Mercusys MR50G AC1900 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router

Basic AC1900 wireless router. Does what it says on the box – I bought this because I needed a router quickly to test out another ISP on a spare port on my NBN FTTP NTD. I needed at least gigabit ports because I was trialing a 100/40 service and expect to occasionally use 250/25, and this was the cheapest AC1900 device I could find on Amazon ($55 at the time, now typically with about $100 list but many… Read more

sellers offering about a 30% discount). I figured that even if I don't continue using it as a router, I could put it in AP mode for improved wifi instead of using the wireless features of my existing gear.

It. Just. Worked. No mess, no fuss.

I configured it according to the new ISP's requirements (not much, really, as they don't use PPPoE and this device defaults to their required settings), and I was online. The ISP is dual-stack IPv4/IPv6, so enabling that was simply a matter of changing a setting and rebooting the router too.

For the last five years I've been using a Gargoyle-modded router, so I've come to expect being able to instantaneously drill down to figure out which device is hogging my bandwidth. You don't get ANY of that fancy stuff with this device. Hardware limitations, due to building the device to a purpose and a price, mean that there won't be OpenWRT or Gargoyle support for it either. What you do get is a basic AC1900 router, with some rudimentary parental controls and some of the expected features like being able to define some static routes and block egress for specific devices (like my abandonware IP cameras, which are unpatchable and I'm still too lazy to put on their own separate network). Plus probably a few other features I haven't needed to investigate so far.

The parental controls allow time restrictions, both daily usage total limits and bedtimes, but the web filtering is limited to specific words in the domain name - so, unless you want the occasional unexpected detour via Scunthorpe(1) I'd recommend better obscenity filtering solutions like the free tier on the family filter at OpenDNS.

There's a management app for Android and iOS which requires registration with the vendor, and is likely to require a firmware update on many currently-shipping devices as the one that was on my router was too old to support it. The firmware update process was quick and straightforward. The app also appears to support configuration of Mercusys wifi extenders and mesh wifi devices, although I don't have any of that gear so I can't say how good it is for managing such things and their interactions with the router. On iOS, the link in the app for compatible products is currently invalid - resulting in a 404 error.

Wifi performance has been hard to quantify, but has been - as expected - better than the 2.4GHz devices I've had previously.

Mercusys has committed to providing security updates for this device until at least 31 August 2025 (https://www.mercusys.com/sg/faq-659), so it's not likely to be orphaned any time soon.

Consider your needs, consider the price you can get it for, consider your alternatives. If you need a third-party firmware, this is NOT the router you're looking for. Especially if you can't get much of a discount. In that case, if you can live with 1200 wireless, something like an Archer C6 might be a better option. If you're just after a basic device that does what's written on the box, with gigabit ports and AC1900 wireless and IPv6 support, my experiences so far suggest the Mercusys MR50G is a solid option.

(1) Wikipedia has a very good article on the "Scunthorpe Problem", why pure keyword-based filtering options have issues. I won't link to it here because it necessarily uses some Bad Words while describing the issue.