ASUS - ZenWiFi Pro ET12

I have an Asus XT12 mesh system with two points. I recently had to factory reset them due to a borked FW update and since I was messing with it I took the time to separate my 2.4 and 5ghz bands. Everything is much happier now.

I went from Airports to Asus Zenwifi ET12’s and they have been rock solid. Faster speeds and better coverage too.

We have several Asus Zenwifi ET12’s at our house and are getting great speeds with only a wireless backhaul. Even to our guest house which is 30’ away from our main house with its own ET12 connected in.

I tried ET12 and I was comparable performance to my old TP link route which was also WiFi 6E. My recommendation is to just try both and see which one works best for you. There are so many variables at play with wired back haul, walls etc.

I have an ET12 system with the same experience. A few useful tidbits: - The Ethernet backhaul on these rocks. They have 2.5GB uplinks and they can trunk two of them. Two lines means more speed and more reliability. - They work with other ASUS routers that support AiMesh. We have one 800’ up a mountain with a fiber backhaul and it works flawlessly. So you can expand flexibly and cheaply. - They allow flexible settings for guest networks and Quality-of-Service management. So you can even limit guests or problem devices. I don’t care if YouTube buffers for two seconds first, but I do care if my work call or video game cuts out when someone starts a new video. - They also let you easily bind certain devices to certain access points. That prevents your TV from connecting to an AP halfway across the house after a power outage because it saw it before the one sitting right next to it. There are probably more reasons to love it, but that’s what I can think of now. I vastly prefer it to the Eero and a custom-built WAP I tried before it.

Hardwired is best. If you have extra phone lines or coax cable you can use that. If not you'll have to Go wireless. Ubiquiti is great. But, it's beyond most homeowners without really doing their homework. Therefore, I would recommend an Asus system. All of their stuff works. Just buy two, three, four of their routers in the AI mesh system will work perfectly.(Buy the exact same router for everywhere). You just need to make sure they are tri-band or quad-band routers (one band will be used exclusively for wireless backhaul). For example, et12, ET 8, et9, bt-10 are all recommended. Check out Dong knows--his website is great.

Backhaul is how the routers talk to each other. It's best to do it wired. But, if you can't they will use one of the channels on the router that becomes a dedicated circuit (band) where they talk to each other. That's why you need at least three bands. If you want Wi-Fi, 7 I would recommend the bt-10 or the expensive BE98 pro. If you just want Wi-Fi 6e, any of the routers I mentioned before would work.. et8, et9,xt9,xt12,et12. Additionally, avoid the BQ 16 and the be96u, the firmware on the routers is buggy and has not been updated. I have personally used the et8, xt9 and the be98 pro. They have all been fantastic.

Backhaul is how the routers talk to each other. It's best to do it wired. But, if you can't they will use one of the channels on the router that becomes a dedicated circuit (band) where they talk to each other. That's why you need at least three bands. If you want Wi-Fi, 7 I would recommend the bt-10 or the expensive BE98 pro. If you just want Wi-Fi 6e, any of the routers I mentioned before would work.. et8, et9,xt9,xt12,et12. Additionally, avoid the BQ 16 and the be96u, the firmware on the routers is buggy and has not been updated. I have personally used the et8, xt9 and the be98 pro. They have all been fantastic.

Please update us in a few days if gets better or worse. I just went to Deco be65 3 pack and its been awesome. Coming from Eero Pro 6 then I had the Asus Et 12 Pro

Get a refurb Asus ET12 on eBay.

I would recommend the Asus Zenwifi Pro ET12. You can get one off eBay for a cheaper price. A 2-pack should be sufficient coverage. You can compare price with the TP-Link XE75 and Eero Pro 6E. Any of those 3 are good with wireless backhaul, and the Asus has the best coverage among all 3. Asus gives the best features available without any additional pay wall, Eero is the simplest to use but has additional features behind a pay wall and TP-LINK is the best on budget and comes between on coverage.

I have a pair of ASUS ET12s and they’re great! One on 3rd floor of one building and a 50 meter 10G fiber backhaul connection to the other in a second building behind. Covered the whole area, one SSID, 3 bands. Fortunately not a lot of metal in the walls.

Yeah you can. Their support is terrible and they don't implement everything they promise. I have a ZenPro ET12 system. Paid $600 on sale for 2 nodes and the thing is fussier than hell. I'm replacing them with Ubiquiti's Wifi 7 system. It's cheaper, better, and a lot more capable You can get a Dream Router 7 and a UniFi Express 7 for under $500.

If you already have Cat 5e or better in the home, it is best to get cheapest PoE+ switches (two PoE+ ports or more) and distribute them throughout the home along with either APs or Mesh infrastructure that work with wired or wireless backbone. I have five VLAN PoE+ eight-port switches along two SFPs ports on two of the switches. This allows me to get wired connections on many of the nearest switches. The reason for VLAN switches so I can separate the homeowner LAN from my infrastructure. The switches are configured the same way so one does need to know what port belongs to switch VLAN LAN. - Ports 1-4 are 1st VLAN and PoE+ - Port 5 for the 2nd VLAN - Port 6-7 are 1st VLAN - Port 8 is the trunk - Ports 9-10 (SFP) - 2nd VLAN - The ASUS ZenWifi ET8 mesh devices are on 2nd VLAN with four ports each and USB-A port. I use USB-A port to charge devices or it could be use as cellular backup. - The ASUS ZenWifi ET12 mesh devices are on 1st VLAN with four ports each. I also have Cradlepoint to allow multiple ISPs or cellular backup via SIMs or cellular router. I pick ASUS so I did not need to pay for additional security services subscription unlike other vendors. Additionally, if the Internet went down, one could still get into the devices. Amazon EERO were problematic, with the above, since it is associated with cloud configuration. The above is overkill but if one wanted to leave with existing equipment particular to a VLAN LAN, one does not need to reconfigured the switches or devices but replace the switches with low end PoE+ switches that were put in storage. Lastly, there are two ISP (cable and fiber) so each VLAN has primary and backup to which the other VLAN has different primary and backup. The only major issue is when switch fails (goes back to factory default or dies), I have to reconfiguring a new switch and powercycle all the devices to forget seeing the other VLAN devices. So each switch location has 1st vlan - mesh device with three ports - four PoE+ and two ports from the VLAN switch 2nd VLAN - mesh device with three ports along with one USB-A port - one port from VLAN switch Yes, I have a lot of interference in 2.5Mhz range with this and my neighbors. Only my low-end devices (irrigation, garage doors, some security devices) use this. I would rather have hardwired connections to avoid wireless jammers trying to block security solutions. NOTE: Having separate LAN help many times when ISP fails and the routers do not always switch over correctly. I also added a power strip with external cable on/off switch so I do not need to open the screwed in wall panel. Occasionally, the ISP fiber to ethernet adapter doesn’t cooperate if their router is powercycled.

For most setups like yours, the best wifi mesh system is a Wi-Fi 6E kit with wired backhaul. The Asus ZenWiFi ET12 or TP-Link Deco XE75 Pro both deliver full gigabit speeds, stable roaming, and no subscriptions. Wi-Fi 7 is nice but still overkill unless you have devices that can use it.

I was using an ASUS AXE11000 6e router with all of its 2.4, 5, and 6GHz bands in use. I replaced it with the ASUS BE98U. Picked up 30% better WiFi coverage on 2.4 and 5 GHz. Improvement on the 6GHz band was about 10% better with connections on 6GHz no longer needing to be in the same room as the router or a Mesh unit. The new WiFi 7 protocols also provide more stable connections between the router and clients - sidestepping interference. The only downside is LOT (legacy) devices can have trouble connecting to WiFi 7 - but the BE98U creates a "friendly" WiFi 6 LOT device channel in its multiple band streams. The improvement was enough to eliminate interference problems from all other WiFi interference outside my home coming from as far away as 600 feet. This doesn't even take into account the huge improvement in available download and upload speeds.    One of my LOT devices is 200 feet from my home at a gate and it's connection is now rock solid. So, yes there are good reason to upgrade to WiFi 7. Ignore the naysayers.

Yeah I like the ASUS approach as well. Mine just works, and it is so easy to add another node anytime I want since their stuff is all interoperable with the AiMesh setup.

Asus zenwifi is worth considering. Just got 2 nodes of the 6E one from 2023 for $200 @ microcenter. After some issues with a new fully updated asus wifi7 router constantly rebooting & some similar claims across a few of their wifi7 devices i fear they've got a bug. The 6E has been running fantastic for ~4days now

you have plenty of bandwidth, any issues you have are connectivity. Id just buy a Asus wifi 6E Ai Mesh capable router and move your current router to the second floor and use a wired backhaul. Installing an Ethernet connection between floors would allow you to improve your connectivity upstairs more than anything else.

I have the AX11000 ( old versión ) and is an AMAZING router!!

I bought an Asus zenwifi system but eventually hardwired the satellites to a switch plugged into the main unit. Works great.

asus zen wifi. with a house you should have it wired for ethernet anyway. the zen wifi can handle both and 2.5gb in the wifi 7 model.

If you want an easy setup, nice user interface and ability to tweak options/configurations down the road, ASUS ZenWiFi is a good option. Another bonus with ASUS is you can use a mobile phone app \*or\* a web interface on a laptop/computer to manage the system. Many other mesh systems from TP-Link, Netgear, Eero only let you manage them with a mobile phone app. That is fine if you have basic needs but if you want to get more control over settings, often not an option. For example TP-Link may not let you select WiFi channels for its wireless networks. With ASUS you have control over a multitude of settings. Or just leave it on the defaults and if you ever wish to dive into the config, it will be ready and waiting for you. I asked Google Gemini for some thoughts too (another poster used Ai so I gave it a try too). I see ASUS ZenWiFi is in the list along with others. Since your needs don't seem very complex any of these should work pretty well. Unfamiliar with Eero, but you stated they are "difficult" to move into AP mode, no idea why but if you know that to be true then I suppose you could remove Eero from your consideration list. Have fun! Click below image to make it larger... https://preview.redd.it/q9mu50skxxrf1.png?width=925&format=png&auto=webp&s=1fb6721ce7d5fb1ded5fee09f45ed12ce365b752

Hello! I have an asus zen WiFi mesh net with two of the three nodes set up. I have Ethernet over coax and have the downstairs node connected via Ethernet. I should (based on the range of these routers) have excellent coverage in the house. I have noticed however my devices sometimes get confused which node it should connect to, resulting in sub par speeds. The nodes are very far apart. When I did add the third node I felt I was getting crazy interference. Any suggestions?

Yeah, extenders don't work in big houses. For 3500 sq ft, get a mesh system like TP-Link Deco or ASUS ZenWiFi.Covers everything, no dead zones, no 5G or 2.4GHz.

Avoid tp-link and any other CCP networking equipment. Don't intentionally put stuff with backdoors in them just to save a few bucks. Unifi is great but it's expensive and you really should use it wired. If you're just looking for plug and play mesh Asus has good offerings. Their AI mesh system works well

I've had zero problems with M1 for many years. Only went down once, and that was for scheduled maintenance in the middle of the night. Also, it's not just your internet plan that could be the cause of any issues. If your router isn't good enough, or is in a terrible position, or is overheating, or the bomb shelter is between your laptop and the router, you are gonna have issues no matter what plan you have. I have a standard 1Gbps plan but an Asus gaming router with ethernet cables going to the 3 heaviest users in the home – PS5, living TV and bedroom TV. I also set up a second router using Asus AImesh to provide wifi signal to one of the further corners of the house.

I've been using AiMesh since the beginning, and it was rocky at first, but now I'm currently quite happy with it. One solid main router and two APs outside. What unifi did you get to replace your setup and do you think it was worth the cost?

Asus AiMesh - Yea TP-Link Deco - Yes TP-Link Easy Mesh - Not sure

ASUS aimesh is the best option besides true ap based systems.

I've been using Asus Aimesh for years. 3 nodes and seamless switching when walking around. There does seem to be a client limit at about 75-80 wifi devices whiche forced me to move iot devices to a separate wifi network. Asus is great to start with but unifi likely my next system

I use Asus routers in my Ai mesh network and it gives me complete control over everything and I've loved it. I use that coupled with family link from Google and I feel like I've done my job as a parent blocking as much bullshit as I can for my kids.  But don't worry, their friends who's parents don't care about a single thing they consume will come along and ruin your hard work. Or your kids will be kids and find loop holes, which they always do. But you still tried. 

Asus AiMesh can be configured without an app and uses local credentials for management.

For gaming use cable, for wifi coverage of this size, you can do well with asus aimesh, you can pick two routers of your choice, cheaper than ismesh system and many settings available.

I went from DD-WRT for years to ASUS AiMesh and have been on Unifi equipment for a good four years now. I never have any issues with roaming (3600+ home) and I can fine tune whenever necessary (rare). I love the Unifi and don't plan on moving away any time soon. If you want peace of mind, I definitely also recommend Unifi.

As has been said, plug in everything you can. For a basic option, the Asus routers with AiMesh are a pretty simple solution. Start with one on the second floor centrally located and see if you need more. Use inSSIDer to see how your signal strength is as what kind of interference you have and set settings accordingly. If you’re not reaching all corners, add another compatible Asus and put them on floors 1 and 3 (both wired connection to WAN jack)

ASUS AIMESH Stable and cheap.