The Asus ZenWiFi Pro XT12 is a tri-band Wi-Fi 6 router with two 5GHz channels and a 2.4GHz channel that offer a combined, theoretical throughput of 11,000Mbps. As a WiFi 6E router, the ZenWiFi Pro ET12 offers all the congestion-alleviating technologies of WiFi 6 with access to the wide-open spectrum of the 6GHz band as the cherry on top. To open a new frontier of wireless networking, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted access to the 6GHz band. Because the congestion-management and latency-reducing features of WiFi 6 are mandatory for devices compatible with this spectrum, they’ll enjoy low interference and top-end performance when they’re connected to a network managed by the ET12.

Still, for many, the XT12 will be cheaper than a full, business-class Cisco Meraki deployment but, if you’re weighing up that as an option, don’t forget to factor-in on-going support costs as part of the total cost of ownership (aka TCO). Alas, connecting to the 5Ghz-2 band didn’t fare too well in our testing, as we saw a reduction in speeds vs 5Ghz-1. Perhaps this is a frequency not utilised yet by many devices, but perhaps this is part of the future-proofing ASUS has built into the XT12 system.Many routers offer 5GHz connections, but not all 5GHz routers are built the same. The ZenWiFi Pro ET12 can access a high-power 160MHz slice of the 5GHz spectrum. Only recently made available for home WiFi in the United States, this 5.9GHz band is unaffected by radar signals, and it offers wider coverage than you’ve come to expect from 5GHz. It can be hard to get the wireless performance you expect in today’s hyper-connected homes. The ZenWiFi Pro ET12 and ZenWiFi Pro XT12 let all your devices enjoy the stable, high-performance wireless internet you demand. As mesh networking systems, these wireless routers make it easy to deliver that bandwidth to every corner of your home. Up close it scored 627Mbps, which is fast but about 100Mbps slower than other top Wi-Fi 6 rivals. Next to the secondary node it scored 609Mbps – which represents only a 3% drop-off and the fastest speed we’ve ever seen from a test by a secondary node on a mesh! Ultimately, the features on offer make the XT12 feel like a souped-up consumer router with SMB-friendly features, which is no bad thing. In some ways it’s like a consumer-friendly Draytek router – a brand that is all about no-nonsense SMB Wi-Fi without the bells, whistles or performance boosts found here. But we’ll have to wait and see whether that’s enough for SMBs to actually use it as the foundation of their core network though – that level of adoption tends to take years of trust to develop. Today’s highest-performing wireless networks need to serve more and more devices with more bandwidth than ever before. ZenWiFi Pro mesh wireless routers offer the most MU-MIMO capacity of any ASUS mesh system for the most demanding environments. The ZenWiFi Pro ET12 harnesses WiFi 6E to offer cutting-edge connectivity to compatible client devices, while the ZenWiFi Pro XT12 delivers a premium WiFi 6 experience.

Guest WiFi: Create a guest network with a WiFi schedule and access rights to control when and how guests can use the network. The WiFi 6E-enabled ET12 uses a dual-band 4×4 antenna array to provide top-end speeds across the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands and a dedicated 4×4 antenna array to 6GHz spectrum. In select markets, it can also access the recently opened 5.9GHz band for premier speeds in this coveted slice of the spectrum. All told, it can provide an aggregate data rate up to 11000Mbps. The XT12 offers a double dose of 5GHz throughput with a 4×4 antenna array devoted to that band and a dual-band antenna to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. Dual 2.5G Ethernet ports on both models let you take full advantage of the bandwidth potential of WiFi 6 and WiFi 6E.

The 2.4GHz band offers excellent range and broad compatibility, and the 5GHz band provides higher performance, but both are increasingly crowded with devices and can be prone to interference. The WiFi 6 technologies on the ZenWiFi Pro XT12 can alleviate congestion when it’s managing a network of compatible WiFi 6 devices. Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) allows the router to communicate with multiple devices simultaneously by dividing slices of the frequency spectrum into sub-channels. OFDMA is complemented by multi-user, multiple input, multiple output (MU-MIMO), which uses multiple transmit and receive antennas so that the router can talk to many devices at the same time. And there are even more similarities, as you’ll note in the hardware specifications below. Hardware specifications: ZenWiFi Pro XT12 vs ZenWiFi Pro ET12