In reviewing ZyXEL products over the years, we consistently come away with the impression that the company should be more popular than it is. This is another one of those D-Link-ish “we do some of everything” vendors—soup to nuts, print servers to powerline adapters. The margins must be so slim in networking gear that the industry’s players have to span the entire product range just to make a buck. When you try to do everything at once, the tendency is to do nothing particularly well unless you have fairly deep pockets.
ZyXEL, while never dazzling us with unique innovation, has never disappointed us, either. The X550N ($99.93) fits the pattern: boring on the outside, interesting on the inside, with high enough performance and build quality at a low enough price to make the whole package attractive.
As an indication of how serious ZyXEL is about its gear, this router’s manual is over 300 pages and features over 300 tables and illustrations. Having QoS is now ordinary, and a bandwidth monitor is almost expected now, but how about a bandwidth monitor for different traffic types? Interesting, right? The setup wizard comes in six languages. There’s a router/AP mode selector in the maintenance menus (although we still prefer a physical exterior switch). ZyXEL goes beyond the usual basic QoS functionality by not only providing general Wi-Fi Multimedia (WMM) QoS—prioritizing by voice, video, “best effort,” and background—but several common application profiles and a custom configuration area where you can create user-defined QoS profiles. This sort of management depth reflects ZyXEL’s larger presence in the business products world. If you dislike 24x7 wireless broadcasting, use the integrated scheduling matrix to disable it during off hours. All told, there’s just so much great functionality buried in this router that it’s easy just to geek out and get lost in it, forgetting along the way that ZyXEL omits a USB port for NAS and FTP functionality, has no media serving capabilities, or any of the other modern consumer amenities. The overall impression is that this is a router for business and productivity, not entertainment.
From the outside, the X500N is totally ordinary: bland white non-styling, three detachable 2 dBi antennas, a WPS button, and five total gigabit Ethernet LAN and WAN ports. It would have been really interesting to try out the X550NH, which replaces the X550N’s 2 dBi antennas with 6 dBi high-gain alternatives, but we weren’t able to land this variant for our review. You can buy the ANT1106 antenna upgrade for $45.10, which is odd when the entire X550NH package runs only $117.27.
- Router Reignition
- Asus RT-N13U And RT-N16
- Belkin N150 And N1 Vision
- D-Link DIR-685
- Linksys WRT610N
- Netgear WRN2000v2 And WNDR3700
- Ruckus Wireless 7811
- TP-Link WR741ND
- TRENDnet TEW-654TR And TEW-671BR
- ZyXEL X550N
- How We Tested
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Many Files
- Benchmark Results: 1GB Transfer, Single File
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Throughput
- Benchmark Results: IxChariot Response Time
- Benchmark Results: Zap TCP
- Benchmark Results: Zap UDP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest TCP
- Benchmark Results: PerformanceTest UDP
- Conclusion


Good point.
Which firmware was installed on it?
I have one (V1), but am very unhappy about the signal range! I have it replaced with a WNDR3700 and have now a twice as strong signal as before!
Bit the bullet with the $$ and opted for the Linksys and am very pleased.
pato, my WRT600N was the v1 variant. I forget the release version of the firmware, but it was the latest version, as Linksys has not released any updates for it in roughly a year (I've had the router since a few months after it was first released). I liked it due to the dual radios, however, but it would drop wireless clients randomly (which was aggravating and required me to reset the router about once every other month) and it would not retain my port forwarding settings for my home server. And I agree with you, signal range was marginal with that router.
2) Should have tested N + G concurrency on 2.4GHz as well as N only on 2.4 + 5GHz concurrency (for devices that had dual radio). This data is important for most people who will run a Wireless N device or two, but likely also have a few smart phones or a game console that only supports 2.4GHz... I know the Airport Extreme currently has a bug making this dog slow, do some of the others?
3) onyl 2 concurrent devices? how about 5 or 6? I regularly have 7 or 8. I notice performance drops off consistently just based on the number of connected devices, even if only one is "in use" actively downloading, and want to know if some routers hold out better with that.
4) no feature comparison chart?
How much did you guys test the shareport function? (Not much from what it looks like). The shareport function hooked up to an external hard drive only works if you are transferring a file or two using windows. It totally fails when you try to us it with a 3rd party backup program (such as acrea). I personally haven't tried connecting a printer to shareport. I also couldn't get it to work using eraser (a disk erasing utility. I concluded that it just doesn't work with third party apps. So far, none of the driver, firmware or shareport software updates have fixed this problem.
D-link does have a nice forum on their site where people can post their problems. For fixable problems, other users will helpfully solve your problems. For unsolvable problems (shareport being one of them) the user complaints just keep piling up. Rarely do d-link's own tech support grace the forums. Apparently, D-link is currently collecting all of the shareport grips and cataloging them. Ostensibly, this will result in a fix at some point in the future. Still waiting.