ASUS RT-AX88U Wireless-AX6000 AiMesh Dual Band Gigabit Router, OFDMA + MU-MIMO tech, 1024 QAM, Range Boost, Trend Micro AiProtection Pro, WTFast GPN, Dual WAN Support, 3G/4G Support

For me it seems rare that a combination of good hardware, software and tech support that comes together in a single package for any one item. It has done so when buying this Asus router. This AX 88U is a very capable router with full support for AES-NI instructions needed for running a VPN client with little CPU usage. We live in a big property, three floors, and I needed options to extend the Wi-Fi as well as give me some more LAN ports. The AX88U seemed to fit the bill perfectly, it has 8 LAN ports. Firstly I have included four photos. The first, with a rule next to it, shows the large footprint that the router takes. No longer upright like me previous router that might be an issue for some. For us that was fine. I have used the switch to turn off the LED lights, I find them distracting. The second phot gives you an example of the UI, the choice of the functions is amazing. The manual does help to explain those. The third photo shows the mobile App screen indicating the AX88U, lots of useful functions with that App. The fourth photo shows the LAN speed being maximised when copying a single large file via the router to a media server in the loft. CAT5E cables used. This review would get way too long to go into the absolute detail of the wealth of utilities that the software supports, it is staggering. The mobile App enjoys so many functions also. So this will be an overview of what has impressed me the most, so far. Setting up the router was simple. My biggest issue, my problem, is that I had set the LAN adapter on my PC to 192.168.1.50 for the IP and then 192.168.1.1 for the gateway. The new routers default IP (and thus gateway for the PC) was set to 192.168.0.50. For those who realise what that means you can then appreciate my initial problem. That was an easy fix tho. You can set it up from a PC, wired, or wirelessly using the Asus App. The Internet setup wizard, or you can go manual, was very easy to follow with using my ISP details. The single SSID again setup was simple. Under the WAN settings port forwarding was easy to setup for my CCTV NVR, to allow remote access for the cameras. Adaptive QOS and traffic management is work in progress. I am enjoying giving priority on traffic to media streaming over that of file downloads, no stuttering of watching videos whilst other download files. Guest access for the Wi-Fi for Internet usage is also useful. I do not have any Wi-Fi 6 devices but all of our AC devices connect and work at their expected speeds and the range is superb, helped of course with the AI Mesh mode. I have used their technical support services, that has been both prompt and informative. Again in my experience no faults there. The 88U has a quad core CPU and 1GB of RAM. The specification is most impressive. It would be difficult for me to find meaningful faults with this setup. Overall I continue to be impressed with Asus and their routers, they fit our needs well and seem intuitive to setup and enjoy a useful mobile App and good UK technical support. The router can be registered with Asus and enjoys a three years warranty. Overall very much recommended. I do not just give a five star review without careful consideration, I simply could not fault the router, nor what it offers. The UI, tech support and lots of useful tips and information, many YouTube videos, is just great. Having several other brands of routers in the past, using various flavours of custom firmware I am now very content with the professionalism of what Asus offer. I do hope that this review has helped you in making your choice. All the best

I upgraded this from a 4 year old Asus router that worked very well. I like the fact you can have guest networks with WPA2 personal security on Asus routers. Main reason for upgrade is son had a gaming pc for Christmas that has wifi 6. Our internet speeds are not great, being in a rural area - only about 8gbs. Whilst the router will not increase that, I am hoping it will be a more stable connection (as advertised) for gaming and has the qis setting to prioritise gaming packets. Good bits: Since setting it up I have found things generally a bit quicker - websites opening quicker etc. There are 6 guest networks available (3 for 2,4 ghz and 3 for 5ghz). I have one guest network set up for all our smart devices. Another for someone's phone who doesn't live here so comes and goes. And a 5ghz guest network just for the pc. If anyone has more knowledge of these things perhaps they can let me know if that is the best way to use 5ghz just for the gaming pc or whether I should have set a separate ssid for the 5ghz and left it solely for the PC. Installation was smooth and I am already familiar with the Asus web page for the router so used all the same logins - that bit was quick and easy except for one gremlin (below under not so goods) but nothing major. I haven't tried the app. My very old laptop works fine with it although I did update the wifi driver on that laptop. All our other gadgets worked fine without needing an upgrade. I will update further after feedback from son using his gaming pc but we're hoping his speeds won't keep dropping mid game and his ping will improve. Not so goods: A very weird thing when initially logging into the router page was that my keyboard was very sticky trying to type and kept missing letters and needing the keys bashed very hard. That was just on entering the password etc and setting up the ssid. Once into the web page keyboard was fine again. But I did use the very old laptop so may have been something to do with drivers. An annoying thing was while setting up guest networks, the web page software would sometimes crash and I'd have to start all over again. I learned from that to do things in a certain order. 1) Set up password initially and get into web page. 2) Change login name 3) Turn off WPS 4) Turn of UPNP 5) THEN - set up guest networks. That worked ok - but when I decided to change the SSID of one of the guest networks the whole thing crashed again and I had to start again once more. Moral of that is - once set up - leave it alone and its fine!

This may be of some use to people who have either bought, or are considering buying the AX88. When it comes to any networking equipment, I usually wait a year or two before purchasing. This is mainly because of firmware bugs etc which are more or less inevitable - the AX88 was no exception. As soon as it arrived the first thing I did was update to the latest firmware release. I would usually go for rMerlin based firmware but opted to keep it on the ASUSwrt for now. On setting the router up, everything appeared to be great until it came to performing a speed test from my cabled device. I’ve just had BT fibre 500 installed, but for some reason I was getting shockingly slow and erratic ethernet results - circa 100mb. It should be noted that I was getting 510+ when running the speed test to the same server directly from the router itself. I spent hours troubleshooting the issue but could find no obvious cause. Having checked everything from router config, cat6 cabling, device network adapter etc, I was at a total loss. What confused me even more was after I re-attached the BT homehub and restarted my device - I was finding I got 512mb download without any issue. Checking Google I could see asus, bt and snb forums filled with people reporting similar issues. I was seeing answers that ranged from faulty switches to enablement of jumbo packets. At this point I was giving up all hope and was in the process of returning the router. Shortly after I started the return process I had a bit of time to re-think what I’d tested and decided to perform another test now that my BT router was back in play. To my surprise I noticed that the BT router was also now playing up and giving me erratic results. This led to me rechecking the nic settings, but everything seemed normal. Having exhausted all the usual troubleshooting steps, I took one last shot and decided to kill all unnecessary app processes on both laptops I had used to run the speed tests from. To my surprise I found that I was getting the full 500mb without any issue! Starting each process again one by one I quickly discovered that Microsoft Teams (of all things) absolutely kills my speed! Checking the network monitor etc I could see no obvious reason for this as it was all ‘normal’ looking. The link wasn’t saturated and no heavy communication was taking place. The reason everything initially looked fine when I used the BT homehub, was quite simply because every time I ran the speed test I had just rebooted the device (so the likes of teams had not yet started in the background), and because both devices are the same model, with the same software, the issue was also the same. In summary, for anyone who is encountering speed issues - avoid making a rookie mistake like me and make sure the device you are testing from has all apps, especially collab apps like teams, zoom, Google meet etc turned off with the processes killed. As I have found out, it’s not always the router that’s the bottleneck or issue.

Update July 2024 Owned now for 3+ years. Generally rock solid and no issues. One time it spontaneously rebooted and no idea why (contacted ASUS support but they wanted me to factory reset- although they didn’t say that and seemed to not understand it was going to wipe every setting. It also stopped logging some data but a few updates later started again. Very few firmware updates now. Maybe one every year it seems. Happy with performance and the fact I don’t need to worry about it. Would buy ASUS again. 👍 Review for the RT-AX88U Absolute doddle to install - I noted down all the existing setting on the Virgin Superhub, put it in modem modem mode and powered it down. Plugged the new router into laptop via cable and configured with the old settings. Less than 5 minutes and all was fine. I was hoping the WiFi range would be better - it’s certainly not worse and seems faster in WiFi. There are some great features in the router - however I have had issues with my smart TV and Netflix, Prime and iPlayer, the TV is connected via cable and the apps all seem slow and buffering which never happened before. It could be my ISP but I never saw that ever. I turned AI security off and QoS to see if it improves. One odd thing - there are no connection / activity lights on each of the network ports. Not sure why but it’s an easy sign of connection etc. If the TV issues persist I will try ASUS support but can’t imagine it will be easy to solve. Quick update. 13-1-21 I turned DLNA server in the router OFF and the Smart TV seems stable again.

TLDR: if you have network performance problems after your initial firmware update, do a factory reset. Best to update firmware and factory reset first, before you configure it. I bought this RT-AX88U as a straight replacement for the earlier RT-AC88U, to benefit my newest WiFi6 devices. I connected my laptop via ethernet, updated to the latest firmware, set everything up identical to the previous model (same SSID and password, etc) and expected everything to work as before. Nope! It was a disaster! All my old devices acted like they had WiFi connections and great signal strength, but nothing worked right. Amazon ECHOs all stopped responding, phone and tablets were incredibly slow and media streaming was impossible. Even the Fire TV stick on a wired ethernet connection stopped working. After much Googling and wasted time going down blind alleys fiddling with settings, I was getting nowhere. I'd have happily chanted magical incantations while rattling chicken bones over the router if it would just fix things ... it didn't, by the way :-) Finally, I found some threads that suggested you need to do a factory reset after the firmware upgrade ... something to do with the new firmware picking up old / invalid settings from non-volatile memory that can only be cleared with a factory reset. I'd never had to do that with the RT-AC88U and didn't relish the idea of doing the config all over again, but was running short on options, so tried it ... and "hey presto", it worked like magic. Everything started working as normal, immediately. Great wifi performance, ECHOs responding, streaming back on the Fire TV. I'm hoping I don't have to do a factory reset and re-configure after every firmware update going forward, but it's solved my problems for now and I'll know what to do if a future update causes similar problems. Apart from that initial glitch, I'm really happy with this router and have no hesitation recommending it. If this tip helps just one person then it's all been worthwhile ...

Purchased on prime day for a great price to replace an AC68 as I had upgraded my broadband to a 1 gig circuit. Fast, COVID safe and friendly delivery as always via Amazon Prime. Arrived well packaged and factory sealed. Looking at previous reviews one of the first things I did was update the firmware. As per a previous review this needed a hard reset otherwise the device just kept rebooting. Once this was done its been rock solid since. I've used and recommended to friends several ASUS routers before and love the user interface (UI) as it flows well and I find it only takes a short time to set up. The Trend security features are a really useful bonus and deep a fair level of packet inspection and visibility plus QOS if needed. The performance benefits from the quad-core processor was very noticeable and even with all packet inspection features switched on and six guest wifi virtual APs enabled runs effortless with my 1gbit circuit. Had one Over the air update since and that went without a hitch. Recommend talking a config backup just as good practice. Rock solid and reliable. Highly recommended!

I bought this because of the endless Hub 3 horrible Wifi reports that everyone talked endlessly about and I am so glad that I did. Was a little worried about how to get the router to work with the hub in modem mode, but it was so easy. Just plug the Wan lead into the back of the hub 3 and do not put the hub into modem mode until you are finished playing about with the router. Maybe get those firmware updates out of the way first, there's 8 so far! The router works fine with the hub 3 still in router mode until you are happy to put the hub into modem mode. Makes sure the router reports a DHCP and IP address of 192.168.XX. on your phone or laptop, either wireless or wired connected works. Then when you are happy that everything connects fine, then go to you virgin hub router settings and switch to modem mode and you are ready to go. If you don't do the firmware updates first and you have a Samsung or Apple phone, you might get slow internet problems reported, but the updates sort that out. I would recommend this router. (EDIT) I thought I could get away with the 160mhz 5G higher frequency channels but, either Virgin is playing up or the router needs a little bit of work, but I lost connection for a few times and even after a reboot I had to go back to the standard 5G 20-80Mhz channels. Maybe someone has an answer for this.

Bought this router with two ASUS RT-AX92U AX6100 for a whole home AIMesh. Wifi is initial superb, devices switch access points seamlessly and wifi penetration is great. Overall router performance is strong and setup very easy However there are several show-stopper problems for me which the items do not work as they are supposed to - after tickets with ASUS on each item they admitted there were problems on each and all kit had to be refunded. 1) VPN server functionality does not work at all as an IPSec server (only OpenVPN) - this might not be in issue for some people, but it was for me. The IPSec VPN config pages are all there but it simply does not accept any incoming connections 2) The Guest Wifi network only works on the router, not across the AIMesh so guests cannot connect to either AP 3) Router Wifi will sometimes just kick all devices off and not accept any new connections until it reboots (whilst the AP's are still working fine) Asus tech support tried hard to help me, but eventually gave up. Amazon immediately refunded once Asus took this step.

This provides very good WiFi coverage in a medium sized house. The setup is incredibly easy using an app that also provides remote diagnostics.A great product well worth spending a little extra on

Excellent router but after having installed the Merlin firmware it's become even better. Merlin really does open up a whole lot of functionality that isn't there with the Asus stock firmware. Flashing it with Merlin is as easy as it gets using the update firmware option.

Superb speeds on both wired and wireless and the router was very easy to setup on my du Network here in Dubai. Updated to the latest firmware the moment I got it, not a single disconnection. Highly recommended.

I hoped that by purchasing expensive router I will get decent coverage specially with across floors, but I was disappointed as the improvement of coverage compared to basic router is not big. Router itself is bulky, but looks nice and function great as long as you are in the same floor as the router. If you are considering this as part of Asus AiMesh, it is still not stable and full of bugs (devices switch between the 2 routers randomly although these devices and routers are stationary which sometimes causes the IoT devices to lose connection)

Awesome router. First time i bought it, got a faulty until. Returned it and bought a new one. Working great. Range is same as the etisalat router but speed is night and day fast. 8 Ethernet ports are good for link aggregation for my NAS.