ASUS RT-BE88U Dual-band WiFi 7 AiMesh Extendable Performance Router, 4K-QAM, MLO, Dual 10G ports, SFP+, Four 2.5G ports, Four 1G ports, 34G WAN/LAN capacity, Subscription-free network security, VPNs

Flashed to Merlin, started up, all running straight away, Tailscale installed and running. I think my old router couldn’t handle running jffs scripts and operating as a router. The other bonus is the Ethernet ports which meant I got rid of a switch. Throughput seems good via 5G router in pass through. No real dramas setting it up. All in all a bit expensive but sorted out lots of little niggles in one hit. Running home network - unraid + vm’s + ai + tv’s + work + mesh with 3 nodes.

So far, zero issues. I held off reviewing this until I've used it for a while. And I can't fault it. The WiFi 7 is a bit of a gimmick, it's just as good as a decent WiFi 6 router, there's no 6Ghz but for most British internet connections you don't need anything better. My reasoning for buying this was the 2.5Gbps networking and it works perfectly. Transfering files from PC to PC in my house now occurs at around 270MB/s which is roughly 2.4Gbps so I'd say that's perfect. If you've got a homelab server setup, lots of PCs with 2.5Gbps LAN this will be great. Our home connection is 1Gbps and via the 2.5Gbps port on our ISP router in modem mode we get 1.2Gbps, that doesn't change via this router.

I have 10gbe fibre to my server and 10gb rj45 lan to pc, then a 2.5gb backhaul to my zen node and a couple of other devices. The only disadvantage is it doesn't have wifi 6 (my node does though) so it's not the best wifi 7 like the ROG But that doesn't have a fibre port. So, for me, this is the prefect setup. Specify by IP the main phones to give priority signal, built in ai protection. It's packed with features including vpn fusion where i can specify which devices live on a VPN. So if you need the fastest wifi 7 find another router. If you want a solid all rounder this is the one.

I've always used Asus Routers, upgraded my Asus RT-AX89X to this ASUS RT-BE88U Dual-band WiFi 7 Router. I wish I hadn't bothered, I found the WiFi only okay, nothing special, what I really couldn't get along with was how grainy everything was when streaming Live TV, Netflix, Disney+ and so on. I'm pretty tech savvy so at first, I thought the grainy streaming quality was my broadband, so I tried out a couple of my older Asus routers, everything worked great with older routers. After doing some troubleshooting, I found when streaming using the Asus RT-BE88U there was allot of packet loss, the software seemed quite slow and buggy. I gave it a chance for 2 days but I couldn't get the Asus RT-BE88U to work as well as it's predecessors. I've returned it, and purchased the new TP-Link Archer GE800 - BE19000 Tri-Band Wi-Fi 7 Gaming Router with the 6Ghz band, and SPF+ Port. Having never used TP-Link routers before, I gotta say, I'm very impressed with TP-Link.

So far this has been an awesome upgrade. I have connected this to a Virgin Hub 4 (which is set in modem mode). Immediately my wired and wireless speeds have improved and my ping has reduced by about 10ms. I chose this model specifically as it has Wireguard VPN built in which I am using to allow my children at University to tunnel through my home connection to watch subscription services that we have a family account for. So far this seems to work although I am not sure as yet if those services are clever enough to detect this. I will update my review if they are eventually blocked. I can't comment on the Wireless 7 aspect as I don't have any wireless 7 devices to test with it, but as this is only a dual band router and does not have 6GHz capability I am not sure it is Wireless 7 capable without a 6Ghz extender (which you can add). But the Wireless 6 speeds are certainly improved. The range is not that much better than the native wireless in the Virgin HUB 4, but my house does not deal well with wireless anyway due to the fact the walls have a wire mesh embedded in them. Overall though a great product and I am very happy with it.

You can literally buy a fake WiFi 7 router, the same as this one, without all the over engineering for £120 here on Amazon UK and comes loaded with 2.5gb/s Wan and Lan ports, does everything this router does, and much easier to work with, also without the ASUS value added tax on top of that, it took me over 3 hours to try and figure things out on this Asus router, I couldnt get any wifi devices to connect to it at all, after various factory resets and no user manual, it turned out it was having a USB stick plugged in the USB port, as soon as it was removed, it lit up like a xmas tree and worked fine, so in order to use the usb port for storage like a nas, you need to set the router up without anything plugged into the USB port, then goto WAN > Dual WAN > and select no to 4G / 5G mobile tethering which is enabled by default, what everyday user is going to know how to do this ? ended up sending it back, this is really not needed for a home router and is a pile of junk.5 Initial setup forces you to set up a single wifi 7 network and a single IoT network, with no bypass just incase you dont want to use those features, and once set, they are there for good, you can disable them in the router web config page, but you cant fully remove them, so if you then decide to not use the wifi 7 and split your 2.4 and 5ghz networks, although youve got the 7ghz disabled, they still show up in the network map, and somehow the buggy firmware, mixes up which devices are connect to which which profiles, its very frustrating. So unless you need all these ports for an office or small business to eliminate a switch for instance, dont waste you money on this, not needed for the normal household.

Paid £264.99 in September 2025. I've been using Asus since 2013, and it's been pretty good, except for a few firmware glitches. Install Merlin firmware to get the best out of the router. The only problems I've had were with upgrading WiFi (5, 6, 7) with stuff like Google Nest speakers, TP-Link plugs, and cameras... man, switching from WiFi 6 to 7 really tested me. I thought 5 to 6 was bad enough. If I'd known how much of a pain it would be to go from 6 to 7, I would have just stuck with 6. But I also needed the 10 gig to future-proof my fiber connection. The IoT network setting is useless and doesn't work. The only way I got things stable was by adding an older WiFi 5 access point for all my IoT stuff; problems vanished after that, and I should have done it years ago. My list of Asus routers owned are as follows, RT-AC56U RT-AC58U RT-AC68U RT-AC86U (IoT Access Point) GT-AX6000 (AIMesh Node) RT-BE88U (Main Router) All of them still working to this day! Touch wood! Overall, the LAN/WAN speed is beyond perfect. The CPU and RAM for this thing have plenty of power for anything most users are going to throw at it, plenty of features but most of them are snake oil, like AI Protection and at less than half the price of the BE98, makes it perfect value. I use quite a few custom scripts and configs to keep the router fresh and monitor my connection thanks to Merlin. But the WiFi compatibility with older devices is a bit of a letdown. I guess that's what I get for upgrading to the newest WiFi standard that's two steps forward, one step back.

Great piece of kit which I run with ET12 mesh nodes and a VPN wire guard tunnel to another ASUS router. Would definitely recommend.

ero titubante perchè è ricondizionato ma veramente un ottimo prodotto funziona alla grande

Una auténtica maravilla de router. Multitud de puertos físicos, con múltiples opciones de configuración, servidor de VPN, filtrado, QoS... Como único punto negativo y a tener en cuenta es que consume hasta 80W (lleva un alimentador de 12v 5A)

Ottimo prodotto però il wifi mi fa un po' a desiderare un po' scarso