RT-AX88U

I'm a long time Asus user and I am replacing a four year old Asus AC router. It works great but over the years the number of devices in my household has increased significantly (almost 50 devices) and many of them are Chromecasts streaming Hulu Live TV. The older router would max out on memory and CPU and sometimes disrupt our activities. I decided to upgrade to a router with more performance and decided to future proof it a bit and spend the extra money to get an AX/WiFi-6 compatible router.This is the second router I purchased. Even though I am a long time Asus user, I initially tried the TP-Link Archer AX-6000. That router performed very well for speed and range but I had CONSTANT problems with it going offline/online - usually 3-4 times per day. I have a family of 6 so unless you want to call an immediate family meeting near the router, it's got to be solid. I worked with tech support who was very responsive but they could not fix the problem. I'm not sure if I had bad hardware or if it was just a firmware issue that might be fixed at some point, but I couldn't accept the disruption of all my devices especially when we're streaming TV. So unfortunately, the TP-Link went back to Amazon. I knew I should have never left Asus!I purchased the Asus and I'm very pleased to report that this thing is rock solid. I have not even once gone offline and all my devices connect and work perfectly. Range and speed are outstanding. I have 115Mbps service in my house for now (hoping 500+ will be available sometime soon) and I'm able to get those speeds anywhere in the three story home. Using a throughput app, I'm seeing 700-1000 Gbps depending on where I am at in the home. Ping is very low, lower than both the old Asus and the TP-Link. So overall excellent performance and range. I have my network setup in "smart" mode where the SSID is the same for both radios. I'm not sure if it makes a difference because I've always set mine up that way, just never had the "smart" feature as an option. The smart mode I think tries to balance the number of devices on each radio and will move them if demand is too great on one or the other. Seems to work well although I haven't tested it without it turned on.So overall, I definitely recommend this router. I've only had it for a short time but I will come back and update the review if something changes. For all those that are having connectivity issues, have you updated to the newest firmware? Mine is rock solid.

I bought a Netgear XR500 last november for the very impressive looking DumaOS... to find a buggy, completely not fleshed out (event he VPN function advertised wasn’t implemented until a late December firmware update), insanely unstable (crashed at least once a week every week, i had to resort to using my 4yr old Netgear R7000 that was perfectly reliable) router with the company that makes DumaOS having an incredibly apathetic, “we’ll fix it when we fix it” and “No ETA’s on fixes, we make updates, Netgear releases them. Ask them” tone on all forums, i gave up on hoping it would be fleshed out at any point soon. So i got rid of it for the AX88u and flashed Merlin on it.I was looking for a traffic analyzing, enterprise-functionality router with the XR500 with every nerd knob possible (like Tomato firmware offers), and got a dumbed down buggy experience with barely even basic configuration options. The AC88u was the exact opposite. From a conditional VPN to IPS/traffic analysis/web logging/firewal/features you normally need to outfit a network with separate dedicated devices for, this handles it all with absurd speed and responsiveness in the interface. Everything i thought might be a gimmick (like trendmicro’s ‘aiprotection’) is the real deal and you could not ask for more to secure a home network unless you did go with those dedicated devices. It’s super stable (i changed core router settings that have to restart services in AsusWRT, while transferring 150GB worth of data from a client to an SSD connected to it to test network/USB speeds, and downloading a giant BFV patch on my gaming PC while on a work skype call and never even got a blip of cut-out or noise on my call. The web interface locked up because i made one kinda dumb change while doing this but the call never did!), inSANELY fast across the board (from using it as an OpenVPN client to enabling all the COU-taxing security features to topping out its resources by reading and writing to a USB-connected SSD), i can’t even convey how great this is.I wanted to see my clients’ connection rates, which interfaces they were connected to, and very importantly their life bandwidth and traffic- and within a couple clicks i can do this as if i’m navigating a Cisco ASA firewall. Just function after function, it’s all available, and it all works.I also got this for increased theoretical AC speeds and eventual AX speeds, along with wanting the fastest chipset available (my R7000 nighthawk was extremely modular, but its dual-core 1ghz CPU definitely struggled to pass VPN traffic at full bandwidth. My XR500 bricked itself after about 5 minutes of use whenever i even tried to configure the VPN. The AX88U has zero issues with that speed or stability there). So far i haven’t been able to bottleneck the CPU with anything yet without the ethernet Gb bandwidth limitation topping out first. Maybe when AX clients come into play and i set up an aggregated 2Gb link the router could start chugging in some cases, but i have no idea and really doubt it would cause a sweat at this point.Lordy, even gaming-wise i’ve been casually checking my ping in Battlefield V and Anthem, i’m getting response times i’ve never seen anywhere i’ve lived with any hardware i’ve had before (7-12ms pings, better than 95% of everyone on any server i’m put in).I even use this to manually reserve IP addresses for my non-configurable IoT devices so I know where everything is on the network. The XR500 would wipe its memory every few days, destroying the work i did there. This is super stable, leases every IP to every device i tell it on-call and never has an issue. It’s just too freaking good. My R7000 was the king of the mid 20-teens. The AX88u is the successor.In summary this thing is an utter beast. If you’re looking to go with a ‘gaming’ router, i was looking between this and the GT-AX11000 when i decided to get rid of the XR500. I chose this because they have the same horsepower, same specs, and the gimmicky 3rd band of 5Ghz the 11000 has id just that... a gimmick unless you have 300 devices in your home. I run about 50 clients in an apartment with plenty of neighbor networks and never have a problem with congestion or needing more bandwidth, especially for gaming, that this extra band ‘gives’ you. Also, the main reason i chose this is because the gaming ROG firmware on thr GT-AX11000 actually IS gimmicky. Read reviews on the GT-AC5300 and you’ll see a lack of Asus updates, constant bugs, broken features (recently an update actually stopped that 3rd 5ghz band from even broadcasting), and poorly implemented gaming functions unique to the router that just don’t work most of the time. I have a friend that runs an AiMesh with an AC88u and GT-AC5300 since Christmas and it has given nothing but issues. The worst part is, NO 3rd party firmware support with the ROG firmware. So if Asus doesn’t fix a bug, you’re out of luck. The AX88u is supported by Merlin which is the snappiest, slickest firmware out there for Asus routers. That’s the key, the firmware- and the AX88u has the one you want with no big compromises to the AX11000.Last thing, AX11000 has the 2.5GbE port. Neat, but with the 8x 1GbE ports on the AX88u you have plenty of available ports to run link aggregation on, say, a separate switch with 2.5/5/10GbE support in the future for a 2Gb pipe into any of the direct router clients, while you can put any insanely fast clients on the switch directly later when those speeds start being adopted. It’s all a win-win with this router and any future scenarios you can think of.10/10 best router of 2019, true Netgear Nighthawk R7000 successor.

I purchased the ASUS WIFI 6 802.11AX Router to replace my NetGear NightHawk WIFI 5 802.11AC Router. Although the WIFI signal is excellent, I can’t say it is any better than the signal I had from the NetGear NightHawk.If you are looking to purchase this Router to replace a WIFI 5 802.11AC Router you may not see much performance gain.On a plus note, I had no issues at all with getting the WIFI Router setup and I LOVE the user interface settings on the Router. Plus the Router looks awesome!I also LOVE the extra Gigabit ports in the back of the Router. The ports came in very handy plugging in extra devices. Previously, I was using a USB 3.0 external dumb switch but I did not get the best connectivity with the switch. When I started using the Gigabit ports that problem was solved immediately.You can go into the user interface settings on the ASUS Router and it will show you if any of the network cables that are plugged in are having performance issues and what the possible issues are to fix the issue.If I had it to do over, I would definitely buy this Router again! If you are on the fence, don’t let the price stop you. Yes, it is more expensive than other Routers. But, you get what you pay for.