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

The media could not be loaded. The ASUS router has been an excellent upgrade for my home network. It’s fast, reliable, and packed with features that are perfect for more advanced setups. One of the standout features for me is VPN Fusion — it lets me route only specific devices or apps through a VPN while keeping others on the regular connection. That level of control is a huge win.However, while it does have built-in load balancing, I ran into issues when using it with multiple WAN connections. If one connection failed and the router switched over, it would temporarily expose my VPN traffic, which wasn’t ideal. That’s why I added a TP-Link ER605 in front of it to handle the WAN balancing. Now the ASUS sees just one stable line, and the VPN Fusion works perfectly 24/7 with no leaks or interruptions.Overall, this is a high-performance router that’s perfect for power users. The interface is clean, firmware updates are consistent, and it plays nicely with complex setups. Highly recommend!- Easy to setup- Great wifi range- Up to this date, Asus still the best router.- Asus VPN Fusion Option - Works great with OpenVPN and Wireguard- Dual WAN - Great!

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.

Our neighborhood finally got access to fiber internet and my trusty AC1750 router couldn't keep up with the new 940 Mbps up/down speeds. I was able to set up the AXE-7800 in just a few minutes and the performance is fantastic. (I did buy a Cat 6 cable to connect the fiber modem to the router instead of using the included Cat 5e cable). The screenshot showing 874 Mbps down/823 up is from my laptop separated from the router by 20 ft and 3 walls. Even in the furthest reaches in the basement of my house, I'm getting 300 down/150 up, which is more than adequate for my needs. I hope this router will be reliable over the long term, but so far I'm very happy.Additional thoughts after a week:The Wifi 6E feature is less useful than anticipated. I'm basically only using Wifi 6 because the range drop-off for the 6 GHz band is pretty harsh. Close the router, 6E performance is fantastic. 10 feet away with a direct line of sight, I get my full 940/940 speeds on Wifi. But anywhere more than 15 feet away from the router and if there are walls in the way, I'm getting better performance on the 5Ghz/2.4Ghz bands. My laptop can't even detect the 6Ghz connection if I'm in the basement. I guess 6E would be useful in an environment with too much interference in the 5Ghz/2.4Ghz bands but it doesn't really do too much for me. I don't think it's the fault of this router, just a limitation of the technology.Second, the ethernet port: I found that my fiber modem and this router aren't able to communicate at 2.5 Gb through the high speed LAN port. Maybe it's my fiber modem's fault, but the router/modem only used it as a 1 gb LAN port. Thankfully, this router has WAN aggregation where it lets you plug in two 1 Gb ethernet cables into the router. It was pretty easy to set up and it seems to be better, especially handling concurrent traffic up and down.Lastly, it's been stable with no drops. I'm still glad I chose this router.