NEWS: Asus Launches RT-AX88U Router With Wi-Fi 6 Support and 6,000Mbps Speeds

Andy Bassett

Asus are Wi-Fi 6 ready with their latest RT-AX88U Router boasting speeds of up to 6,000Mbps.
Read the news.

psychopomp1

And knowing Asus it will be full of bugs galore hence the need for Merlin or other third party firmware to fix the bugs. Haven’t touched an Asus router since the notorious RT-AC87U. What on earth were Asus thinking of by using Quantenna hardware?

MarkyPancake

I like Asus routers and the last three routers I've had have been Asus (N66U, AC68U, AC86U), but it's highly unlikely you'll ever achieve the theoretical max speed of any router in real-world use. The larger speed numbers on the box are good for marketing though.

Before trying to achieve a true 160 MHz channel width connection, try and make use of a 5 GHz channel at 80 MHz for the AC spec and you'll struggle, due to other networks around you and DFS limitations of higher channels.

I have no doubt though that the ever improving hardware specs of routers help them to deal with the increasing number of devices connected to them.

tich77

Fixed that for you.

On a more serious note, its interesting to see just how far marketeers will take their claims, adding together max theoretical duplex bandwidth, QAM, and "magic sauce" to come up with a bigger number.

psychopomp1

Actually you CAN get the advertised link rates, provided the right hardware is used at both ends and the conditions are right. My Linksys EA9500 router paired with my Asus PCE-AC88 desktop 4x4 wifi card gives me a 2.1 Gb/s link rate. Of course real life performance will be nowhere near that but those link speeds are exactly what is advertised on the box.

Har-One

I've got the RT-AC88U and so far it works quite nicely.

malford

My RT-AX88U was delivered on Saturday and I was able to use the backup config from my RT-AC87U so setup took minutes which was great and I got to transfer the Asus DDNS to the new router.
Noticeable differences so far are the speed of config page is instant and I can now stream my Hikvision cctv footage in “clear” with no dropouts or stuttering.
I’m now using the old AC87U as a AP, not sure whether to sell and buy an AiMesh device?
I do prefer the aesthetics of the AC87U to the AX88U

mickevh

For my two cents worth, it's nice to see MU-MIMO (and OFDMA) beginning to be a "thing" in the real world. It's what most interested me when AC was under development. Of course, it's a bit less interesting a "marketing" sell to the general public over ever inflating link rate claims (the latter always rather reminds me of the "score inflation" in pinball machines and video games,) but it wouldn't surprise me if MU-MIMO made a bigger difference to peoples "lived experience" with their existing phones and tablets than higher link rates with ultra fat channels and 4 stream MIMO.

malford

:: Update ::
I was unsure that the new AX router was performing any better than my AC87 so I spoke to my brother who is very knowledgeable in networks and he advised me to run Acrylic and test the status of each device.
The results came back and the AX was only running at a max rate of 800 compared to the AC87U access point which was at 1733.4.
I made a rookie mistake by flashing the new AX88 running standard firmware with the backup from the AC87U running MerlinWRT. It worked and connected to Skyfibre and assumed everything was ok, it wasn't.
So I restored the AX88 back to factory firmware & factory settings and here is where another problem occurred, the factory firmware does not give you the "option 61" option needed to configure with Skyfibre..

I resolved this by loading the AX88 with MerlinWRT 384.9 firmware and "option 61" now available in WAN settings and after entering my "manual client id" and cloned MAC address I'm back online with Skyfibre.

Now the AX88 is transmitting correctly and extremely fast and range has increased considerably.

Hope this helps anyone with similar setup.