Asus RT-AC88U possesses excellent performance skills such as it delivers high Wi-Fi data rates, longer range and stable wireless signal. For the users with high internet needs, it is better to adopt Asus RT-AC88U for $280.Compared to other wireless router such as Netgear X8 AC5300, Asus AC5300, and RT-AC5300, etc. Asus RT-AC88U is very cheaper.
Comparison between AC5100 and AC5300:
From the beginning of the 802. 11ac Wi-Fi standard, there have been Wi-Fi designations such as AC1750, AC 5300, AC 1900, AC3200, AC3100, etc. and the number following with “AC” refers to total bandwidth that a router has. Most of the companies calculate this number by adding top sped for each band of the router. Let us consider a scenario that you have an AC1900 router such Asus RT-AC68U which has high speed of 1300Mbps on the 5 GHz band and 600Mbps on 2.4 GHz band. Now add those two numbers and you will get 1900. Even though most of the routers are dual band but some of the routers comes along with the additional band on the 5Ghz frequency and is often named as “tri-band” routers. If you have many bands then it doesn’t matter because you have to connect your device to only one band at a time. So this is the reason why the AC designation number is misleading and it also doesn’t show how fast a client can connect to a router.
AC3100 router is faster than AC5300 router, but both shares the same top speed on the 5 GHz band of 2167Mbps and 2.4 GHz of 1000Mbps. Coming to Asus RT-AC88U, it uses Broadcom NitroQAM chipset which is one of the chipset that is used in routers such as RT-AC5300 and Netgear R8500. The only difference is that RT-AC88U supplies any additional 5Ghz band. Asus RT-AC88U also supports MU-MIMO and includes unique features for gamers.
MU-MIMO Supported:
In order to handle the Wi-Fi bandwidth efficiency Asus RT-AC88U supports Multi-User Multiple Input multiple Output (MU-MIMO) technology. This technology was first introduced with Qualcomm MU/EFX 802.11AC Wi-Fi chip. Regardless of their Wi-Fi power all 802.11ac routers treats all the Wi-Fi clients as same. A router has more Wi-Fi capacity than a client so it is hardly used at full capacity. As most of the Wi-Fi connections are not efficient, so the router loses more power for lower tier clients. Hence it doesn’t have that much capacity to maintain connection quality to multiple clients.
The construction of new Asus RT-AC88U is same as RT-AC87U. It consists of two USB ports and four detachable antennas. USB 2.0 port is connected on the back end and USB 3.0 port is connected on the front whereas USB 3.0 is used for hosting a permanent storage device.