there's one over here the great thing about this router is that it is relatively future-proof it supports the latest 802 11 AC wave 2 standard which gives it multi-user mimo support so you get four by four multi-user mimo meaning that this thing is going to be able to instead of talking sequentially to individual devices on your network it's going to be able to talk to multiple devices at the same time so you're going to get better performance in theory now of course the devices the client devices will need to support multi-user mimo as well so it will probably be a while before we get a full network that supports this but that means that the RT 2600 AC is relatively future proof at least for the time being now this router enables up to 800 megabits per second from the 2.4 gigahertz network and over 1,700 megabits per second on the 5 gigahertz network that gives you combined wireless bandwidth of over 2.5 gigabits per second now phonologies SRM interface which is used to configure the router is very snappy very responsive and that's in part thanks to the 1.7 gigahertz dual-core processor that lies inside the RT 2600 AC you also get half a gig of ram smart connect is a super handy feature that combines the routers SSID with the shared settings for the 2.4 and 5 gigahertz bands this allows automatic seamless switching between those two bands depending on where you are in relation to the router so you can see I am connected to one SSID that is fireworks and if I open up the DS router app you're going to see that I'm connected right now to the 2.4 gigahertz band now smart connect can be configured in SRM inside of the Network Center you'll find it on the wireless tab so to test this out I've move my iPhone right next to the router and you can see right there I am pulling the 5 gigahertz band so it switched automatically and seamlessly while connected to the same SSID super handy feature to manage the router settings you can download so knowledge ease vs router app now this application is a fairly straightforward and simple app it is similar to airport utility where you can go in and the routers various settings it's not as robust as the SRM web interface but it gets the job done if you don't need to do anything particularly complex so you can monitor and control traffic check link info modify the Wi-Fi settings you can even do things like turn off the LED lights or turn them back on for that matter and you can also eject the USB devices connected to your router just like this now one of the really nice features about this app and one that I use all the time is the usage tab this allows you to monitor traffic in real time so you can see upload and download for all the devices connected to your router now in ologies routers run SRM which is the operating system that is accessible via a web interface and this is really what makes this router so special because SRM is excellent it is a windowed interface so you have a start menu like button in the upper left hand corner you can add shortcuts to your desktop you can access those items just by clicking on them and it's just a very familiar interface it's not overly complex like some router interfaces are but don't get it twisted the ease of use doesn't mean that this thing isn't powerful because there are a lot of power user features wrapped in this friendly looking interface and you'll find tons of really granular settings that you can go in and adjust and really like turn the knobs of the router to make it just like you want it but again there are packages that you can download such as VPN + server which allows you to run your own VPN you can download that from the package center and you can see the windows it's very much like a desktop on a native OS you can even maximize windows minimize windows there's even an expose like features so that you can view all the open windows at once just like that so d/s router is a great app for quick settings changes and monitoring but for the real experience you definitely want to go into SRM and get your hands dirty if you have children then you'll no doubt appreciate the parental control feature found in network center in SRM so all you need to do is click on parental control and there you'll see fine green controls that you can have over every client device connected to your network so the ps4 is here I can turn on the web filter i can enable safe search I can even choose windows devices allowed online and when it is not now if you go into the web filter you have your typical block access to known malicious websites you have adult web sites you can block but you also have the ability to block access to custom web sites so if you go in here you can select edit block list you can add or check the specific categories or you can go in into the customization section and add your own websites if you wish to do that that is one feature but I really like this internet allow time feature so you can go in here click that and then you can choose when your children or when a particular client device is able to access the Internet and when it is not so you can see here that the ps4 can only get online on the weekends and on Friday after school as we showed you during the unboxing the side of the router contains a USB 3.0 port so essentially what you can do is connect an external drive like this one here in terms of Rother into a Synology nass once you have an external drive connected you can go in a control panel and go to storage and find that drive there and you can adjust any user permissions you can rename it etc once you finish the configuration you can go to file station to find the drive and you can start adding files to that drive or downloading files from that drive works just like a Synology NAS pretty awesome in fact I can play a video directly from the drive of the network just like that so if you're curious as to what a Synology nas is like what it's like to use DSM this is very very similar to what you will experience using a Synology nas proper and there's also an SD card slot which can be used for storage as well hiding out Dell front package center is loosely synonymous with the App Store on an iOS device it's here where you can go and download various applications that are designed to run on your router and not only can you download router centric apps like VPN plus server but you can also download math centric apps like download station or media server and these can be stored directly on an external drive that is connected to your Synology router so again a lot of overlap with some of analogies Nass products and really this is like a taste test so to speak for what you would expect from a small gene as you're not going to be able to get the full experience but as you can see it's still extremely capable and you can see right now that I am downloading the media server app and I'll speed that up just a little bit so it can complete alright so it looks like the installation is completed firewalls popping up some notifications I'll just click OK there all right so now we have the media server app available as a new application I'll just right-click and select add to desktop and then we'll launch the media server app and you can see right there you can go in and configure it how you like and get down to business so as mentioned at the outset during the unboxing the Synology RT 2680 e has four different Gigabit LAN ports but you'll notice this first LAN port is a little special because it can also function as a LAN port so these two right here can be to win ports this can work as a secondary or a failover LAN port you can also do things like load balancing so you can actually connect to internet interfaces say a cable modem and a DSL modem or whatever the case may be and have redundancy and also have load balancing so most customers obviously wouldn't need something like that but if you're a business customer with mission-critical apps and things that need and require internet access this can be a quite compelling feature to have speaking of redundancy the Artie 2600 AC allows you to connect a 3G or 4G dongle to this USB port right here and share that wireless cellular connectivity with the rest of the clients on your network now again this is mainly for backup purposes when your primary provider goes down but again it's nice to have if you need it another features that I find extremely handy is the fact that there is a physical power button I don't know if you've noticed but a lot of routers don't have physical power buttons in fact the router that I'm replacing Apple's Airport extreme doesn't have any buttons whatsoever so this is a very nice departure from that thinking for instance if you're troubleshooting and you need to turn off the router for whatever reason instead of having to unplug the power cable and having it fall behind your mantel or wherever you have the router mounted you can just press the power button like that to turn it on or off super handy and super simple and speaking of troubleshooting there's a handy Wi-Fi button that allows you to disable Wi-Fi directly from the hardware so no longer do you have to login to the interface the SRM interface in this case to disable Wi-Fi if you need to do so for troubleshooting or whatever the case may be now you can just disable it right from this button right here on the router itself then you have the ability to manage these LED lights which is really nice you can turn them all you can turn them all you can even schedule when they come on and when they go off so just like everything else in SRM managing the LED lights is super simple so all you need to do is go to control panel click on device and then under the LED tab you'll see only status LED on or you can customize and create an LED schedule so hmm I'll make it so that the LEDs go off at a p.m. and come on at 8:00 a.m. simple Quick Connect and dynamic DNS two features that allow you to access your Synology router from outside of your network now Quick Connect is for Synology apps and dynamic DNS is for anything else one of the things I really appreciate about this router especially for someone who accesses the router outside of the network is 2-step verification so you can enable that directly from SRM if you go into the user options you can click on 2-step verification then you go through you set it up it's just like any other 2-step verification setup you use the little QR code you snap it and you add it to whatever Authenticator app you're using I use one password so that's where I go to get my six digit code whenever I need to login to SRM so let's try that out right now so well log out here and now I'm going to log back in so I paste in my six digit code already enter my user name password sign in and I'm in just like that another one of my favorite features is the built in VPN VPN plus is a super simple super easy to use VPN that is built right into the Synology nas you can actually download it from the package center run it and then once you do you just click where it says Synology VPN and it gives you all the details about this setup now the really nice thing is that Synology has rolled out some VPN plus apps for iOS and Android as well so you can download that VPN plus app directly from the app store and then you just put in your login credentials and that's pretty much it once you're logged in you're connected to the VPN and you can start using your iOS device or Android device on public Wi-Fi networks without having to worry about someone spying on you so you can see right here the data the traffic or the VPN you can actually monitor VPN traffic directly from the overview section of the VPN plus server app on your Synology NAS so just again a very well-done application that's easy to use now suppose someone on your network was just being ridiculous and downloading just tons of stuff and just using a ton of bandwidth you could actually go into the traffic control section of Network Center you could find the offender and you can actually do is click and ban them in one click or you could also take a more subtle approach so I'm going to unbanned this user ps4 user and I'm going to click where it says custom speed so you can go in here you can actually change the amount of guaranteed bandwidth or maximum upload bandwidth or maximum download bandwidth just like that you can also change the priority of a particular client just like that but one of the things I really like about traffic control is the ability to go in and edit a device and give it a custom image so that is easily recognizable you also give the device a name right from this section so for ps4 I gave it a controller make sense right and lastly let's talk about monitoring and reporting so you'll see a monitor tab under traffic control in Network Center and this allows you to see current real-time network traffic you can see upload and download traffic for all the devices connected to your network which is really cool you can also go back in time so you can check the past 24 hours that's one week to pass one one etc and when I set it back to the past 24 hours you can see some aggregate data how you see the past 24 hours and the exact time that I use certain amounts of bandwidth to get the upload bandwidth download bandwidth and if you want even more data you can click report and generate a report so I created a monthly report just click on that click generate report now and it's generating that report and I just click this little link here and that will open up a new page with my report and you're going to see that it's just beautifully laid out and very clear so you can see my upload traffic for the last month 20 gigabytes is my download 80 gigabyte so really not as much as I would have expected you can also see destination overview you can see top traffic days really cool you can see trends you see application categories destination countries just a lot of data in here that you can take and analyze it's laid out in a very easy to read manner so ladies and gentlemen that has been a look at fifteen technology RT 2600 EC features this is a router that I'm using to replace my airport extreme and I can highly recommend it I like it a lot I've been using it for over a month no issues and it's just a solid router with a ton of power user features in a very easy to use package one thing I don't like about it is it looks it obviously doesn't look anywhere near as good as my airport extreme but I can live with that considering the amount of features that are jam-packed in here and the fact that it uses the latest wireless tech so ladies and gentlemen let me know what you guys think down below in the comment section do you own an airport extreme or a time capsule and if so will you be replacing it sound off down below in the comment section this is Jeff with nine-to-five Mack [Music]

Channel: 9to5Mac

Views: 148,512

Keywords: 9to5Mac, Synology, RT2600ac, 2600ac, RT2600, Synology RT2600ac, Best Mac Router, Best Wave 2 Router, Best AC wave 2 router, Best Wireless Router, Best Wireless Router for Mac, Best AirPort Extreme Alternative, Synology Router, Synology Router Review, RT2600ac Best Features, RT2600ac review, RT2600ac Walkthrough, Top RT2600ac Features, Best RT2600ac Features, How to use Synology Router

Id: YXbbLZdY2p0

Length: 20min 57sec (1257 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 28 2017