Who Won Our Synology RT1900AC Wi-Fi Router Competition?

Christmas is coming early for three lucky Gizmodo readers. Here’s who scored in our competition to win (and review) a Synology RT1900AC Wi-Fi router.

Thanks for entering, everyone! Winners — we’ll contact you via email to arrange delivery of your prizes, and to send across a reviewer’s guide.

Winner 1: duanne: “this would be a godsend”

Good Lord this would be a godsend!

I’d finally ditch my Bob2, which has provided adequate but uninspiring service for many years now.

How would I use it? Well, I dream of doing this:
1. Prioritise MY devices over the kid’s iPads, iPods, etc. I mean, really, if I need to do work (or even browse Gizmodo) that should take precedence over more Youtube Minecraft or ‘how to style your hair’ videos!
2. Set up some night time restrictions for the kid’s devices. Nothing too onerous, but I cant see why my 10yr old should even be awake past 10pm, let alone be up on Youtube.
3. Parental filters. I cant protect the little ones from the world forever, but if I can keep the creeps away while they are kids, then I must try!
4. Upgrade my TV (or at least my DVD player). I have an old house with THICK walls, and the telly sits in a nice slow/dead spot. A little bit of iView or some TED Talks on the big screen when I feel like it would be great!
5. Tinker. I would tinker, break stuff, scour forums for patches and fixes. Obsess over minor settings and drive the missus crazy by staying up far too late on my Christmas holidays and playing with gadgets.

We wont be getting NBN in our area. We are not even on the list for future deployment, even though we are in a major suburban area in a capital city. Thank you to successive governments for overlooking my area; I’m really feeling the love. I need every little bit of technology help I can get to squeeze the most life (and speed) out of the connection I have. This device can only help.

Winner 2: kahooli: “it would be good to see how it copes”

I would love to review this item on my 100mpbs FTTP NBN, as I would especially utilise the parental controls for my kids, the built-in VPN feature as then I don’t need to open ports to the internet, as well as the storage and other features.

I’m also keen to try the RADIUS server, and see if I can setup WPA2-Enterprise, as that could be a good way to disable one kids access when needed (or setup guest access) without having to change the wireless password for everyone.

In my environment we have several tablets & smartphones, as well as IPTV (FetchTV), a home server, my home office as I work from home by VPN access to the office Intranet, so it would be good to see how it copes with all the different types of traffic.

Winner 3: Chris Ford: “there are a few things I’d do with it”

There are a few immediate things I would do with the Synology router at home:

1. Move my DHCP server from my Synology NAS (DS412+) across to the router. I use 3rd party non-ISP DNS servers and my existing router (Telstra Gateway Max / Netgear C6300) doesn’t let me override the DNS settings in the DHCP config.

2. Configure the router as a VPN client to provide VPN access for all devices in the home using OpenVPN, rather than having only L2TP from my iOS devices as it stands today.

3. Configure the router as a VPN server, in particular allowing access to my NAS (I don’t entirely trust the Netgear and DMZ or port forwarding).

4. Be ecstatically happy that I no longer need to reboot my router everyday (resorted to a timeclock that reboots it at 3am) – my Synology NAS runs perfectly with curently 43 days uptime (I moved it). My Netgear router regularly hangs up, which it hopefully won’t do in bridge mode.

The $229 Synology RT1900ac is a high-speed AC1900 router — it’s capable of a combined 1900Mbps transfer rate, across the 1300Mbps-capable 802.11ac 5GHz band and 600Mbps-capable 802.11n 2.4GHz band.

Four Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports and one Gigabit WAN port will satisfy your connectivity needs. The File Station service lets users access files from any locally-attached storage drive connected to the RT1900ac — there’s a side-mounted USB 3.0 port and SD card reader.

Streaming is a breeze, and you can also play content from external storage, on a DLNA compatible TV or media player. It’s perfect for gaming, too, since you can prioritise bandwidth to the devices you need the most. So you won’t be able to blame it on the lag anymore.

Thanks again for entering, everyone!


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.