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.

 

[jksmurf]

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

I have both; One at home and one remote. The remote is paired with wired RT-AX86U Pro nodes (2x), all VLAN and GNP capable. I am happy I do not have to deal with MLP and Wifi7.

However even that does not guarantee you a seamless, flawless alwasy working AiMesh system, especially if you have many IoT devices (Shelly at least).

A working system seems to depend on many, many factors e.g. which nodes start when and in what order, relative TX power, in-device RSSI settings, steering/trigger (if you use SC, which is generally not recommended here), RA (disabled on 2.4) etc.

Even then I have recently had to resort a regular ARP Cache flushing script and a wireless watchdog which checks for errors and restarts the wireless & flushes the ARP cache to clear stale routing entries . As I have said before (tongue firmaly in cheek) AiMesh seems great for a single router environment ... like Seth's. Yes I have done all the resets and tweaks and things but AiMesh leaves a lot to be desired. It is simply not robust enough such that when it is restarted, it resets properly i.e. such thatall the devices come back, with this success being able to be repeated. My devices join the network (layer 2 apparently), but are not accessible via the WebGUI nor visible in the Shelly App.

But to the OP, if you do not need Wifi7, go for Wifi6; the current round of Wifi7 seems to be less about future proofing and more of a massive headache.
Turning stuff off (MLO) to make stuff work seems kind of ... lame.