Synology Teases RT6600ax Router With 5.9 GHz UNII-4 Support

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When it comes to routers, Synology might not be the first brand that springs to mind, but the company has produced some interesting routers, especially when you take into account its custom OS, the Synology Router Manager, or SRM for short. The company has teased a new addition to its small family of routers, which should launch at some point in the first quarter of next year, that brings with it a few interesting features.

The RT6600ax as it’s called, will be one of the first routers to support the UNII-4 WiFi band, also known as the 5.9 GHz band. This is an extension of the 802.11ax/WiFi 6 band and it’s not related to WiFi 6E which uses the 6 GHz band. UNII-4 only adds a total of four 20 MHz WiFi channels, but the key here is that it allows for a third 160 MHz wide channel, something that could be handy in congested locations. For now, UNII-4 is only going to be usable in the US, although more countries are likely to be considering opening up the extra frequencies for WiFi usage. That said, it’s unlikely that Europe and Japan will allow it, since neither region supports the UNII-3 frequency band.

Synology didn’t provide any details on who the hardware partner is, but considering its past WiFi products have all been based on Qualcomm hardware, we’re likely to see a continuation of that partnership with the RT6600ax. What we do know is that there will be 4×4:4 support on the 5 GHz band, but considering the six antennas, the 2.4 GHz band might only be 2×2:2, unless some of the antennas are of the dual-band type. Sadly it looks like Synology cheaped out a little bit and only added a single 2.5 Gbps port, although it can at least be used as either a LAN or a WAN port. The RT6600ax also has three Gigabit LAN ports, a Gigabit WAN port and what appears to be a USB 3.0 port.

To go with the RT6600ax, Synology will also launch version 1.3 of SRM in 2022, which is said to add a host of new features such as VPN Plus, which allows for blocking access to certain devices on the network from users connected over VPN. Synology will finally also add VLAN support to SRM and more advanced SSID support, improved network analytics and a new mobile app. Synology should also be releasing SRM 1.3 for its current models, although no timeline for this was provided.