2026 Merlin Router Recommendation

[John DeLuca]

Hello I have a friend of mine who is looking to get into Merlin. I was wondering want is a good model for him to get. Speeds will be fiber at 1g max for now and he wants to do Vlans. He will probably need a switch too but I think I will have him do the vlans from the router so he doesn’t need a more expesnive switch.

It’s a single story house nothing too big, not sure how thick the wall are off hand. I will probably have him do QOS if he has only a 750mbps speeds ATM. I know at above 500 QOS becomes less important so I could just leave that off but he will game from a Xbox. Most things will be on LAN expect for smart devices.

For the switch I’ll may suggest this one as it’s 10 gig but may be overkill for him.

https://a.co/d/02XYPj15

 

[lgkahn]

depends what he wants for wifi and how much he wants to spend but for hardware componernts i like the rg-be88u

 

[Tech9]

I will probably have him do QOS

There is no good QoS options on new BE-class ASUS routers. Adaptive QoS is broken, Traditional QoS and Cake are both NAT acceleration incompatible, under 500Mbps WAN-LAN on high-end models. Doing VLANs in 3006 firmware is also quirky. ASUS tried to make it more user-friendly, but it may be confusing. If inter-VLAN routing is needed - CLI options only. Reports about issues with mDNS and IoTs compatibility. Make sure you are suggesting the right thing to your friend. Not everything is smooth sailing, there will be rough seas. They have be able to support 3rd party firmware setup themselves. Don't turn yourself into support guy.

Models - RT-BE88U for dual-band, RT-BE96U for tri-band.

 

[Seth Harman]

Models - RT-BE88U for dual-band, RT-BE96U for tri-band.

I went through this evaluation about a year ago. I have a single device in my house that uses/needs WiFi 7 (my phone) and I think buying dual-band now would cause me to regret it by the time I actually need WiFi 7 since I'd certainly prefer tri-band and, currently, "good" Asus WiFi 7 tri-band routers are definitely not cheap. I ended up going with the RT-AX88U Pro which gets me all the other stuff (VLANs, better CPU, etc...) at a much lower price point. I am aware that my AiMesh nodes are dual-band WiFi 7 but that was an immediate need and those were on sale/relatively cheap at the time.

 

[Tech9]

I ended up going with the RT-AX88U Pro

You've made the right choice. Unfortunately, RT-AX88U Pro and GT-AX6000 are hard to find lately.

 

[Seth Harman]

You've made the right choice. Unfortunately, RT-AX88U Pro and GT-AX6000 are hard to find lately.

Interesting. I wonder if they stopped manufacturing them.