Wired, USB and Efficiency
Still wondering if you should run cables throughout the home? It's a no-brainer if speed and reliability is of the utmost importance. Connecting the RT1900ac to our test laptop via cable delivered download speeds of 858Mbit/s when transferring a 2GB file to a NAS on the same network. That's far quicker than anything we managed on the wireless bands.
We see many routers' USB ports optimised for read performance. Synology takes a more balanced approach, with our USB-attached SSD recording read and write speeds of 379MB/s and 297MB/s, respectively. Decent results, though we had hoped the RT1900ac would be able to make full use of the bandwidth available to the SSD.
Power consumption is inevitably higher than a bog-standard BT Home Hub 5, yet that's a small price to pay for the improved performance and considerably more flexible software.