ASUS RT-AC86U Wi-Fi AC2900 Mesh Wifi system Router
ASUS RT-AC86U Wi-Fi AC2900 Mesh Wifi system Router AiProtection by Trend Micro, WTFast game accelerator free, Link aggregation, adaptive QoS, USB 3.0 ASUS router app support, Dual-WAN 3G/4G suppo
Unbeatable Coverage
With ASUS innovative antenna design and the new Range Boost technology, both Wi-Fi range and signal stability improve dramatically. AiRadar further focuses Wi-Fi signal on your devices, making your Wi-Fi faster, clearer and stronger.
| Weight: | 862 g |
| Dimensions: | 20 x 10 x 15 cm; 861.83 Grams |
| Brand: | ASUS |
| Model: | RT-AC86U |
| Colour: | Black |
| Batteries Included: | No |
| Manufacture: | ASUS |
| Dimensions: | 20 x 10 x 15 cm; 861.83 Grams |
been using for about a year had to reset everynow and again but over all running 40 pc’s and other devices and working really well and no slow down on our lease line.
Can’t fault this router at all. Fast speeds through LAN and the Wi-Fi signal is exceptionally good.
Looks smart and it’s compact.
No hesitation in recommending this.
AC86U provides a big increase in Open VPN speeds, the reason for upgrading from the AC68U. With a faster processor, I now get up to 150mbps download speeds using Open VPN whereas on the AC68 I only got up to 20mbps.
The downside is that with the current firmware for the AC86U there are problems adding AiMesh nodes to the router, with 100% failure to add either an Asus Lyra Aimesh node or add the AC 68U as a mesh node. There were no such problems with the AC68U in AiMesh mode in over 5 years of use.
It seems that Asus needs to update the firmware for the AC86U specifically to improve AiMesh compatibility as there are other reports online about this problem. I am waiting for Asus support to do this.
Otherwise the AC86U is an excellent router with very fast wifi speeds, as fast as my broadband provider allows, up to 200mbps in my case.
Bought to replace an AC-68U, which had a hardware fault on the ethernet, limiting it to 100Mbps. Initially went for a direct replacement, but that demonstrated the same problem!
I am not a gamer, but this router has too many other advantages to ignore. I wanted ASUS since I use AiMesh and needed the compatibility, so am using stock firmware. Some people have problems with the 2.4 GHz band, but my router is currently very strong there. I get good coverage on both bands, speed is excellent and I particularly appreciate the extra security features over the “68”. It plays nicely with my SmartHub 2 (needed for Digital Voice) when suitably configured. One odd glitch – I could not set the time, via a time server, when in Access Point mode.
Very pleased, currently a good price for what is offered – I just hope it does not fail prematurely. If so, I will revisit this review.
While there may be better bang for buck options out there I opted for this model as it was heavily discounted but was still rather expensive.
In my father’s house, we had tried power line adapters, mesh networks and multiple routers to try to cover the house. Each solution came with its own issues and we’d accepted some inconvenience. This router unexpectedly solved the whole problem out of the box! The range is excellent and drop off in strength is far lower than what we would have normally expected.
To top it off I can’t remember the last time we had to switch the router off and on again, which was a very very regular occurrence before.
It may be that a number of these routers do not like BT Fibre Networks, because this ASUS RT-AC88U too like the Netgear R7000 before it seemed to have a fault and kept dropping both the Wi-Fi and wired internet connections and needed constant rebooting, nothing I did would overcome this issue, full factory resets x 5, all failed to address the issue. I know it is the router problem as the TP-Link Archer and its older brother work fine all the time with no glitches, I just wanted a router that I could install a VPN directly on to. That is not possible with my current machines. That said, before you waste your money consider this !!!
The latest Wi-Fi 6 routers are obviously the way to go but I see that they are not supported by the VPN providers if you wanted to install a VPN directly on to the router itself, which is the ideal solution for someone like me. Nor as far as I can see does DD-WRT software yet support any of the new Wi-Fi 6 routers, so for me I seem to have no where to turn. Why would I spend a fortune on an old technology router of which most of them still are and yet if I buy a new technology router it does not support any of the VPNs or other firmware options such as DD-WRT. Now on to this particular ASUS AC-88U routers performance,
The setup is easy once you work it out, NO thanks To ASUS!!! ( I have to say their so called technical support is a joke), Firstly the router takes simply ages to reboot and will not connect to BT FIBRE without some hassle and knowledge of your account details. In my case I also ended up having to pull the power on my BT modem as this was also needed to get the thing to connect once I had entered the BT Router info in the opening setup page which is: ([email protected] password:. bt) In my case I wanted to install NordVPN directly on to the router that should have been easy but thanks to the useless customer service from them combined with fact the router came with outdated firmware caused hours of frustration. Make a NOTE! this thing did not in my case, auto update its firmware you must do it manually if you want to install a VPN which in my case slashed the download speed from 150mbps to 49mbps so that sadly turned out not to be an option, and when asked NordVPN just shrugged, they did not like such questions!!! You can obviously opt for DD-WRT firmware to install a VPN but check your warranty conditions and that software also has its downside. I was delighted with the price I got my router from Amazon but sadly it seems to have an inbuilt fault when it comes to BT Fibre It is not cheap and should be more user friendly and up-to-date. Its performance was nothing to write home about as these old generation routers apparently cannot compare with the new Wi-Fi 6 routers. So my advice if you are not a “NERD” like me is opt for a Wi-Fi 6 router that will out perform any of these older generation routers. Amazon of course list them clearly and you can read as to why they are the way to go.
With the help of the Vodafone forum, I swapped our Vodafone router (we have Gigafast, home to exchange, fibre). Easy to set up with the help of the forum and we now have much better wifi range covering our whole home. We’ve not had any trouble with it and it was set up within minutes.
The downside is that the web interface is quite scary looking for the novice and I was hoping to set up QoS to prioritise my husband’s laptop. Unfortunately you do need some technical knowhow (which I do not possess) so I just turned on the basic settings which prioritise traffic more generally. To be fair, my husband hasn’t had any issues with poor connection rates since moving to this router so maybe we don’t need more QoS setup than the basic settings.
More recently, we have bought another Asus router (AX-56U) to create an aiMesh to extend our wifi into the garden office and it was set up in 5mins. Very easy. Honestly we’re really pleased with this router.
I’m a big fan of Asus – easy to set up, reliable, lots of features to play with – and I wanted to achieve more range than my 7 year old RT-AC66U could offer. I tried a couple of Asus’ Wifi 6 routers (the AX68u and the AX82u) and while these increased the overall speed throughout the house above the AC66U, I wasn’t achieving the extended range I was looking for.
Step up the AC86U. It’s a beast. Now, I don’t have any wifi 6 devices, so if this is what you’re after then it might not be the router for you, but it out-performs the Ax68u and AX82 in range, and is getting the same full speed as the AX routers throughout the house. The router is at the front of the house, and I also get 5G halfway up the garden, and 2.4G at the full-length of the garden, so no need for expensive or messy mesh systems either.
Easy to set up. tons of features including for gaming if needed. It’s early days and I am very impressed with this router so fa
My issues were: 1) slow response time from a number of externally accessible services on my NAS (for some reason, the Vodafone router needed to “think” long and hard before allowing traffic and implementing inbound firewall rules); and 2) inability to play hi-res audio files from my NAS without issues. For 2, I have an audio streamer (Node 2i) and so the audio files need to go from the NAS to the router, and then from the router to the Node 2i. The Vodafone router proved completely unable to send and receive heavy files at the same time and when playing hi-res files I ended up with huge lags, constant stops to buffer etc.
I decided to take a leap of faith and purchased the Asus AC86U router as a replacement. I have it hooked to a cheap BT Huawei HG612 modem, since the Vodafone router can’t be used as modem only and I did not want double NAT. I am now fully satisfied with the router and have it using the Merlin firmware.
It is packed with more cool features than you can imagine. For instance you can hook to it an Android phone, which you can use as backup connection if your main ISP goes down. It also supports Asus Aimesh, though if you’re going to do that with this router, you best do it via a wired connection as it is not tri-band (though you’re always better off doing things wired, your house does not always allow it). There are also a lot of custom scripts you can setup to do all sort of interesting things. I haven’t tested that though and will just list + and – below based on what I am using.
(+) Performance is fast with the router able to sustain continuous concurrent upoad & download (heavy torrenting not an issue).
(+) The router is really stable (on Merlin 386_2_4). While I have it on a schedule to restart on a weekly basis, I tried before that to leave it run for weeks on end and it never had any issue. Only thing is that RAM usage slowly & gradually crept up (as you’d expect from normal usage over time) but that never led to issues or instability.
(+) The VPN features are great. You can setup on it a VPN Server (allowing you to log into your local connection and access your home network while on the move) and multiple VPN Clients. For VPN Clients, you can then route the traffic of different devices via different VPN connections. In my case, I plan to use it when friends and family from my home country visits (as soon as COVID allows), connecting them to a VPN in the motherland so they can stream local content and bypass geofencing.
(+) Allows you to easily setup guest network(s), for when you want to share your connection without exposing your internal devices. You can setup many, on 2.4Ghz and/or 5Ghz, decide how long the guest network will be up, limit the bandwidth used by it etc.
(+) The mobile app to manage the router (iOS) is pretty good.
(+) Some of the built-in reporting like traffic analyzer is interesting, allowing you to see which device is using most of the bandwidth.
(+) Adaptive QoS is also a nice feature, allowing to prioritize traffic and preventing one member of the family from sucking away all bandwidth (e.g. if some of your users are streaming 4k videos on Youtube).
(neutral) I don’t find WIFI performance particularly impressive. It’s not bad but no better than what I had before either.
(-) The UI of the router is a little dated and applying some of the settings result in some wait time (0 to 100% progress bar).
(-) A lot of the advanced features require you to agree to share your data with MicroTrends which will be a red flag for anyone concerned about data privacy.
(-) Still around privacy, there is a Web History feature that I find questionable, as it lists all sites visited. It’s easy enough to leave it deactivated but It means the administrator of the router can invade everyone’s privacy. There are some pretty bad people out there, and not everyone would know how to protect themselves from prying eyes. I wish a feature like that was just not there in the first place.
(-) It is a downright ugly beast. Tuck it away in a place where you don’t see it, if your space allows it.
Overall it’s my first Asus router having had some Netgear, Linksys or ISP provided routers (which are notoriously bad), and it’s easily the best one I’ve had. It’s incredibly versatile and packed full of features. It will be overkill many. My biggest issue with it is probably around some of the privacy concerns, which you can mitigate (don’t accept to share your data with MicroTrends, but you’ll lose some features), but other than this, it is excellent.
I bought this while trying to find a way to fix my very poor WiFi. Our supplier is Virgin Media and we had 6 months of torment while on their 632mbps package. Some of the issues we were facing were connections timing out, some devices not being able to connect at all, extremely slow speeds on both wired and wireless connection, WiFi strength being poor when in the same room as the hub. After 32 different phone calls to Virgin for assistance. Eventually, one of their staff told me that their hub is useless and to get a third partner router.
The staff member actually suggested this router if I was willing to spend a bit more money for the extra features.
I have to say I’m extremely satisfied with the result! Setting up was incredibly easy, set the Virgin hub into modem mode, attach the antenna and plug it in. Connect to it using the default SSID and password and log into it to start customising settings. If you aren,t sure what you are doing then start off with the simple settings and you can always look into theore advanced settings after (it does give information on pretty much everything to help).
Running it for the first time I saw a big increase in WiFi performance. All of my devices were getting amazing speeds with minimal ping. The range of the WiFi is also much further.
I’ve owned this for just over two months and in that time I haven’t had to reset it once (I have it reset at 3am on Wednesdays and Sundays in the settings) and we have had far better speeds and connections with no dropping out or issues. It covers almost all of our property (the garden is very long so we will likely look at a powering booster for summer).
We have had it in our bedroom for the two months since purchase and only last week did I notice there is an LED on/off light on the back. I remember seeing this in the advert and just forgot about it but now I’ve used it, the lights don’t cause an issue anymore.
I would highly recommend buying this router if you are in the market for something that has a tonne of features (seriously there is to many to get into in this review). It is a bargain for the price if you want better connections for gaming/downloading/streaming or if, like me you are having issues with your current Internet.
Like many others I’ve got the ill fated Virgin Media Hub 3. I had the previous model and that was sporadic at best; so I thought the Hub 3 would be an improvement over the Hub 2. At first the Hub 3 was actually pretty good until around early 2020. Noticed the WiFi on the 2G and 5G would drop for no reason, at first I thought it was an update on the Hub side of things, separated the signals through the in hub options and that helped a little, but not by much. Few months went by and the problem persisted to the point I was on the phone doing an online order and… the WiFi dropped again. So I read up online about a new router and came across a Reddit post about the Hub 3 and various models to upgrade to and ASUS popped up.
So I was lucky to find one on the Amazon sale for 130 as now they have jumped back up in price to 160 or a tad, so I’m lucky I guess. Ordered the AC2900 as I didn’t want to break the piggy bank and end up getting the hammer to the Godzilla coin box. Came next day and my only gripe was it didn’t come in an Amazon box, now it came to my door so I’m not all too bothered, but if my neighbour took the box I’d doubt I’d ever see it again and have to get a replacement.
I think it is rather simple and great with little to no headache issues for me. You do get an Ethernet cable with it so don’t worry about buying one to connect it to the old router. Logged into my Hub 3 through the IP login portal. Clicked on Modem mode, doing so makes the light go red and it reboots to enable modem mode. Plugged in the new router and connected it up through to the Hub 3 Ethernet 1 to the internet port on the back of the ASUS router and presto away it went.
Popped on the laptop and searched for the ASUS WiFi signal and hopped onto the 2G, I’d say for a smooth experience pop an Ethernet in and it will be better, if not the WiFi will do. I was using chrome and the login portal didn’t pop up, read the manual and typed in the ASUS link and that will take you to a set up page.
Now I just copied my old router information over so I don’t have to make a big song and dance at the moment in changing all the passwords again. After that you have a to make a login for the router itself which I made a unique one and then you can access your router at ease.
Is this for everyone no… and yes, stays with me, most hubs you get with ISP’s are total doo doo. I’d say invest in a decent router so you can get the best signal and speeds from your internet package. This connects fast and now my wifi cameras pop on and stream in a lot better.
Lockdown. Stuck at home. The 3 ‘children’ have returned home. So there’s now 5 of us again, just like the old days. Just when we thought we’d got rid of them! Although it’s nice to have us all together it created a bit of a problem – the internet could not cope!
We have Virgin cable 350mb internet with the Superhub 3 router. Things started to randomly disconnect or become unreliable. My main PC connected directly to the router via ethernet cable and didn’t flicker – it was fine – constant connection at full speed. So I knew that as long as I used a wired connection everything was ok. The problem was anything connected via wifi.
I shan’t dwell on the time spent talking (or waiting) to unhelpful Virgin employees who tried unsuccessfully to fix the problem. I’ll move straight on to my next move which was to look for help on the internet. Bingo!
Quite simply buy this router, change the Superhub 3 to ‘modem mode’, connect the 2 together and problem sorted. I make it sound a tad easier than it is – there are a few set up procedures to go through but look at more of these reviews or google it and you’ll get all the info you need.
I buy loads from Amazon and I think this is the first review I have ever left because it really does work! I have such a quiet life now – no more ‘Dad, the internet’s gone off’ and a grumpy wife who can’t shop online. (Actually that could be a possible downside!)
Fantastic router.
I ordered the RT-AC86U to replace my VM hub 3.0.
My router is badly positioned behind a TV in the downstairs corner of my house and i have a 200mbs connection. With the Hub 3. 0, in the same room as the router i was getting max 90mbs but average about 60mbs. In the upstairs room in the far corner of the house (furthest i could possibly be from the router) id get around 20mbs max but aveerage not even 5mbs.
The 86U increasedy speeds dramatically. In every room in the house i am now getting 218mbs average, in the corner room the firthest away from the router i have seen the speeds as high as 140mbs but average around 12-20mbs ish at 5ghz. Line of sight it is about 10m distance through the floor and a brick wall. I was hoping the router would have enough range however it is right at limit of the 5ghz range. It keeps switching between 5ghs and 2.4ghz. When in 2.4ghz i get an average speed of around 60mbs.
Overall a fantastic buy and so much better than the router provided by virgin.
I was looking for a device to replace the setup I have with the BT Smart Hub 2 and an old (ish) netgear router. I alway had trouble connecting IoT devices to the BT smart hub and had to use the Netgear router as an access point to have extra WiFi capability to support those devices. Defeating the object of having the BT smart hub 2. The Netgear would occasionally lose it 2.4Ghz devices and I had to reboot often, so I opted to upgrade the lot. And I wasn’t disappointed that I did.
Lets start with the basics I now have the one device to do the lot. For WiFi strength I’d say it is about the same if not marginally better getting around the house. Whilst most things did connect to the 5 &2.4 GHz combined signal, I had a couple of devices that didn’t, but that was resolved by creating out of one of the 3 available guest networks an IoT Network.
For features its packed with goodies, and I’ve been playing a lot. There’s plenty to fiddle with to get what you want out of it.
The one snag I have is although IPv6 is turned off, my devices are still getting IPv6 addresses. This was something I have turned off on the router from BT, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference off on this router. I still get IPv6 addresses, and I had to disable that on my printer to get it to communicate with my laptop.
Also would say although there is plenty in the web front end, could it be slicker and prettier – Yes. Does it function though – Yes, except when I look at my devices I see whole bunch of things disappearing and re-appearing. I have no reason to believe that’s actually happening, as devices are never complaining of drops but it’s worth noting.
I’ve been running it properly for a full week and all appears good so far, still need to put some of it through its paces, but so far so good.
This is the following scenario I have in my case.
I recently moved to a 3 bedroom terraced house and today I installed virgin Media broadband on 500mbps contract.
As you probably are aware, virgin media’s super hub is limited in its wifi capabilities so I bought this wifi router as I wanted to keep my pc upstairs but not run an ethernet cable to the modem downstairs but run it on wifi.
Installation
For users that will run into the following issue”your ISP DHCP DOES NOT FUNCTION PROPERLY” do the following steps:
1. Connect to your superhub on 192.168.0.1(open web browser and just type in this numbers)
You will get to the login page of your superhub password is at the bottom of the modem underneath it(settings password)
2.Go to modem mode> select run this in modem mode.
You will be told a restart is required let it do it’s thing( takes about 5 minutes)
3.( in the meantime keep the asus router shut)
4. Wait until virgin media superhub goes into modem mode(you will see the light being steady and purple not white)
As long as its purple and not blinking but steady, you are succesfully in modem mode.
5. Shut down super hub(I know it sounds weird just do it and keep it shut for 10 minutes)
6. In the meantime open your asus router and go to the link the manual tells you to go. Use a laptop for this with an ethernet connection to lan1 port or wifi( new asus connection should appear in your wifi networks, i did it via cable) .
7. Go through the setup process and the router will ask you to plug in an ethernet cable from asus router WAN interface(the separate one).
At this point if 10 minutes have passed simply turn superhub(virgin media modem back on and wait for another 5 minutes till it s connected)
8. At this point your connection should be fine and no more dhcp error messages will appear.
Make sure you follow the steps otherwise you will have delays after delays i was getting a bit fed up with this.
Now for the speed and coverage.
Speeds are monitored with speedtest ookla app on an iphone 8 and on pc that sits at first floor above modem.
Wifi speed when connected to virgin media router
Next to it 360mbps, 12 meters away in bathroom passing through the kitchen 90 mbps, outside after toilet maybe 14 m away from router 20 mbps but in a certain place otherwise falls to mobile internet.
Wifi speed when connected to asus wifi
Next to it 520 mbps, in bathroom 350+ mbps outside where virgins superhub was either dropping or getting 20mbps i was getting 100mbps the lowest with my back to the router.
I went at the end of the garden, another 7-8 meters away so about 20 m away from where router is sitting and while i am facing the house i got 200 mbps. I am impressed.
KEEP IN MIND that if you have some cheap wifi adaptor or wifi network interface card that can only get 300 mbps you will only get that.
By wire i get 520 constant.
For my pc upstairs i changed the wifi card which could only get 300 mbps and bought an asus one at around 50 mbps with 3 external antennas.
First floor with that card i am getting 480 and 490 mbps on my first two tests.
I am extremely happy with this product and will follow up after one week with another review to see if it is consistent.
Buy it, you won’t regret it.
Ps. You can do a lot of advanced stuff on it but I won’t get into those, please read specs for people who want to customize it.
Until I bought this router, I was using the ASUS RT-N66U router, a previous generation 802.11n router. It was a brilliant router which was used for around six-years, before developing a slight fault with its 2.4 GHz band.
I bought this with some trepidation. How much faster would the 802.11ac standard be, and would it be difficult to swap-out?
Thankfully, ASUS offer a brilliant utility via its web UI whereby I could save all of my previous settings from the N66U, and upload a settings file to the new AC86U on initial connection. With this brilliant utility, it took me literally ten-minutes to swap-out the old router, and not one of my many wireless devices had a problem connecting to the new router.
And WOW! The SPEED. WiFi 5/’ac’ is SO much faster than the old ‘n’ standard. I just can’t believe the wireless speeds I’m now getting from this router. It’s literally TWICE as fast as the old ‘n’ router on the 5 GHz band. And coverage is so much better too. Previously, I had to use a WiFi Extender/Repeater upstairs, as the signal was poor there. Not any longer. This router is just so much more powerful, with superb coverage throughout the house. The Extender is no longer required.
In summary, an absolutely BRILLIANT bit-of-kit. I’m couldn’t recommend it more highly.
Ok, so it wasn’t hard to get this working, to slip it into my network in place of the old Netgear R7000P and set it up with the same network, SSD and so on, and then forget about it. I was pleasantly surprised at how the looks of the unit (criticised by some as “extreme”) actually take up less room than the Netgear due to the vertical footprint and with less flashing LEDs on the front. I was absolutely delighted at the way the WiFi reaches all corners of the house with no dropouts and little fall-off in speed, where the Netgear struggled even with a range extender.
HOWEVER, if the simple setup script doesn’t get you what you want (and it might – I’m a bit fussy and many / most aren’t) then you won’t find the (extensive, powerful, feature-rich) user interface to be very friendly. I guess that’s the price of power but the pain is real. It’s not the most user-friendly thing.
Still, it works better than the old one by a country mile in every respect, and that’s what counts, right?
Due to reliability issues with my Virgin superhub, I decided to buy a nice beefy router and place the Virgin hub into modem only mode. The Intel puma chipset in the virgin hub is abysmal, and so I wanted to take as much load away from it as possible. In comes this Asus AC86U. First off, it has indeed improved the reliability of my broadband connection, I presume because the virgin hub has a lot less work to do now. Another benefit is that the WiFi signal is fantastic with this AC86U. I no longer need to use WiFi repeaters. Also, I no longer need to manually switch between 5Ghz/2.4Ghz networks depending on where I am in the house. The band steering on this router actually works consistently. In areas of the house where I’d maybe get 15 Mbps, I now get over 200 Mbps. The port forwarding interface is nice and simple, and there are some wonderful features such as a ddns updater and traffic analyser. I’m happy with this product and will be using it until another major WiFi standard eventually makes this obsolete in a decade or so.
SET UP:
Download the ASUS app on phone > install AC86U antennae + power on > put ISP Router into modem mode and connect it to the AC86U via ethernet cable (blue ethernet port)> connect to the AC86U network (which should be unsecured) and go through the set up via the app.
PS: Wait for a minute or so before attempting to connect to the network when you power up the router.
You can be up and running in as little as 5 minutes.
PERFORMANCE:
Our realised speeds have improved by as much as 1000%. That wasn’t a typo: our realised internet speed is over 10 times faster in some instances.
This router has totally transformed our internet experience. Virgin’s Hub 2 & 3 gave us many problems from limited range to poor stability. I even bought the Mercusys Mesh Wifi extenders but their performance was limited because of the frankly awful Virgin Hub 3.
Performance in a fairly small (~1100-1200sq ft) 4 bed house. Router is downstairs in the living room and services about 10 devices. ISP Package is Virgin M350 (~350mbps) and AC86U is in 5GHz mode.
3-6ft from the router i.e in the same room
Hub 3: 120-140mbps
AC86U: 375mbps
Upstairs bedrooms (10-15 feet from the router + doors and walls)
Hub 3: 25-40Mbps
AC86U: 290-320Mbps
Across the road (~40 feet)
Hub 3: lol
AC86U: 170-230Mbps
The range on this is excellent.
Please note that I didn’t bother to test the 2.4GHz mode – it’s supposed to have even better range and obstacle penetration which is nice to know but unlikely to be of use to us.
The 5GHz signal drops off at around 40 ft which is more than most people would ever need, but those lucky enough to live in large compounds which eclipse a 40+ ft radius may want to consider getting two or three of these to create a mesh network. You can also use lower end ASUS routers with AI Mesh technology for this purpose.
For those looking to replace the Hub 3:
This is what you’re after. The AC86U will likely end all your WiFi problems. Though it’s worth noting that almost any midrange to premium router will handily outperform the Hub 3 – it’s that bad.
While these speeds are welcome, they’re also unnecessary. My problem with the Hub 3 wasn’t so much the speed, but the reliability. It dropped connection a lot and I kept restarting it/disconnecting + reconnecting my WiFi, which gets quite annoying. When it worked, I got around 20-40Mbps, which was on average, 10% of my advertised speeds, but for normal internet use, it was more than adequate.
This is a long winded way of saying that whilst I wholeheartedly recommend the AC86U and find its range + speeds far beyond anything I could have imagined, I’m fairly confident that a sub 100 (RRP) router would have been just as effective, even if it couldn’t achieve those ridiculous speeds because range/signal stability and uptime are much more important than 100+mb download speeds.
So after the past few years dealing with virgin media’s hub 3 enough was enough! We’d even had the engineers around this year and given us a new one but alas a couple weeks in and the same problems carried on. Constant dropping out, trying to watch stuff on the iPad and we had the loading circle. I even used all my mobile data whilst being at home in lockdown as It was better than the high speed WiFi we were meant to get. We had to reboot almost daily. I did notice WiFi with VM was better if we used an Ethernet cable to things like Apple TV. Anyway, after lots of research and asking my tech head brothers advice (I am pretty clueless) we decided with this one! It’s been a week, signal is reaching places the virgin never did! We have an extension and the WiFi could never get through the old exterior wall. I wish we had got this sooner! It was so easy to put the hub 3 in modem mode, then you just connect the new router to your laptop via Ethernet and quick as a flash it’s up and running!
IF YOU HAVE A HUB 3 DONT DILLY DALLY GET THIS TODAY!! Soooo much better, not had any issues yet, at all it’s been so worth the money, when all we do is sit at home, on Zoom calls and streaming, we need internet:) Highly highly recommend. Yea it is a bit pricey but buy cheap buy twice is my motto!
I did make sure we bought some cat 6 Ethernet cables as someone else had recommended too!
Bought this after upgrading to a 1gb Virgin Media hub 4 and suffering terrible WiFi. It wasn’t just a weak signal in certain rooms but total dropout of WiFi signal. A new hub and boosters didn’t sort things. The hub worked fine wired so I decided to run it in modem mode and get the ASUS RT-AC86U router. It wasn’t the easiest to set up I have to say (so loses a star for that) and the manual was confusing. After trying a few things myself it managed to work. I was able to set up a 2.4 and 5 GHz network and split compatible devices between the two. Immediately, my WiFi improved. Strong signal throughout the house and hasn’t dropped at all. Only issue I have is that we have V+ TV box in another room and since I turned the hub in to a modem I can’t access recordings from another room’s V+ box. If anyone can help me fix this I’d be grateful! It’s worth it though to have really fast reliable WiFi.
I bought this as a VPN router and after the two first weeks I had to reboot it on a weekly basis and often clients lost their connection, similar to other people’s negative comments. The Asus support was a joke, after a few emails they came back asking very detailed info, which I provided but never received a response to this, and that happened well over a month ago.
Why then it is 4*? Because of its simple user interface, which provides Open VPN client (and server but I have no use for the latter) and I (finally) found a way to configure it so that it is overall stable. This is what worked for me: I disabled all the “fancy” features. You can enable an option for additional protection via a company Trendmicro. I didn’t, you will have to agree that they process your data (including visiting urls) and the whole point of having a VPN is anonymity. So not for me anyway. Then, I created two separate SSIDs with different passwords. the 2.4GHz is much slower e.g. for my 100MBps connection 5GHz operated at full speed while 2.4GHz at about half (but this I saw with other routers). Thus I only used 2.4GHz for older devices that didn’t connect to 5GHz. If you enable “Auto select channel including DFS channels” available for the 5GHz, it is entirely possible that some of your devices (my older FireTV stick for instance) don’t play well with these particular channels and get disconnected. You have two options: either you connect them to the 2.4GHz or disable use DSF channels. I went for the former, as DFS channels are rarely occupied by other signals. Of course finding which device is compatible with which frequency is a minor nuisance but not as much as me installing and uninstalling different firmware hoping that things will work out – they didn’t. Finally (and that was needed mainly for sidecar) I disabled “Roaming assistant”, the feature of automatically disconnecting clients if the signal to noise drops below a cutoff value (wireless-> professional->Roaming assistant). After this I am almost pleased with the router. It could happen that clients loose connection but it will be only a second. Sometimes I will lose internet access and then I disable and enable the VPN client and everything is back to normal. The latter happens once every 2-3 weeks. However, if you don’t need a VPN client on your router, you may want to also look alternatives. For instance my Apple router (extreme 4th generation) didn’t need a reboot or any attention in years and everything worked out of the box. It works fine till today. Apple doesn’t produce routers (and besides I suspect they are flawless with apple devices) but there must be other equally stable and easy to use options available.
We live in a 3 bed semi-detached home and have been getting through with virgin super hub until it started randomly disconnecting me from the internet or would drop out on YouTube or video calls.
Went from 28MB DL to 111MB DL. About 4x faster.
I’m more impressed by the 2.4Ghz signal (her laptop has an older wifi card which struggles to capture 5Ghz).
She is now getting 40MB DL speed on it and signal is quite strong, even for 5G on certain new devices.
Plug and play is super easy, put Virgin super hub in modem mode, plug ethernet cable from port 1 of super hub and plug it into the blue port on the Asus router.
Browse to 192.168.1.1 and set up the WiFi names. To keep your family from complaining, set it to the same username and password so all devices re-connect without having to connect to a new name and new password.
The router also updated it’s self very quickly.
So far, first impressions are positive, paid 133 on a deal and would report back if any issues. I feel like I’m finally getting what I have been paying for in terms of fiber optic performance.
The screenshot shows the test conducted from an upstairs room, before and after setting it up.
I stupidly upgraded our Virgin Media Superhub 2AC to a Hub 3 and that’s when all our problems started! Slow WiFi speeds, poor connections, Samsung phones dropping in / out constantly and unknowingly using our up our families data allowances… After a few nightmare months arguing with Virgin, fiddling with settings and trying out countless extenders, access points and power-lines, including virgins own kit (which was useless) enough was enough and I opted for this in the hope that it would resolve everything once and for all…and I’ve not been disappointed! This router is amazing – the WiFi is now streaming perfectly all over the house – even up to our teenagers attic bedroom and halfway across our garden where previously there was no signal whatsoever – and that’s even with the thing hidden behind our TV at the front of the house. Gone are ALL the access points, extenders and power-lines. Bliss – and peace at last in the house! No more arguments and stress with the kids complaining about rubbish connections and the phones connect instantly. We have dozens of gadgets connected and there’s been no glitching at all! It really was very easy to set up, and it’s easy to put the Hub 3 into modem mode, and the interface is much more comprehensive and quicker than Virgins. I only wish I’d done this years ago – I can 100% recommend this router – you will not be disappointed if you’re upgrading from the Hub 3.
Been using it for almost a year now and absolutely no issues arised ever since, I am using Asus-wrt Merlin as the firmware to optimize additional settings but the default is just as good had no issues with that either. The AI Protection is kind of an extra that I never used and had it turned off in the first place, most points in the functions are simply managed if you know what to and what not to enable, UPNP, pptp 2 etc. Setup is really simple just factory reset out of the box before use and set up everything afterwards and boom had it up and running in I would say less than 5minutes. The one I use is in the main hall and is roughly around 70C after days of running, bare in mind the area is not ventillated only when I open the door to leave. This supports channels 100 to 140 for 5ghz with 20/40/80 channel width really useful in crowded areas where many accesspoints fight for signal. Over cable the ports support up to 1gbps, with a 300mbps ISP line it works perfectly, will test with new 1gbps line in the future. Overall a great piece of equipment and would definitely recommend the extras are not a big deal but the hardware is great and its blazing fast.
Tests Passed:
– Router Crash Test – Survived All rounds
– UPnP exposure Test – No Response
– All Service Port Test – Stealth All
Would have got 5 stars but jeeeeez have I had to do some researching for the 2.4GHz band!! Caused absolute mayhem for my Sonos and other smart home devices and it was continually dropping out! The devices could only connect for 2 minutes before being booted! So a few settings for people to bear in mind if you have the same issues
1. Beam forwarding isn’t required! Disable it! You need compatible devices in order for it to work anyway!
2. The above should disable MU-Mimo. Again it’s more of a future proof (or so I gather)
3. DISABLE AIR TIME FAIRNESS!! Constantly kicks devices that aren’t actually using the connection, i.e. My sonos speakers and smart home devices.
4. Enable the IGMP snooping protocols. Apparently allows devices that are in a group (e.g. My sonos) to communicate with each other, but only one of them is the one that communicates with the internet (or something along those lines)
5. Select a channel and 20MHz frequency band – I chose channel 6 for the 2.4GHz band and change the 20/40MHz to just 20MHz. Basically channels 1, 6 and 11 are the only channels that don’t overlap with each other. Therefore the most likely to have no interference from neighbours. If your neighbour have chosen 6, choose 1 or 11.
The above can be found under wireless and professional tab.
Hope this helps people or at least gives you something to google if you’ve got issues!!
Once this was sorted, the router has been absolutely incredible!! My 5GHz devices have such an incredible speed of internet now!
Having bought an Netgear XR500, I have to say that I was really disappointed with it. The interface is lovely, even superior to the AC88U, but it has tons of nasty bugs. I sent it back and got an AC88U instead.
Of course the AC88U has more features, but whether they interest you or not just depends on you. Personally I found the additional ports in the back very useful, but other than that there wasn’t much else that really stood the AC88U apart for me.
WTFast is something that may be of interest because I often play on distant servers, but I have to say that I am not sure it’s a good idea to actually run WTFast on the router. Identifying game traffic on the router is a lot more difficult than on the PC, so why bother doing that on the router when you can download a WTFast utility to do it on the PC? WTFast on a router really seems like a console option to me.
Anyway the first thing you notice about the Asus is that the packaging is much nicer than the NEtgear.
The first power up and just like the Netgear it goes through a setup, but the Asus Wizard is simpler and it actually got it wrong. Luckily a quick check in WAN settings and even I could see it hadn’t guessed that I might need an internet username and password.
The first thing I did was a hardwired speed test and I was truly surprised to see that the Asus was faster than the XR500. The ping to my speed test server was 1~2ms less than the Netgear. That really surprised me. It may not sound much but the XR500 is supposed to be a gaming router so it really should be optimised for low ping and it’s not.
One very negative point is that Asus don’t warn you before you buy the product that the really nice features of the router — AiProtection, Adaptive QOS, Traffic analyser, they are all driven by Trend Micro, there is a warning when you enable any of these that Trend Micro may collect your data. You aren’t forced to enable them, though, and in the case of QOS you can always use the traditional approach which doesn’t involve Trend.
The Asus router is definitely the more advanced router. It has more features than the Netgear. The thing with the Netgear is that it’s interface is much more oriented towards giving the gamer information rather than packing tons of features. The Asus’ QOS for example is much more advanced, but it’s not very informative. The Netgear on the other hand the QOS is simplistic but is more informative. I would prefer the simple approach by Netgear except there is a very limited number of games it recognises and the manual configuration currently doesn’t work. I guess they may fix the manual configuration soon, but really do you want to have to configure the router to recognise every game you play? I don’t.
You may have heard that Merlin is a a better version of the firmware for the Asus .. google it to find it. When I bought the router, Merlin didn’t contain all of the functions of the Asus software but recently it’s been updated to include everything and more so Merlin is recommended for everyone now.
The help and documentation for the Netgear is better. The Asus is just too brief and you have to resort to experimentation to resolve. To my mind there is simply no point in having features if they are not completely explained. So from a beginners point of view I think the Netgear is the better choice. In particular, buffer-bloat is really just not explained at all with the Asus. You are very much left alone to sort that out.
All in all, so far, I am very impressed with the Asus. The XR500 has a better UI, but the simple fact is that the Asus is superior when it comes to function. Especially QOS, which is important to gamers, albeit not as well explained or simple to configure as the XR500’s QOS. The only really positive thing I would say about the XR500 is that Geo Location is fantastic for consoles, but to my mind the Asus is the better choice for PC owners, albeit it is not quite as friendly as gamer friendly as the Netgear. The Asus is expensive for what it is, but then so is the XR500. In terms of value, neither are great, but right now the Asus maybe has the lead.
Incidentally, don’t bother with the promotion. They are just after all your info.
So really I think both are worthy routers. Both are great but the XR500 is definitely the more friendly. I think it would win apart from the problems it has right now ~ mainly the bugs in the very thing it’s supposed to be good at! The Asus can do everything the XR500 can do, and more, just it takes a little more effort. Until Netgear sort out the bugs with the XR500 the Asus remains the better buy .. as of today, Nov 2018.
One minor complaint is that it runs pretty hot, with the CPU core temp over 67 degrees C all the time. I discovered, though, by just resting a 12cm 1300rpm Noctua NF-P12 fan on the top of the Asus, so that it covered the triangular vent on the top, it lowered the core temp to 46 degrees C. So the fan is staying there. The top of the Asus is not flat but it’s flat enough to reset a fan on. Snip the end connector off the fan, which is a three pin, then connect the red and black ( positive and negative ) to a “5.5mm x 2.1mm DC Power Cable Female Connector Plug” ( you can buy those on amazon ) so that it then just plugs right in to a 12v supply you can buy anywhere. Ignore the yellow. Hey presto, 21 degrees of cooling for 20 and ten minutes fiddling.
After 6 months or so, I’m no in a position to review this router and give some feedback.
+ Great coverage;
+ ASUS firmware (excluding Trend Micro functionality) is very stable;
+ Easy configuration;
+ Smart Connect technology (switches between 5GHz and 2.4GHz automatically, according to rules);
+ Wifi scheduler.
The only gripe I have with this router is that, when AiProtection or Traffic Analysis or QoS is turned on, the router becomes unstable. Interestingly enough, the router still works as normal, but, if you try to turn off the lights via the router control panel (the physical button), it would not work. Also, the Wifi scheduler stops working. I even tried a scheduled reboot every 1 or two days, to no avail: The issue can manifest itself in a matter of hours in within a few days. Very annoying. Given that AiProtection and Wifi scheduler was one of the key features I wanted this router for, this was somewhat disappointing.
After 3 months, I actually returned the router back to Amazon as faulty and asked for a refund, naively thinking I had a faulty unit as instructed initially by Asus technically support. I then bought the same router again, hoping for the best, but the the exact same issues manifested again. I actually logged a case with Asus, managed to go to the tech. team after a few weeks of bouncing backs and forwards, but I never managed to follow it up all the way. I always keep the router updated to the latest firmware. I have also tried the Asus wrt-Merlin firmware. No good new there either (as expected really, as the Merlin firmware is built on top of the Asus firmware anyway).
So, unfortunately, I simply run the router without AiProtection features on and the router works very well, with a very good range.
Would I have bought this router if I had known all of this in advance? Definitely not.
With eight ports, VPN solution, WTFast and all the WIFI you can shake a stick at; not to mention a management app The RT-AC88U is a fantastic router.
ASUS seem to be making a significant in-road for most of the technology I use these days. If you have a house full of kids/people that insist on taking up your bandwidth every day then this is the solution for you! My only regret is that I didn’t buy this router sooner. So what does your money get you?
Simplicity! No more clunky WEB interface as just about everything can be managed through your phone app although you can still access through the web UI if you want. The best thing about this is that once you have configured VPN on the router you can connect from anywhere and manage it securely. Want to turn off all access to the internet? You can do that. Want per device access scheduling; check! Want to integrate with Alexea? you can do that too!
“Oh Alexa, turn off the wifi for little Joe”
With Trends (AV) network monitoring you don’t have to mess around with your own rules and will block services and sites based on category. At the same time you can set exceptions and tailor specific rules to devices. If you want a premium gaming experience this router also has a custom gaming network access which shortens the route to the servers and for the hardcore gamer will disable other device access for sole command to a single computer.
Oh and for guests that come over you can setup and schedule how long yout guest wifi will be accessable for. Winner!
For the modder in you you can send it custom firmware which can alow for more toys.
Oh.. almost forgot. The router also has USB 2 and 3 ports so you can plug in your external drive or usb stick with your media on and share it through web apps you can install separately through the router (Just like a NAS) or use DNLA! The finishing touch to be able to turn off all the lights from the touch of a button is great.I have only one complaint which as it happens the router allows you to fire off directly to ASUS from the UI as more suggestion box (tres bon!)… This router can get hot! depending on how much it’s being used so make sure you give it plenty of room and next to a ventilation source. If you have this in a small room then you will not need your central heating on 😉
In an attempt to be “Green” there is a wifi power saving option which I don’t know is any better on the electricity bill or not at 19V Power adapter so this is not the same as your run of the mill POS router from your ISP.
It seems that the general consumer is finally able to purchase what you would normally have to pay thousands for as part of an enterprise piece of hardware for a fraction of the price.
UPDATE:
Our house is very long (it is two semi-detached houses put together), so the router was struggling to cover the whole area + conservatory. I tried replacing it with an GT AX 11000 and it was a disaster. The speed dropped, even on my two ax clients (the rest are all ac), and coverage was the same. I tried to set it up as an aimesh node and it kept disconnecting, even with one of the two 5Ghz bands dedicated as backhaul. I also tried that with an AX6000, same results.
Looking up Smallnetbuilders showed that AX is just not ready for Aimesh yet (nor for that much, it seems!). It is also my experience, AC is much more stable.
So, I got one AC2900 (= AC 86U, newer that AC 88U contrary to what the digits suggest), made sure all firmware was upgraded and set it up as a wireless node: very easy to do (remember to connect a LAN port from the parent to the WAN of the node for easy set up). At last I had very good coverage on that side of the house (I had tried extenders before but the speed was too low), but the overall speed dropped by about 15%. Not so good!
I got a second AC 86U and set it up as a wired node on the other side of the house (flat ethernet cables are really useful for that!). Excellent coverage on that side too, and the speed returned to its original figures. BUT: one or the other node would disconnect overnight and I had to reboot them to get them back on the system. Not so good either!
More investigations, and I changed the following under ‘Wireless’ – ‘Professional’:
Airtime fairness: disabled on all three bands
Universal beamforming: disabled on all three bands
Explicit beamforming: disabled on all three bands
AC beamforming: enabled on 5ghz.
I always had Smart Connect and Smart Roaming off as I need certain portable devices to stay on the same network as the printers, scanners etc.
Since then, no disconnections, the network is rock-solid and the speed has improved again. The distribution of the devices has also improved, with about 7 on the parent router, 6 on one side and 7 on the other. Contrary to ready made mesh systems like Google, Orbi or Lyra, this system is much more customisable and offers all the advantages of the complex interface of the RT 5300.
It took me a while to find all the relevant information and to optimise the settings, so I hope that this will help someone! Do let me know if it does.
Before buying the RT-AC86U i did consider the RT-AC5300 which is much more expensive but the RT-AC86U has a better and newer CPU and double the flash memory than the much more expensive RT-AC5300.
Before buying this i owned a RT-AC68U router which i have left an extensive review on some time ago here on amazon. The RT-AC86U is basically a beefier and much better upgrade from the RT-AC68U router. For example my old rt-ac68u had 128MB nand flash and 256MB of RAM and my new rt-ac86u has 256MB of nand flash and 512MB of RAM which is the minimum i would go for now with my setup and certainly see the difference when adding the beefier newer cpu with hardware accelerated crypto which helps when using vpn with encryption and now gives me full line speeds over my vpn client. My old rt-ac68u has a 800MHz 32bit dual core cpu and my newer rt-ac86u has a 1800MHz 64bit(1.8GHz) dual core cpu and certainly makes a difference across the entire router. Both routers have Gigabit WAN and Gigabit LAN ports, 1 x USB 2.0 and 1 x USB 3.0 port.
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The first thing i did was to install the asuswrt-merlin firmware. This firmware is a fork of the orginal asus firmware but with additional features and improvements maintained by merlin. Anyone who take’s networking seriously or like tinkering will likely already know and probably be using the merlin firmware. The asus web-gui is the best out there not only it looks apart and appealing i find it less cluttered and easier to use than other branded routers. If you not got a clue what i mean by the above just ignore it, it’s meant for those who know about asuswrt-merlin firmware.
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I own a macbook pro mid 2014. My router is approx 15 feet away from my laptop, When connected to my router, the speed of the connection from my macbook to my router averages around 878Mbps to 1300Mbps (max). Note this is the speed between my laptop and router connecting to the 5GHz band using wireless-ac, this is not the speed of my internet connection which is different. I’ve never tested file transfer rates between router and laptop as it copies quickly enough so have never needed to bother. Previously i had a portable HDD and USB stick in both the USB 2 and 3 ports on my router. The HDD contains my videos, music etc, I have DLNA enabled so i can wirelessly play content on my DLNA enabled device like my TV, phones etc from the HDD connected into the router. This has always worked seamlessly for me and never have had issues with it. Although my setup is now changing somewhat. Now my HDD is connected to my media box and the usb stick is still in router used as a swap drive and to install custom scripts from the merlin firmware community.
My router really does get pushed to it’s paces everyday, multiple devices connected wirelessly and via ethernet, sometimes with streaming going on, along with running two OpenVPN servers and 3 OpenVPN Clients so i can get secure access to my network when on the go; VPN routing to route only specific devices to to my external VPN connection, SSH (i only enable for lan and not wan). I use the SAMBA service and FTP service which is great so i can acess my usb drive that’s connected to the router to copy, edit, delete data etc. What really makes this router do it for me is the hardware accelerated crypto built in directly to the cpu, i get full line speed now over my vpn.
Now i’ve given a glance into what i use my router for let’s talk about some of the standard built in features.
– Guest Network
Great when you don’t want family, friends etc accessing your main network, stick them on a guest network to block access to your network, they can connect to the internet, just not see any devices on your network, great to ensure they aren’t snooping on your network, it’s like someone going through your knicker draw, not acceptable so block them. You can also limit their time as well. There is an option to allow people on guest networks see all your other devices on the network so be ensure to disable it when enabling the guest network if you have guests around.
– AiProtection
Once your router is setup i recommend you head straight to the AiProtection tab immediately, once there choose ‘Network Protection’ then hit that big button ‘Scan’. Why you may ask? well as daft and stupid this may sound most routers by default when setup aren’t secure at all, yes wireless connections are secured generally by default nowadays but they are still some insecure settings enabled that means anyone with some knowhow could easily hack your network without much effort. It basically does a router security assessment and with a press of a button will secure your router further, Asus gets extra kudos for this in my opinion as it allows novices to further secure there router and network with a simple press of a button without having to understand the technical aspects of the settings.
Under the AiProtecting tab there is also Parental Controls and DNS Filtering. I’m not going into full details but Parental Controls as the name implies allows to to schedule times your children can have access to the internet and allows blocking of websites etc. DNS Filtering takes this a step further by protecting LAN devices from harmful online content. The main popular one used by novices and families is OpenDNS or OpenDNS Family. Again check google and OpenDNS website for further explanation. If you have children then you will likely want to take advantage of Parental Controls and DNS Filtering.
– Adaptive, Traditional QoS & Bandwidth Limiter
ah QoS well what can i say. Asus take note if you reading. Fix It! when running a vpn client on router the download and upload bandwidth meters are wrong way around, the QoS statistics, well i am not sure if i trust and believe what i see sometimes, it’s so messed up and always have been and nothing to do with merlin firmware as it’s closed source so merlin can’t change it either.
I never really used it on my rt-ac68u (old router) as i always found it to be buggy and more times than not found it made things worse. It allows you to prioritise devices, tasks and applications. I here conflicting information regarding QoS, some people swear by it others hate it. It’s great if you want to prioritise certain traffic over others, an example such as give high priority to streaming and low priority to web surfing or something similar. In this tab there is other settings related to QoS such as bandwidth monitoring, Web History, QoS statistics etc.
I am currently testing QoS out again on my rt-ac86u (new router) as it’s been a while but not good so far. In my opinion it needs entirely rewriting from the ground up. Asus boasts about this feature so fixing the issues out should be a priority. Bandwidth limiter allows you to setup limits on download and upload speed per each device.
– Traffic Monitor
Allows you to monitor the incoming or outgoing packets. Useful for real time monitoring of traffic on network. Traffic Analyzer part of Traffic Monitor alllow’s you to view graphs and filter by device etc. Can be really useful and a nice thing to have.
– USB Application
* AiDisk – Share files in the USB disk through the Internet.
I’ve never used AiDisk, i only connect to my network when out via OpenVPN server setup on router, i do not trust any other method, therefore cannot comment on AiDisk.
* Media Services and Servers
Allows setting up of UPnP, iTunes, FTP and Network Place (Samba).
* Network Printer Server – The network printer server supports two methods: (1) ASUS EZ printer sharing (2) LPR to share printer.
Again i’ve never used this, i have a all-in-one printer connected to my router wirelessly and have never needed to use this feature.
* 3G/4G
Never used this either, i know people use it without issue though, great if your internet connection goes down, by plugging in a 3G/4G dongle you can for example have the router switch to the 3G/4G dongle if your main internet goes down so you can still continue doing whatever you was doing without interruption.
* Time Machine
As i own a macbook pro i did use this feature and loved it, it meant i could have my macbook pro backup wirelessly to the HDD plugged into router. Unfortunately every few weeks time machine on my mac complains it cannot verify the backup and needs to do a fresh one all over again, to unreliable so i just plug in HDD when needing to backup.
– AiCloud
This had major security bugs back few years ago, i would never and have never used this feature, again i just connect to my home network when out via OpenVPN client on router. OpenVPN requires setting up and knowledge but certainly the way to go. I don’t trust using any third parties to connect to my network, i like to have full control without the major security issues that AiCloud has had. I cannot comment on this simply as stated above, never have and never will use this feature.
There are a multitude of other settings but there’s so much i covered all the main ones and features. The rest is more about configuration settings, for VPN, LAN, WAN, DHCP, Firewall, Port Forwarding, Administration etc, to many to mention. If you are a novice or basic user majority of this stuff you will likely never bother with but it’s there for the more advanced user.
– Asus android/ios app
Only used about twice myself as i prefer to access router web-gui via computer and browser but for novices or anyone who want a simpler, more user friendly way of accessing settings, ie. parental controls then the app will be a welcome bonus. Many settings can be changed and viewed via the app, not used for quite some time but imagine it’s improved further since. More manufacturers are now developing apps to be used to access router in a more user friendly and convenient way. I imagine many people will like the app.
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Some key pointers that keeping coming to mind i want to share:
– Disable WPS if you value your security.
– Usually disabled by default: ‘enable Web Access from WAN’. Never ever turn this setting on, you are basically allowing anyone access to your router via the open internet, bad idea, use OpenVPN server on router instead for gaining access to you’re home network from outside of the home.
If you have custom merlin firmware then you have a ton of extra features and per device policy routing via vpn tunnels etc, asus stock firmware users you get it to just not as advanced and don’t believe there’s per device policy routing with asus stock firmware but not used asus stock firmware in 2 years so don’t know.
– SSH Daemon, i enable this on LAN side only, I’ve never opened it on WAN side, to many security concerns in my opinion. If you want to SSH into your router, do it when connected to router at home (LAN), if you want to SSH into router when out and about etc again setup OpenVPN and connect to your router/home network via OpenVPN and SSH in that way ie from a phone, tablet etc. I create my own SSH keys, using a SSH key generated by yourself to login and not a password is more secure.
– Telnet, again can be another security concern, if you don’t know what it is then you don’t need it, just ensure it’s disabled. Merlin users will find telnet removed as it’s just so old and outdate now, should have gone out with the archives.
– Firewall, should be enabled by default but still worth checking to ensure it’s enabled. Do not disable the firewall it’s there to protect your network from hackers, malicious users etc. DoS protection is disabled by default i recommend enabling it, it will slightly increase router workload, personally i don’t see any difference so i enable it. You also have a url, keyword and network services filter in this menu to. Never used them as personally think they are much better options like DNS Filtering in the AiProtection tab, and if using merlin firmware well you even more options.
– When configuring wireless settings, ensure authentication method is set to WPA2 and not WPA, WPA2 is more secure than WPA. Choose a long WPA Pre-Shared Key (if you don’t know what i mean, basically those cheap routers/modems you get given free from your ISP? well as you probably know they have a sticker on them on bottom or back usually with a password key, well this allows you to connect to your router securely using a WPA key wirelessly. There’s nothing to configure except to change it from WPA to WPA2 if not already done. Most routers use WPA2 by default but always worth checking.
I use the maximum length of 63 characters, this may sound extreme and a nightmare when having to type it into every device that connects to your network but security is a number one priority for me. Hence why it’s good to use Guest Network, you choose separate keys for the guest network, so when friends, family come over for example, they can connect to the guest network with a different key which you choose such as 10 character in length (anything up to 63 characters), one it means you are not sharing your main network key and two guests will not be able to view any devices on your network and it’s easy to change the guest network keys ie. when you’re guests leave.
Don’t use the same key all the time or keep guest network on, i mean let say your’re friend comes over, you have guest network enabled, you give them the key to connect to your’re guest network (wi-fi), well if you do not turn off guest network or change the key when they leave when you not about or home or whatever they could easily just sit outside your home and connect to your’re guest network as signal will likely penetrate to outside enough signal for them to connect and yeah you guessed it you never turned off guest network or changed the key! just something to remember or easier still you can set a time limit via the web-gui.
– Remember when i said in my very long review above about going to AiProtection > Network Protection > Hit the SCAN button then Hit the Secure Your Router button. Well doing this will alone make your router more secure and will disable the likes of WPS, UPnP, Web Access from WAN and many others. Some settings are disabled by default but i know from experience when updating router firmware, some settings due to for example a bug, enable themselves, only happened once but nonetheless, so i also manually check my router settings regularly and monitor my router logs.
I want to point out i’m no security or networking expert but hope this review helps you in some way or another.
This is one very long review but hope it gives you an sight on what this router is capable of doing and is able to achieve when setup correctly. I will never buy any other brand router now well for now, i’m just so accustomed to this brand of router and the merlin firmware. I’ve never had issues with this router, all issues are usually bugs, wrong settings, poor setup/configuration. If you have major issues then a full reset is usually the way to go, if you don’t upgrade to latest firmware as and when available and miss a few firmware updates for example you can find settings can conflict and cause undesirable results, nothing a reset cannot solve however. I could go on forever as there’s so many settings and options but would mean this review would quadruple in size to be fair.
If there is one thing i could wish for and that is Asus implement Advanced VLAN and Inter-LAN routing. Please Asus if your are reading send it to suggestions department. It’s the only thing i want, millions of insecure, bad IoT devices being mass sold to public means network segregation is becoming even more important. Even other brands are including it now so please implement it Asus, if it wasn’t for the merlin firmware i would have gone with Draytek as they have this feature, i already own a Draytek modem to.
I would highly recommend this router, i have only owned this new router for a week but as i had the rt-ac68u prior to this rt-ac86u i knew what i was ordering. My old trusty rt-ac68u router is packed up ready to be used as a media bridge or AP in the future, it’s a few years old now and still as good and reliable today.
If you gotten this far well thanks for reading this very long review and i hope this review has helped you.
I pay for 100 mb download and get around 6 mb upload.
Speeds without vpn and using the 5GHz channel.
Using an ethernet cable from the RT-AC86U to my desktop computer I get 106 mb download and 6 mb upload.
Using WiFi from the RT-AC86U to my desktop computer I get 106 mb download and 6 mb upload.
Speeds using the vpn client with expressvpn .ovpn files and connected to expressvpns recommended UK server which is approximately 60 miles away.
Using an ethernet cable from the RT-AC86U to my desktop computer I get up to 85 mb download and 6 mb upload.
Using WiFi from the RT-AC86U to my desktop computer I get up to 85 mb download and 6 mb upload.
Tablets and phones all reach a minimum of 50 mb download speeds now there own processors aren’t handling the encryption.
These speeds do vary depending on the time of day, the number of people online streaming amazon video, Netflix etc and which server I’m connected to.
I am incredibly happy with how this router performs and it copes very well under heavy use and provides a strong WiFi signal. It’s also proving to be very stable using Rmerlins firmware.
I use a vpn for the added security it provides and to help claw back some privacy from isp providers and especially the government who are trying to erode our online privacy and security which takes me to the AiProtection by Trend Micro which I do recommend because it provides an extra layer of online security but for me I’m sacrificing my privacy by using AiProtection which defeats the object of using a vpn to retain some privacy.
Apps/traffic Analysis
Bandwidth Monitor
Network Analyzer
Network Protection (AiProtection), blocks known malware domains
Parental Controls, including time scheduling
Quality-of-Service
Web History
To use any of the above functions, you’ll be asked to agree to a long-winded End-User License Agreement (EULA) from Trend Micro. At the very bottom of the EULA, you’ll find a section devoted to [the lack of] privacy.
A friend recommended this ASUS router as they had used it to provide wireless coverage around their house and for their TIVO set-up – no disconnection issues (except when the VM signal went down). I was a bit miffed that the price had gone up by 30 in the space of a month – probably because other VM users were having the same issue.
The RT-AC3200 is a light unit but quite big so you need to make some room for it. Six antennas, plug and adaptor along with a network cable come supplied with it. You’ll need it to feed the signal from the VM SH hub to the Asus. The front of the unit is adorned with status lights. The rear has 4 LAN ports, a main LAN input from another modem, power switch and a USB port which can be used to attach a NAS device or memory device. I need to look at the last option as it could open up some interesting options.
Configuration can be as simple or as complex as you want. This has some advanced settings that I can’t get my head round. As the TIVO V6 boxes stream media, I decided to dedicate one of the 5ghz bands to each box and keep the 2.4 network for laptops, phones and other devices.Streaming was flawless and internet speeds were significantly faster meaning that the VM SH3 isn’t performing well in many areas.
Within the settings, you can run a traffic analyzer along with usage stats for devices. You can limit access times and speed for specific devices as well. Could be useful when kids come round to the house. There is an app you can download onto a smartphone or tablet to control the router remotely.
The icing on the cake are updates. Even though this unit was released in 2014, Asus are still supporting it and it comes with a 3 year warranty. If you register your product, you will get 5GB of cloud storage for life (until they decide to relinquish the offer).
If you need a stable router with extensive features and to replace the networking capabilities of your VM Super hub, I would wholly recommend this.
Very easy to set up and there is a lot of other settings within the hub that you can set up, such as add a VPN client, security controls and parental controls.
I have mine set for 3 separate SSID’s. I use the 2.4ghz for my Ring Doorbell and most of the smart home devices. One of the 5ghz is set for the family to use with the consoles, phones and laptops and I have the other 5ghz set for myself to use for my personal and work laptops and phones, my PS4 and other smart home devices. Everyone can connect to the 2.4 or 5ghz-1 if they need to change for connection issues.
This suits my needs for now, but I may end up changing the settings if any issues arise (more than I could do with the VM Superhub).
The only issue that I have and the reason for 4 stars is with the 2.4ghz wireless range, It seems weaker than the Superhubs (the 5ghz is stronger) I have had to buy a wifi extender to allow me to get my Ring Doorbell 2 to receive a decent signal.I think the wireless range issue has been mentioned a few times on various reviews.
Initially I was using the stock firmware and was suffering with intermittent wifi dropouts. I found that installing the Merlin firmware instead removed any issues and seem more stable.
We had an extension built on the house with a small office where my server, switch and router now live. I should say I work in IT and my system is more elaborate the a regular home user. Maybe its that foil back insulation in the new extension, or the fact its now in the furthest corner of our house but the old N66U never quite performed the same. It has also been getting slower lately with the updates and I knew things had moved on with wifi standards so when the Black Friday sales came I knew what to look for. After carefully picking out the reviews for each model this seemed a good bet and it has been.
Coming from the old router. this thing is massive, overall twice the size of the old one I would say. Those 6 aerials seem bigger too ( although I assume internally they’re a set length for the frequency etc ) and its an imposing looking beast. I decided to wall mount it which took a bit of searching for the right screw heads but its not heavy, so its solidly placed as high as I could reasonably get it with clearance for the aerials etc. So this is dual core and 3 separate bands covering 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz, and it gets just as warm as the old one, which is pretty hot, but I think they are all like this. Despite being dual core it takes longer to initially boot and issue DHCP than the old one, however once its running its noticeably more responsive especially in navigating the interface. Also turning on extra features (like QOS etc) doesn’t seem to stress it or make it laggy like it did on the old router, it seems to take more stuff in its stride.
It also has a much improved reporting and monitoring section where you can see which PC and even which app is using the most bandwidth in your house. It really is pretty enlightening and will be useful for tracking down issues and secret bandwidth hogs. My biggest LAN bandwidth usage is my IP cam recording to my server, which makes perfect sense with hindsight but I never really thought about it.
As I had an ASUS previously which ran the same firmware. Guess what? I just restored a backup of my settings and it worked! I had to go in tweak a few things like the device name was restored as RT-N66U etc… That saved me a massive job of manually reentering NAT virtual server ports, VPN details etc. it also comes with new features like the built in Trend Micro threat monitoring which is great for peace of mind, and it does spot stuff…Sometimes legitimate stuff, it blocked my VDSL stats monitoring program which, to be fair was directly accessing my modem over telnet to read stats out. I can see WHY it blocked it but you don’t get a whitelist option, so you either turn it on and it works for you or turn it off and do with out. There are several levels of protection though that can be tweaked but I would have liked more control here.
The built in ASUS apps like the media server and downloader are pretty woeful like they were on the old one, but I don’t really use them as I have a server, but if you want to use this as a stand alone storage appliance/server then the file sharing, ftp and DLNA stuff works OK. USB 2 or USB 3 I get transfer rates of around 30-40MB/s over gigabit Ethernet which is not fast but is useable. The downloader and more esoteric functions are pretty flakey though.
So what about the Wifi? Well the amazing AC3200 is twice as fast but still a bit underwhelming. Testing with nperf3 between my phone and a Windows server i.e. real world file transfer rates up from circa 100MB/s (Megabyte) to 200MB/s. However, that is only if you’re on TOP of it! It drops off pretty rapidly once you get a wall in the way or you’re over the far side of a fairly modest sized 70’s bungalow. Also, the range and signal strength is only slightly better than the old N class Wifi router, but I think it is hampered by the foil lined walls. The speed overall at any range is better though. I left the band selection in auto magic intelligent mode where you had a single SSID and the router decides which band you go on. That seems to work OK.
Did it stop the kids moaning about the Wifi? No, not really, due the range they are not really seeing the performance increase. You know what I think? All wifi is rubbish you should just hard wire gigabit everywhere and if you can’t do that, connect your PC with Cat 6 and buy some earplugs to block out the moaning from everyone else 🙂
Was it worth the upgrade? Yep, I think so the overall performance is improved even if it is not a stellar jump. Most notable thing is, the old router would be reset twice a week as needed, its been well over a fortnight and I still haven’t needed to reset this once!
As my primary need was for a VPN client this newly launched router seemed to have everything needed to make it a super fast capable router when being used with a AES 256bit CBC encrypted data signal. Well it turns out that this router with its super fast optimised dual core CPU is certainly up to the task.
With its ease of setup, using the Merlin firmware, as a VPN client, it is very simple to apply policy based routing. Having devices running through the WAN or the tunnel of the VPN connection, wit ha kill switch, is very easy. As is port forwarding.
Using a smart connection for the excellent Wi-Fi, to combine both the 2.4ghz and 5ghz into one SSID, and then the router allocates the appropriate band to each device, is also both easy to setup and very effective.
There is much more to this router but the little that I have touched on went to convince me that it is a very impressive buy for our needs.
I never did like using DD-WRT or a pf sense box, my brain is far too feeble to cope or manage with those.
So far I am very very happy with the excellent throughput of this router and its massive list of features.
Merlin described it as being …..
So basically, expect around 200 Mbps of throughput (I doubt the GT-AC5300’s extra cores will make any real difference, OpenVPN being single threaded). That’s about 4x faster than the RT-AC68U, and probably around 3x faster than the RT-AC88U/RT-AC3100/RT-AC5300.
and someone noted with their fast VPN connection…..
Based on those results I added only the rcv buffers as the snd buffers lowered the upload speeds.
DL: 223 Mbps
UL: 233 Mbps
The single highest values: DL: 228 Mbps UL: 262 Mbps
Excellent router so far.
I note a lot of the one star reviews are found also on the AC88U with built in modem, their experiences do not match my own. I purchased the RT-AC88U in August 2016 and a little over a year later I find it just as fast and responsive today as it was then. I’m still waiting for the KRACK WPA2 fix (which my RT-N66U has already received) but other than that minor quibble I really have no qualms with this router and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
It has a slew of wonderful features that make administering the network a breeze even for a novice like me. I share my internet with some 40/50 other people with this router acting as the DHCP server for the various other routers I use throughout the complex as “dumb switches” and it doesn’t miss a trick. No one has ever complained of lag or poor internet and with the excellent monitoring tools I can implement QoS rules to either limit specific devices I see are using far too much bandwidth or create priorities for specific usage.
I can also block devices directly or their MAC addresses in case I see strange devices using my service.
The 8 ethernet ports come in really handy here, and the dual core CPU and RAM seem like overkill; I’ve yet to fully tax them in other words.
There was one instance of the system becoming unstable but it seemed more to do with my ADSL modem playing up than the RT-AC88U. A reboot of all devices seemed to fix it and I’ve not had a problem since.
I don’t mean to discount the experiences of the other reviewers but it would have been helpful if they mentioned whether they were reviewing the normal RT-AC88U or the model with the built in modem that perhaps suffers from interference?
The web interface is snappy, and intuitive. It seems very stable indeed and doesn’t run hot.
In short, I’m very pleased with it, although it does have some rather annoying downsides:
This router is as big as a dinner plate. Even with all that space it only offers 4 ports. There are no lights per port either – so if you have a problem with one device not connecting, you’ll not be able to easily tell. This is basic stuff – get a grip Asus !
You cannot block ip addresses inbound. This is unbelievable – I have never had a router that won’t do that. You can get round it by ssh-ing onto the box and manually configuring the IP Tables rules ; sadly this is probably beyond the scope of your average user. ( iptables -I FORWARD -s 27.8.0.0/13 -j REJECT for example), and you’ll have to redo it every time the router is rebooted as you can’t make it persistent.
Router based Client VPN connections are very slow. It is not entirely obvious why this is the case as the processor does not show high utilisation. The same VPN connection (to Express VPN) gives 60Mbps on my PC, and 18-20Mbps on the router. The router software does not appear to like ExpressVPNs configuration – however this can be solved by adding in the line “proto udp” to the .ovpn config file, thus stopping it complaining about the use of the fragment option.
You can’t do both Client and Server based connections at the same time. However, you sort of can if you are prepared to ssh onto the router and start hacking the routing table. Again this isn’t persistent.
They have some Smart Connect technology which aims to load balance Wifi connections across the 3 set ( 1×2.4Ghz, 2x5Ghz sets). As far as I can tell it just doesn’t work. Leastwise, my Raspberry Pi hates it and cant connect at all when that’s on.
Has a nasty bug in the DHCP section – if you don’t put in all the MAC addresses in upper case, the list of connected clients shows nothing !
I bought this router as I needed a more powerful network solution to handle the things I throw at it. This has allowed me to run an OpenVPN connection for which I can selectively route traffic based on IP address (and with a little bit of fiddling by service also).
Currently it has been performing in a stable fashion for 4 days with plenty of headroom left in the CPU and RAM.
Other things I like about this router are the ease of use due to the design of the user interface. Even if you aren’t familiar with configuring IP Tables and other network geek things, it is relatively straightforward to setup – I was almost dissapointed at how easy it was.. it took me a total of 1 hour to unbox, flash new firmware (ASUSWRT-Merlin), setup VPN, route connections and begin using.
The jury is out on the adaptive QOS as I have yet to really squeeze the bandwidth to see how this performs.
I’ve not used and of the Ai plugins (AiCloud etc); mainly since I have no use for them but also due to security concerns in earlier firmwares with regards to SMB and AiCloud setups. I don’t know if these security flaws have been fixed yet.
Wifi signal in the home has increased a little; turning Eco Mode on obviously reduces the coverage make of that wahat you will.
Lastly, I have noticed a minor speed increase since replacing my Virgin Media Superhub2 with this – my connection speed to the WAN has increased by approximately 2mb/s. I haven’t got any metrics to make a comparison of my internal network speeds prior to the upgrade so I cannot comment on this.
In summary, this is a powerful router which can be setup by the average home user but provides enough functionality to keep this enthusiast happy.
Build is solid and tuning functions are good. Out of the box it’s good, a little tuning for streaming in home and it was great. Overall for someone with no house/device issues it’s probably the best I seen. Getting 200mb on speed test on my 5g 2nd band. Now issues for my home.
4K TV streaming Netflix and amazon had issues when Triband sharing enabled but this was TV issue and position of wifi in house.
Solution:
1.split bands
2.tv selection 2.4gig
3. Everyone else split over 5gig bands
Result still low 11mb, this is due to wifi signal…my house.
Solution:
1.Had an old netgear wifi extender for 2.4/5gig bands, this however on my netgear killed my download speeds on the rest of the bands. On my ASUS it worked great. Not ideal, until I get the broadband building position moved, its best I will get.
2.locked TV to extended wifi 5gig and hey presto 4K streaming working, all other devices max speed.
Will probably order the ASUS EXTENDER as I think it will be better than my netgear one.
So expection was, it will fix my crappy house wifi, actual was it did but with a little tweaking, my netgear couldn’t do it, this did. Good buy overall. Once this is bridged I think I will be very very happy, bridged over extending etc.
Just make sure all your devices can take advantage of the dual 5gig bands, as some Tv’s don’t support these wifi bands, same for laptops/desktops. Great item overall. To get 5stars it would have needed to not require my extender but that’s a house issue with positioning of incoming wifi.
Since using this router my connection has been stable and my wifi signal strength is steady instead of dropping up and down.
Although I do feel the router is a little over priced I would recommend it to any one who wants to expand there network or just needs to replace a rubbish router.
There are cheaper dual band routers out there but none boast the data rates this one has.
Some people have said they feel the router is very big, this is correct if you are comparing it to your standard router supplied from your broadband provider but in general it is not that big,I think the 4×4 antenna make it look a little over sized.
Most routers provided by service providers come with antennas built inside the router which can block your wifi signal.
The features the router has are brilliant, if you have children you can even see what kind of usage they have been using, facebook,youtube,skype ect, you can also limit there usage to certain times and block certain content.
You can choose the content to block even by blocking certain words.
There is a handy button on the front to turn the lights off however I do not feel these are intrusive lights not like the amber and blue you get on other routers these are all white.
Initial setup was straight forward, plug everything in and switch on as simple as that.
But you will then need to login to the dashboard to set the other futures up as you would like them to work, the dashboard is very easy to understand but if your not used to these things you will need to read the manual and take your time.
The router comes with a quick start paper manual and a user guide cd, there is also plenty of online help on ASUS web site.
Also comes with a UK power plug and a EUROPEAN power plug so can be used anywhere in Europe without the need for a new power adapte
I hesitated before writing this review. There is no doubt that the AC88U is a true ASUS stable mate. From the extreme easy setup, which now has an option for expert mode, which in one step allows you to upload a previous ASUS router configuration file without any hassle, to the plethora of options and features, simply too many to mention.
My main reason for getting this router was to get the 8 (eight) GB LAN ports which this unit has. A good choice to get it ? I’m dubious. The RT-AC68U, which this 88U replaces ,was and remains AN ABSOLUTELY BRILLANT ROUTER and one that gives absolutely sterling service. In my case and note that things might be different for you, the area coverage of the 68U beats the 88U, hands down.
Now, that might be because of the way it is mounted, as the 88U is NOT designed to be wall mounted and neither was the 68U but due to my setup, I wall mounted both units. Why the coverage of the 68U was better, I just do not know, but running my Android WiFi analyser app shows it to be true. The 68U beats the 88U. No doubt in my case, but NOTE: as our American cousins are fond of saying… ” Your mileage may vary”.
There is very little not to like about the Asus RT-AC88 router. One particular nice feature is the traffic monitoring display. I mean the fact that this router keeps meticulously track of what Apps are using the router to go onto the internet and will show you the amount of data each and every Application is consuming. It can display that data is various ways, just pick what suits you and there it is.
I had two young teenage guests staying today and by God… did it show their use of the SNAPCHAT app, using data like a burst tap !.
The router effortlessly handles whatever data needs you can throw against it and it never remotely breaks out in a sweat. It features TRI-Band connect, if that takes your fancy and allows your guests to access the internet, but they are not able to access your own LAN devices. I really like that feature. Another nice thing is that it allows your clients to be defined by you, for instance, instead of saying IP camera, on address 192.aaa.bbb.ccc you can give a far more descriptive definition, like OUTDOOR AMCREST CAM ON DRIVE WAY.
I could go on all night long about the many many features the unit has, but for now, I like to explain why I gave this excellent router only 4 stars.
Two reasons, it should have been designed to be wall mounted, as well as flat desk mounted.
The second reason, just short of 300 UK Pounds sterling it is (too) expensive, but that is my own opinion.
Let me sum it up as I see it, but note that this is my own private opinion:
Unless you absolutely need some of its more exclusive features, my advice would be: Buy the ASUS RT-AC68U and get a 8 GB unmanaged LAN switch. Your performance will be virtually as good, you now have 12 GB LAN PORTS to play with, and you saved yourself a fair bit of money in the process. Happy “Routering”.
Albert
PS: Apologies for the photo being sideways on, bloody Amazon seems to want to do that to all my photo uploads.
ADDENDUM TO MY REVIEW AS ABOVE.
This router has one serious problem. The traffic monitor is completely INACCURATE. I supplied proof of this to ASUS UK tech. support and they have escalated it back to their development team. It under reads the network traffic by a HUGE amount, as proven by the Windows Task mngr graphs I supplied to them. Where the task mngr reports a data flow of around 10MB/Sec the ASUS traffic monitor says it handles 800 KB/Sec.
As the traffic monitor is a nice to have feature, i have left my review at 4 stars, but for a unit costing just short of 300 pnds, this should be fixed by ASUS. FYI, I have often 12 wireless clients on the 2.4 band and 4 on the 5GHz band and the router barely notices that load, as per it’s CPU and RAM graphs. A good product and i hope that the next firmware release will fix the traffic monitor problem. Albe
Our house is very WiFi unfriendly as all the internal walls are solid and there is a metal mesh under the rendering of the exterior walls; this severely attenuates WiFi signals (Especially 5GHz) in just 30ft or so, which is the distance from the VDSL (BT Infinity 2) master socket to all the multimedia equipment in the lounge. We also have two exterior IP security cameras.
The pre ASUS set-up included a BT HH5, an Apple AirPort Extreme, a BT dual channel WiFi extender, a Netgear power line adaptor (For non-WiFi YouView box); I also needed a timer to force the IP cameras to reboot every 24hours as, even with the WiFi extender the WiFi signal to/from the IP cameras was very dodgy. I also have a 20TB QNAP NAS which backs-up tech for the whole family as well as being a multimedia server and security camera recorder.
Preservation of domestic harmony has prevented me remedying the WiFi situation with several runs of Cat 6 Ethernet cable.
The BT HH5 is probably one of best ISP provided modem/routers but its WiFi performance is not brilliant and the more advanced features are ether abysmal, missing or just do not work properly (UPnP for example).
Due to Amazons very fair “returns policy” I thought I would try the ASUS and am glad I did.
For a few days I used the router just for WiFi (Replacing the Apple Airport Extreme and WiFi extender) and found that not only did I no longer need the WiFi Extender, but the connection to my IP security cameras became more stable than ever! I also found the WiFi was signal was strong enough and fast enough to support 4K video, from Netflix and Amazon Prime, to my Smart TV, in the lounge.
I was also very impressed with the 802.11n speed (Over 56MB, yes MB not Mbit) I was getting on my laptop from my NAS server.
The following may be of interest to Potential buyers who are BT Infinity customers or with an ISP that uses a separate modem and router or a modem/router that can be switched to modem only, such as Virgin. Unfortunately Sky customers can probably only use this router as a super powerful WiFi extender.
According to information on the Internet ASUS routers are compatible with YouView (A digital/IPTV service from BT, TalkTalk and others) the Internet channels on this service use a feature called “multicasting” which causes problems with most non-ISP provided routers.
I wanted to completely replace the BT HH5; so I purchased an Openreach VDSL modem, from eBay, connected it to the VDSL socket and the WAN port of the ASUS RT-AC5300. The ASUS connection wizard quickly detected the appropriate settings, subsequently asking for a username and password, I had obtained the username from the settings page of the BT HH5 and, although the password is not used, something has to be typed into the password field.
I don’t know if the separate modem is better than the one built in to the BT HH5 but my connection speed has increased by around 5mb/s (To over 70mb/s) and the connection does not seem to “drop off” as much.
I modified the appropriate settings on the ASUS, as recommended on Internet sites, to enable YouView compatibility but to my dismay the Internet channels on YouView did not work.
I telephoned ASUS support and spoke to a very helpful gentleman who went through all the settings with me eventually coming to the conclusion that there was a “bug” in the current version of the RT-AC5300 “firmware”. He said he would escalate the issue, which should be addressed in a future firmware update. He went on to say that there was third-party firmware that may solve the problem, in the meantime. ASUS does not officially support third-party firmware and he warned me the router would not be supported by ASUS whilst third-party firmware was installed and it would be down to me if the router did not work at all after the update.
I decided to try this alternative firmware, which I believe is a “tweaked” version of the ASUS firmware, as it looks and behaves the same.
After installing the third-party firmware and rebooting “YouView” started working and even the 4K “BT UHD Sport channel works.
I was now, and still am, very happy with my purchase.
Uploading firmware on the RT-AC5300 is a very simple process and I have had no problems doing it numerous times (Comparing different firmware versions) nevertheless, I am not recommending anybody else do it and, if you do, you do so at your own risk and it will be your fault if, no matter how unlikely, you turn your very expensive modem into a “brick”.
The third-party “YouView” friendly software is available from:
(…)
You need the RT-AC5300 version 380.57, the latest version (380.58 at the time of writing, 25/03/16) does not support YouView and I have emailed the developer this fact.
Hopefully this review will be helpful to someone considering purchasing this very capable router.
ASUS RT-AC3200 Tri-Band Gigabit Wireless Router, Access Point/Repeater/Media Bridge Mode,USB 3.0,Time Machine, 3G/4G Dongle Support
I have had it working for a day now and no issues (ASUS RT-AC3200). Just had a baptism of fire with the Linksys WRT1900ACS (don’t buy). I got this one to replace the dreadful Linksys that I had from launch on 1st November 2015. Basically being a Virgin Media cable customer for x many years I have the cable router in modem mode rather than use the unreliable Superhub 2. As Virgin increased the speed they got to the point where my old external router was too basic (100 base), you need a gigabyte router when you get to speeds of 200 Mb/s since the Ethernet handshaking will cut you down to units of 10, 100 and 1000 if you have equipment that can handle wired 1 gigabyte Ethernet. Hence why you don’t want to use power plugs not rated for 1 gigabyte.
I followed the hint covered in one of the reviews here. Check for the latest software online, download it. Do an update after going through the menus and do a factory reset, that clears out any extraneous parameters that might be still hanging about from the previous software. Also switch all wifi and wired equipment off. This drops all the existing IP addresses so when the router is powered up, all equipment gets new IP addresses.
I was doing all of this frigging about his the Linksys router for the last 2.5 months less one months holidays. To my surprise I found that my new Samsung Galaxy Tab S2 on wifi on the 5 GHz band gave a speed check of 200 Mb/s i.e. there was no degradation in the cable speed since it was using the 801.11ac standard. The dreadful Linksys WRT1900ACS capped the speed at circa 50 mb/s.
I am running the built in Trend virus checking website filtering. I haven’t found any issues. It’s useful as I’m sure you know to have Speedtest and Insidder apps loaded up. Insidder can be used to check what wifi bands are being used locally so you can select your own if you wish. 2.4GHz band they should only be positioned on 1, 6 and 11. Wired speedtest is used to cross check against the wifi speed.
The only thing I would say at the minute is that the unit runs hot, so I hope the components can handle it. Like most electronic stuff if it survives the first few days it will go on and on.
Update: day 4 and it’s still going strong, no reboots, hiccups or anything (for winter you could probably dry your gloves on it although not recommended). There is an eco – energy save mode but generally I like routers to run 24/7 at full power. Using the ASUS Router app you can turn off any of the three SSIDS. Since I didn’t want my neighbours getting close to my favourite top band 5 GHz SSID, I turned off the lower band 5 GHz channel since I wasn’t using it and it would just cause other peoples routers to move channels getting closer to a channel I have to myself. Top band I have on auto, the more crowded 2.4 GHz band I always choose myself. The software has got some useful nag stuff in it to get you to change the routers password, length, security on etc.
I was in a quandary between getting the Asus, Netgear R8000 or the D-Link AC3200. I voraciously read the reviews where people complained of dropped connections, needing to reboot, awful QOS etc etc.
I plumped for the AC3200 by Asus and I am glad I did. Its a beast, the range is not quite as good as the RT87, but the web interface feels far snappier.
The Smart Connect on the ASUS has some “Rules” which allow you to decide how it assigns devices and so far so good.
Tip: Enter following value into “Network Key Rotation Interval” Found on the Wireless/General settings page.
Tip 2: After installing the Merlin Firmware to a “Reset to Factory Defaults”.
I have setup fort forwarding for CCTV, QNAP NAS, Torrents etc and they are working fine, as is the reserved allocation of IP addresses on LAN.
It has not crashed or needed re-booting once yet, wireless speeds are stellar, certainly on tests (speedtest.net) I have hit 161 Mbps (Down) and 12.1 (up) on Virgin Cable.
If you are in the market for an AC3200 class router then my advice would be to stump up the cash for the Asus, use the Merlin Firmware (It gets firmware updates far more frequently than the other two routers will).
Also routing on wired LAN network seems faster.
Thanks for reading, have a great day.
UPDATE
Since writing this review, the AC3200 has been relegated from routing, to being a WiFi access point (WAP) routing is now done by the Ubiquiti Edge Router Lite, (This has no WiFI it’s just a very capable and very fast router), The ASUS AC3200 continues to be a great device and the Smart Connect is a great feature and works well.