Hands on: Zyxel USG Lite 60AX review
This review first appeared in issue 360 PC Professional Edition.
SMBs and home offices looking for affordable, all-in-one security solutions router You’ll find Zyxel’s USG Lite 60AX to be a worthy contender. This small desktop device combines a Wi-Fi 6 access point (AP) with an integrated multi-gigabit switch, and the price includes a lifetime subscription to the Zyxel Secure Cloud.
The service includes firewall, ransomware and malware Prevention, VPN proxy, intrusion, dark web and ad blocker, application identification, GeoIP country restrictions, and email fraud and phishing protection. An optional Elite Pack license supports Trellix-powered real-time threat intelligence and web category filtering services and Nebula Pro Pack for £33 per year.
The router is designed to be table-mounted, and its small, flimsy base bracket swivels to keep it upright. The switch has two 2.5GbE multi-gigabit ports for WAN and LAN connectivity, paired with four additional gigabit LAN ports, while the AX6000-class AP claims speeds of 1,148Mbits/sec for the 2.4GHz radio, wireless The speed of the network is 4,804Mbits/sec. 5GHz a.
The router’s local web interface only provides a basic status view, to manage it you assign it to your Nebula cloud account. It’s easy to do: we use Nebula iOS App Scan the QR code on your iPad’s base to add it to our website.
The device appears in the Nebula dashboard as a new secure router, and the main view can be easily customized. Dedicated widgets are provided that display the router’s uptime and firmware status, threat detections by category and client, the top ten applications discovered by the Application Identification Service, and an operating system graph of connected clients.
For wireless services, you can create up to eight site SSIDs, each with its own WPA2 or WPA3 authentication scheme and decide which radios are active on each site. Setting the guest option on the SSID enables L2 isolation so that wireless clients cannot see each other. You can assign a custom Captive Portal, Walled Garden and Click, Coupon, Facebook or Nebula with your own logo and greeting verify.
Wireless performance will depend on whether the application awareness service is enabled – when testing Zyxel’s SCR 50AXE desktop router, we found that its wireless speeds were up to 50% faster. Fortunately, the USG Lite 60AX has a more powerful quad-core 2GHz CPU So its impact is far less worrisome.
We tested a Lenovo Windows 11 The Pro 24H2 client comes with a TP-Link Archer TBE550E Wi-Fi 7 PCI-E adapter. We recorded close-range file copy speeds between client and server on a 2.5GbE LAN at 164MB/sec with application awareness disabled, which dropped 16.5% to 137MB/sec with it turned on.
The six threat management components are accessible from the Nebula Secure Router settings page and can be enabled or disabled using sliders. Nebula’s Threat Report provides an activity graph, a map showing countries where threats originate, and threat tables by category and customer, the latter of which allows you to immediately block systems if they get too high a hit rate.
Application Awareness provides the option to apply custom application block lists and traffic shaping rules for selected clients. The Elite Pack license is well worth considering because it Web content filtering 103 URL categories are provided, and access can also be fine-tuned for clients or IP addresses.
The USG Lite 60AX is an excellent entry-level security router with lifetime support for Zyxel security cloud services Meaning no ongoing costs to worry about. Application identification does have little impact on performance, but it provides a good set of security features, and businesses with remote workers will appreciate Zyxel’s Nebula cloud management.
