Asus RT-AX88U

PACKED WITH FEATURES BUT A BIT HALF-BAKED. WE EXPECT THIS TO IMPROVE WITH TIME.

ASUS’S NEW RT-AX88U is from the alien attack fighter school of router design, so its angular-black chassis, four large antennae and gold detailing will look awesome or awful, depending on personal taste.

The theoretical speeds offered by AX6000 routers are (roughly) 6,000Mbps: 1,148Mbps on the 2.4GHz channel and 4,804Mbps on 5GHz. We’d love to have tested maximum speeds but, unfortunately, AX Wi-Fi adapters won’t be available until around Q3 2019. While we had an AX-compatible Samsung Galaxy S10+ phone on hand, this could not beat older AC Wi-Fi speeds using the Asus, even when used as a tethered, USB Wi-Fi dongle. We also tried to transfer files from a directly-attached, fast, USB SSD but, try as we might, we could not convince the router to enable transfers. This left us testing performance the oldfashioned way: sharing a 115/5Mbps internet connection with an iPad Pro on each floor of a three-storey town house. While we were testing, two children were watching YouTube videos on old Android tablets while a teenager was shooting things on an online PC.

Up close the Asus recorded 86Mbps download speeds. One floor up these dropped to 73Mbps while on the top floor they dropped to 46Mbps. This is decent last-gen performance but we expected more. To verify we tried the S10+’s AX Wi-Fi and saw maximum speed on the ground floor, followed by 107Mbps and 83Mbps as we moved upstairs. This improvement came despite the phone’s weaker Wi-Fi antenna which suggests Asus’s router is not quite as compatible with our test environment as TP-Link’s AX6000 (previous page). To be fair, it’s very early days and firmware and driver updates will likely fix a multitude of sins.

Somewhat making up for performance shortfalls is an impressive feature list. However, while we applaud having eight gigabit Ethernet plus two USB 3.1 ports, the old-school, web-browser-based settings eschew a simple, modern layout for a crowded mess.

Nonetheless, we were impressed with the integrated malware and family protection tools that are provided by Trend Micro. Asus calls them AiProtection Pro and TP-Link offer the same thing.

There are many, elaborate QoS settings which allow you to set the priority of different types of apps (gaming, VoIP, streaming etc). In addition to these are more-specific ‘Game Boost’ QoS integrations including WTFast for maximising MMO game stability and LAN Boost which (also) promises to prioritise game traffic performance. Another ‘QoS’ feature records all Web Surfing History – which may spark privacy issues.

Multiple USB settings allow you to configure the USB ports in various ways: web server, 3G/4G dongle, print server, Time Machine, Samba and FTP server. Asus AiCloud options add more web server functionality plus integration to Asus’s cloud services. Other features enable VPNs, Alexa plus IFTTT integration with other smart devices.

Some of the extra features will intrigue buyers but it all feels a bit messy and halfbaked at the moment. At $569 it’s very expensive and with a solid, faster, cheaper TP-Link rival outperforming it, most people would be better off saving money and buying that.