ASUS is a name you will have heard time and time again, but how much do you really know about their range of products? Personally, I have been purchasing PC components built by them for a long time and the reason I do is that I have only ever had good experiences and fantastic reliability from their products. Can their range of WiFi 6 Mesh systems hold equal prestige in my heart? Let's dig in!

Mesh systems have become a mainstay in the world of home networking, namely because buildings are now made from extra thick or super-insulated materials that naturally cause dead zones in your house for WiFi connectivity. A dead zone is simply a place or spot in your vicinity where you struggle to maintain, or even identify, an internet connection within your home or office building an area, and this then becomes an area that you avoid because you cannot use your devices there reliably, if at all.

There are three main methods to bolster a network: repeaters or extenders, powerline connections, and mesh networking. The first, using repeaters, is a super basic stepping stone approach that boosts the wireless signal area of the device it's connected to and, within its own span limit, extends the range within which you're actively able to connect to it.

As a theoretical example; if your network has a ~120ft range limit before it drops off and you overlap another ~400ft repeater the signal is able to bounce from the router to the repeater, to your device up to a possible limit of ~500ft. This is all well and good but what if you have something blocking out that wifi signal, and because of thick walls and doors, or being on another floor altogether, you simply cannot get any signal to penetrate the very fibres of your home or office?

By effectively running wire WAN-LAN connections through the existing electrical "mains" cabling that exists in your home or office, and because they are already interconnected,  our second option, powerline solutions, and cleverly and effectively bypass any material limits within the structure you are networking within and plumb internet all-around your home rather effortlessly, but without an outlet that emits WiFi as opposed to hardwired internet, how can you then connect anything other than wired devices to that cabling?

Our final solution--mesh networking--is the key to all of this. A combination of wired powerline connectivity and wireless hotspots dotted at selected plug sockets effectively blankets you in WiFi throughout your entire property and gives you full coverage regardless of if your house is lead-lined, or your office is several stories tall. With LAN speeds of up to 1800 Mbps and future-proof support for up to 8K resolution content streaming, this Hybrid ASUS Mesh networking solution is more than capable of running the average household with its eyes shut.

Unboxing the ASUS ZenWiFi AX Hybrid you are met with what looks like two very lightweight routers, a selection of cables, and an instruction manual, which is fantastic to gaze upon as you quite literally have everything in the box to get you up and running in mere minutes. With prices as low as £269.99 you get two XP4 routers, two sets of AC cables for English or European plug sockets, and a simple flat profile LAN cable that can connect directly into your existing router's first LAN socket to gain WAN connectivity.

Each of the 20cm x 14cm x 7cm white towers houses two Gigabyte Ethernet ports, one Gigabyte WAN port, and a USB 3.1 Port for connecting wireless printers, or HDD's for backup/FTP! Each has an approximate range of 2750 square feet of connectivity, giving this twin pack a stonking average of 4400 square feet, or 410 square meters, of workable area. That's enough to cover approximately 6 average rooms, and with each connecting to the powerlines and piping the backhaul through your sockets at full AX1800 WiFi 6 speed; there is no room or annexe that needs to suffer from dead zones ever again!

My house is a bungalow, with an estimated square footage of well under the 410 square meter upper-limit, however, if you factor into it my garage and garden, then planting an XP4 router in my garage means that I now have uninterrupted wireless internet across my 3 bedroom home, through the living/dining area, out into the garden from the first router, and then thanks to the powerline connection, across the garden into my garage, whereby once it is emitted from the second router; it is effectively hitting my garden from two sides with glorious internet connectivity.

WiFi 6 is the latest in the long line of WiFi standards that promises to usher in a new standard of next-gen network speeds. With full compatibility for all the old WiFi standards too, you can expect 802.11b speeds of up to 11 Mbps on older devices, up to 867 Mbps on 802.11ac devices, a blistering maximum of 574 Mbps on 2.4GHz devices, as well as a whopping 1201 Mbps on spunky new 5GHz banded 802.11ax enabled devices. Bearing in mind that 2.4Ghz has a longer range, whereas 5GHz has a shorter range but is innately speedier, the choice you make with setting up your network is entirely up to you, but I preferred to segregate my higher-end devices, such as my Sony PlayStation 5 and my Amazon Fire Stick 4K's, to my 5GHz bands and keep anyone and anything else on my 2.4Ghz bands to maintain less traffic on the more speedy frequencies. WiFi 6 as a standard doesn't necessarily mean faster, it means more stable, as the theoretical speeds available to it (9.6 Gbps) will never be reached in normal commercial usage, though this is a notably massive improvement from WiFi 5's maximal 3.5 Gbps speeds.

I have to admit that the set-up was very straightforward once I had physically hit the microscopic reset buttons on the back of each one. Initially, the routers were not found on my mobile phone using the app, but with a quick restart everything fell into place and within about five minutes I had everything up and running without any hiccups whatsoever. Connect your existing router to the first XP4, turn on the second XP4; it syncs to the newly established network and you're done!

Beyond this, you have a plethora of features that you can use with the help of the ASUS Router application on Google's Play Store or Apple's App Store. For starters, you can set up child-safe locking and scheduling to keep the little ones from accessing anything they shouldn't, or accessing it after a certain time in order to lockdown their surfing habits and help ensure healthy usage and even establish a bedtime regimen. You can also set up specific devices as gaming devices guest wifi access points with ease, and view usage statistics from your phone with full admin rights that allow you to limit or even block specific devices, if you need to, very easily.

In addition to the ASUS Router app, there is also the ASUS Instant Guard that can effectively layer you up with VPN for your network. Integration for Alexa and Google Assistant is also built into the app, though I couldn't see any clear options for Siri or Homekit integration which isn't the end of the world, but would have been nice to see out the box.

There seem to be a few points at which you get a wall of text pop up in the app for you to accept or decline based on your data and privacy. I noted a couple of occasions where I was prompted that my information and device usage would be shared to Trend Micro if I used AiProtection, Traffic Analyzer, App Analyzer, or Adaptive QoS/Game Boost/Game IPS, etc. Though there is ample opportunity to opt-out of this after accepting, there was seemingly no way to opt-out before agreeing to use it. The best thing to do is read everything you can or take a screenshot of the terms, and then circle back to it all if you think twice about your privacy. In the interests of reviewing these items, it was a no brainer for me to utilise these services to improve my connectivity and increase my gaming pleasure at peak times, however in a world where privacy really does matter, I would recommend that anyone purchasing any device should read everything carefully, and know what you are agreeing to before you make your own decisions.

As a test for the Mesh set-up, I decided to attempt to stream a movie in several locations around my property, and thankfully it exceeded my expectations. Using various apps to stream movies and catch-up television, I managed uninterrupted viewing around my home, into my garden, and out into my garage. The streaming quality was superb and no synchronicity was lost throughout. I then added gaming into the mix with my PS5 connecting to PSN to play a couple of games online at the same time as I was streaming, and the results were great. It should be noted that I have the Virgin M100 connection, I managed consistent 113 Mbps download and 10.0 Mbps upload speeds, through the mesh set up, around my entire property using speed test apps, which is pretty normal speeds for my connection, but the fact that there was no patchy connectivity is testament to the ASUS ZenWifi AX Hybrids ability to perform across all terrains.

I loved the ease of use of this setup and honestly, even the styling of the routers fit my home to a tee. They aren't massive--they're almost ubiquitous, and most importantly, they do exactly what you expect of them with no fuss! I don't think I could go back to having patchy or no connectivity whatsoever in my garden, and if I ever get around to renovating my loft and garage there is no way I wouldn't continue using or extending the ASUS ZenWifi AX Hybrid Mesh system in my home to keep everyone connected and gaming, streaming, and surfing with zero interruptions, 24/7.