RT-AX57

Amazon Rview: Read through to get to the Asus RT-BE88U....This review will most likely not get posted. I purchased the Netgear RS700S as "refurbished," which generally means that it was returned and some how repaired (or at least double check to make sure it is working per manufacturer specs). It was not. Router would continuously drop signal. So it appears that Amazon just repackaged it and sold it, as is.Router Review:1. Administrator menu is very limited on what you can do.2. When accessing the router's admin menu, it times you out after about 15-20 seconds while your trying to read the documentation for settings. You must re-sign in EVERY SINGLE TIME!3. You can NOT change the admin user name. You must use "admin." Without the ability to change the admin name Netgear reduced your router access security by 50%.4. In order to gain access to the needed security for the router, you MUST pay an annual subscription!!5. Netgear customer service people are rude to you if you turn down the subscription sales pitch, and then reqest to get I.T. support on an issue. They actually hung up on me. At first I thought the over-seas phone line dropped. However, when I called back 2 or 3 times, they would not even answer the phone.CONCLUSION:I returned the RS700S for a full refund and bought an ASUS RT-BE88U router. Everything mentioned above is NOT an issue. Their admin user name can be changes, you have a huge amount of control within the admin menu (including how long you wish the menu to time-out.) NO annual subscription fees. Signals on 2.4, 5, and 6G are very solid. I have 15 devices and not one of them has ever dropped a signal. Also, reboot times are much fast than Netgear's.Great router, security, menu interface, and performance! Customer service wasn't needed because this router just WORKS!!

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.