Asus RT-AC88U Dual-Band Router Review: Comes With Great Features Like MU-MIMO Technology Support

The Asus RT-AC88U is a 4-by-4 based 802.11ac dual-band router along with Broadcom NitroQAMTM technology   with Multi-User Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) technologies to serve multiple Wi-Fi clients simultaneously without sacrificing bandwidth.

Design and Features

This gigantic router has 4 removable and rotatable antennas two at the rear and one at the both left and right for maximum coverage.

The black in color router comes with some red parts in antenna enhancing the looks. It measures 3.3x11.8x7.4 inches and has a black matte hood with angular edges. The front of the router designed beautifully with a USB 3.0 port hidden under a small panel at the left side whereas LED & Wireless off/on button in the right. Just above the front of the router, it has LED indicators for power, wireless activity for both bands, Internet (WAN) connectivity, Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), LAN connectivity, and USB port activity. The back side has eight Gigabit Ethernet ports, a USB 2.0 port, a WAN port, and a Power jack, Power button, a reset button, and a WPS button.

User-friendly web interface

The RT-AC88U management interface is really very intuitive with lots of useful features that can be accessed via Web browser or Mobile app. The dashboard divides into two sections one General setting and other is Advance.

General setting

The General setting contains Guest Network, Adaptive QoS, Aiprotection, Traffic Analyzer, USB application, Game Boost and Aicloud 2.0. The Guest and The Adaptive QoS allow you to manage and monitor your bandwidth.  The Traffic analyzer option provides you a graph or statistics of your traffic, pie charts of incoming and outgoing packet data used by clients. The Game Boost page offers you WTFast Gamers Private Network(GPN) and LAN Boost. The WTFast is a client/server solution that uses proprietary software to accelerate online gameplay whereas LAN boost is used Adaptive QoS to optimize the network for better gaming experience without dropping a frame.

The Asus Aiprotection features is an inbuilt security feature implemented with Trend Micro collaboration. This feature smartly monitors your network in real time to detect malware, viruses, and other intrusions before they breach your network. It also provides parental control option, including time scheduling and filtering feature to restrict unwanted websites and apps for your children security.

With the AiCloud feature, you can access your data from a smartphone or a tablet using an iOS or Android app. You can attach USB disk to the front panel USB 3.0 or back USB 2.0 port and can use it as a Cloud Disk from anywhere through the internet. Also, can create a Samba network to access the PC’s remotely.

Advanced settings

Now come to the other part of setting i.e. Advanced settings. It basically relates more to router networking part, it let you create wireless SSID, select security protocol, VPN, WAN, RADIUS and a wireless bridge, WPS, Firewall and others. In the Wireless Professional Settings page, it offers settings such as beacon intervals, multicast rates, wireless scheduling, Reducing USB 3.0 interference, Airtime Fairness, beamforming and much more. The Firewall tab offers Denial of Service protection, URL filtering, Network service filter, keyword filtering and IPv6 firewall.

Performance

We tested the signal performance of dual-band Asus router, connected two machines wirelessly on 2.4 GHz band and transferred 963 MB of data from one machine to other and it took about 5 minutes and 22 seconds. While using the 5 GHz band it took only 2 minutes and 18 seconds. We also used som benchmarks to test its download and upload speed. On 2.4 GHz, using the OpenSignal, download speed was 6.6 Mbps, upload was 448 kbps with a latency of 68 ms.

On 2.4 GHz, using the OpenSignal, download speed was 5.5 Mbps, upload was 746 kbps with a latency of 548 ms. Using Wi-Fi analyzer, signal strength was -36 dBm, link speed 72 Mbps and AP latency was 4 ms.

On 5 GHz, using the OpenSignal, download speed was 6.6 Mbps, upload was 448 kbps with a latency of 68 ms. Using Wi-Fi analyzer, signal strength was -33 dBm, link speed 433 Mbps and AP latency was 3 ms.