The RT-AC88U is a fine router, but is overkill for the average household.
The short version:
The main reason for this purchase was to get longer wireless range. It did extend the range, but not really enough to be sufficient for my needs/intentions. There are cheaper and more effective solutions to weak 5GHz WiFi range than just buying a "long-range" router.
The long version:
For years, I've been relying on the built-in WiFi 2.4/5GHz wireless solution that's built into my cable modem. It worked for many years for emails, browsing websites, and streaming Netflix.
However as I added more and more wireless devices (smart thermostat, Ring/security cameras, streaming boxes like Apple TV, etc), it seems to have gotten overwhelmed. Many of the IoT devices intermittently couldn't connect and the PCs weren't able to utilize all the Internet bandwidth that was available. Speed tests showed 100+MB/sec throughput, and doing things like downloading large files or watching movies that could be buffered worked fine. But communications that required real-time low-latency communications was inconsistent.
In March 2019 when my wife and I both started working from home, this solution proved incapable of the demands. Internet audio (Teams & Zoom) was completely unusable for either of us. VPN connections frequently dropped and had to reconnect. And when I relocated my make-shift kitchen-table office to my basement, I couldn't get a 5GHz WiFi connection. 2.4GHz was possible, but throughput wasn't nearly good enough for my needs. So I installed a 5GHz WiFi repeater. For those not familiar, a WiFi repeater is just a poor-man's mesh network extension that bridges the communications between my existing SSID and a new one that the repeater hosts. That got me 5GHz connection to my office and was OK for general Internet access, but only made the existing latency issues worse.
As an experiment, I disabled the built-in WiFi in my cable modem and added a cheap Asus router (AC1300 RT-ARCH13) setup as an access point. This improved my wireless performance DRAMATICALLY! It sped up my top speed to the Internet to ~230MB/sec as well as got rid of the latency issues making internet audio possible and VPN connections perfectly stable. However the router couldn't extend the signal all the way to my office. The repeater's lag still made Internet audio not reliable enough to rely on, but it was at least possible and intermittently usable.
That's where I got the idea to try a long-range router like the RT-AC88U. Since I was already familiar with Asus' user interface from using the cheap router I already had, I decided to stay with Asus. So I bought one (used). And as expected, it was a drop-in replacement for the cheap router (after being configured exactly like the cheap router). It was able to get its 5GHz signal to my office, but the signal was so weak that going through the repeater still gave me better throughput and performance. So the experiment was a fail.
The real answer for my dilemma is to relocate my WiFi router (acting as an access point) to a more-central location in my house. If I did that, I'm absolutely confident the cheap little Asus router would work just fine AND would let me get rid of the repeater. The only thing holding me back from this is getting an Ethernet cable run between the Cable Modem and where I'd locate the WiFi router. At some point, I will do that. And since I have it, I'll keep the RT-AC88U, but it is WAY overkill for my intentions.
If I were going to host a gaming server where each device on the network would benefit from high-speed ultra-low latency access to each other, this router would make a lot more sense over a cheaper one. Low-latency (LAN-party) gaming really is the intention of this tier of router. But I cannot recommend this router over cheaper alternatives for it's 5GHz range-improvement alone. Spend the extra money relocating the router OR on a true mesh-network architecture.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
