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This review first appeared in issue 350 of PC Pro.
Zyxel’s SCR 50AXE will appeal to small businesses and home offices that want secure wireless networks without the added expense of separate devices. This desktop router delivers tri-band Wi-Fi 6/6E services, combines these with an integral firewall and Zyxel’s threat management services, and delivers them all at a tempting price.
It looks particularly good value as the price includes a lifetime subscription to Zyxel’s Security Cloud, which enables (deep breath) a firewall, ransomware and malware prevention, VPN proxy, intrusion, dark web and ad blockers, application monitoring, GeoIP country restrictions and protection against mail fraud and phishing. An SCR Pro Pack license adds the Trellix-powered real-time threat intelligence and web filtering services, with a one-year subscription costing around £40.
The router comes with a magnetic desktop base or it can be wall-mounted with the supplied bracket. It sports a WAN and four LAN ports – all of the gigabit variety – while on the wireless side its AX5400-rated access point (AP) claims speeds of 575Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz radio and 2,400Mbits/sec each for the 5GHz and 6GHz radios. The latter two both support the high-speed 160MHz channels, but with gigabit ports all round you won’t see their full performance potential.
The SCR 50AXE is designed to be managed from Zyxel’s Nebula cloud portal. We found it simple to add it to our account. After logging into the Nebula app on an iPad, we selected our predefined site, scanned in the QR code on the label on the device’s side and added it to our site with one tap.
The portal presents a customizable site dashboard with extra sections for the SCR 50AXE. You can check its uptime and firmware status, see the top ten apps identified by the application identification service and view threat management activity. A second table shows total detections for each category.
Up to four cloud-managed SSIDs are supported, each with their own authentication scheme, including the mandatory WPA3 for Wi-Fi 6E. You can decide which of the three radios are to be active, create custom captive portals for guest networks with click-through, voucher, Facebook or Nebula authentication, enable L2 isolation to stop guest users seeing other devices and apply upload and download rate limits.
You should use Zyxel’s application identification service with extreme caution, as its overheads will reduce wireless performance by up to 50%. We tested this using a Dell Windows 11 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TXE75E Wi-Fi 6E PCI-E adapter and saw close-range file-copying speeds between the client and a server on the gigabit LAN of 112MB/sec, dropping to a respectable 87MB/sec at a distance of ten meters.
Running the test again with application identification enabled saw close range and distance speeds tumble to 48MB/sec and 32MB/sec. While the copy test was running we enabled and disabled the service from the Nebula portal and could see its impact almost instantly.
Threat management is simple to apply, with six slider bars for enabling or disabling each individual component, and you can add exception lists for specific clients and IP addresses plus blocked or allowed web domains. Clicking on the main chart takes you to a monitor page with a map showing where threats are emanating from, and the affected clients with the SCR Pro Pack license extending its reporting period from 24 hours to 30 days.
This license enables content filtering, which offers 103 URL categories to block or allow, and you can fine-tune access by applying custom policies to all or selected clients. We also ran our copy tests with each threat management component progressively enabled and can confirm they have no adverse impact on performance.
The SCR 50AXE is an affordable all-in-one wireless security router for small offices. The fly in the ointment is the application detection service, which hits wireless performance hard, but otherwise the router is easy to manage from the Nebula cloud portal and offers strong threat protection measures for the price.
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