ASUS RT-AC5300

IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR THE BIGGEST AND BEST, THIS IS IT.

IF YOU SIMPLY must have the very latest tech, the ASUS RT-AC5300 is your best bet. It’s cheaper than its AC5300/AC5400 competition and boasts more features than any of the other similarly-specced routers.

As we have noted in other ASUS router reviews, the company really has the best bundled rmware on the market today. Based on the open source OpenWRT, it possesses features commonly only found in business and security routers, but retains an appealing graphical user interface that makes it accessible to non-technical users.

e feature list is extensive: there’s VPN support (both client and server), fantastic QoS and tra c management tools and reporting, 3G/4G data sharing as a failover in case the main network goes down, excellent USB storage and printer sharing, per-user parental controls and management, peer-to-peer and direct download management, and remote access to les on attached storage devices using the AiCloud service. e mobile tools are also great, providing easy setup and giving access to the full range of features available in the rmware.

So let’s talk about the hardware, then. When it comes to consumer Wi-Fi, this is it — the very best you can get. It creates two 802.11ac networks with MU-MIMO and 1024QAM support, individually capable of 2,137Mbps. When a device connects, it is dynamically assigned to a network based on the current network load. All this bandwidth makes it best for environments where there are a large number of users likely to hit it at once. It’s probably overkill for most households, but small businesses and multi-dwelling units could make good use of it.