ASUS RT-AX88U PRO AX6000 Dual Band WiFi 6 Router, WPA3, Parental Control, Adaptive QoS, Port Forwarding, WAN aggregation, lifetime internet security and AiMesh support, Dual 2.5G Port

I picked this up partly because I’m a big IT nerd and wanted something more customizable for my home network—and partly because I was struggling to get Airlink working well with my Quest 3. Nothing else I tried gave me a stable connection, but this router totally delivered.For the price, it’s a great deal. You get a bunch of enterprise-level features like VPN support, firewall controls, and more. But despite all that, it’s still really user-friendly. Setup was super easy, so even if you just want a strong, no-fuss router, this one’s a solid choice.I mainly use the 6GHz band for Airlink and the 5GHz band for everything else. The wireless VR experience has been the smoothest I’ve ever had—no lag, no drops. Plus, the 5GHz signal easily covers my entire apartment.Even the unboxing experience was nice. The build quality is exactly what you’d expect from Asus—solid and reliable. Honestly, I don’t see myself needing to replace this until Wi-Fi 9 shows up and starts pushing 1 Tbps or something wild like that. 10/10 would recommend!

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.

This is a significant upgrade from my ASUS RT-87U to the RT-BE88U. The setup process was straightforward; it took me about five minutes to get everything up and running again. The IoT and other devices connected to the new router seamlessly, as if nothing had changed. I cloned the MAC address from my old router to ensure a smooth transition and used the identical SSID and password. The ASUS management interface looks similar to my previous router, except for the new 2.5GB and 10G ports. My previous ASUS router lasted me 10 years. I recommend this router from ASUS if you have an older ASUS router. Lastly, you can easily customize your gaming experience if you are a gamer.

I replaced a failing RT-AX89X with this RT-BE88U because it appears to be the spiritual successor of that older model, based on the generous amount of Ethernet ports on board. The fact that half of the ports on the RT-BE88U support 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet is great, as I no longer need to daisy chain higher-speed devices in via an SFP+ port, but just in case, this model still has one.I don't know what to make of the fact that one of the Ethernet ports is labeled "gaming," as any device can be optimized for gaming via the software's QOS settings. I suppose there could be some hidden code giving that port some priority, but I don't think anyone wants or needs such a feature.The 10 Gigabit WAN port is definitely overkill in the US for now, but it is nice to have, and can be repurposed to be a LAN port, which is nice.The lack of a 6GHz radio does not bother me, as I have almost no devices that would take advantage of it, and I do not have any mesh nodes to support. This "missing" feature brings the cost down by a considerable amount.The firmware is very familiar to me as I have had many Asus routers in the past. That's a double-edged sword as it has some of the same chunkiness and weirdness that has existed for years, but I also can easily find this router's newer features as they are in logical places in the UI.In my basic testing, the wireless range has been comparable to the old router, so I have no complaints there.I had forgotten that plugging a large storage device into an Asus router results in it using up all its RAM then not releasing it in a timely manner, so I had a bit of a scare during setup. A reboot always brings things back down to earth. SSH-ing into the router and issuing a cache clearing command also works, if you feel comfortable doing that, but I wish Asus would do better garbage collection and/or provide a software button for clearing the system caches!I hope this one lasts longer than my last Asus router. I have some very old Asus gear that still works to this day. The marketing fort the RT-BE88U boasts the presence of good heatsinks, preventing the need for a fan. Indeed, the fan on the RT-AX89X was awfully noisy and bothered my pets, so this silent model is an improvement in that regard. I don't feel any excessive heat coming off of the RT-BE88U, but I can see a lot of metal through the copious vents in the plastic casing, so I assume it's dissipating.The worst thing about this model comes as no surprise to Asus router customers - somehow, after all of this time, the detachable antennae are still absolute crap. Threading them onto the unit is more difficult than it needs to be, and if you attempt to adjust them (or maybe even look at them for too long), they will inevitably go limp and require tightening.