ASUS RT-BE88U Dual-Band WiFi 7 AiMesh Extendable Performance Router, 4K-QAM, MLO, Dual 10G Ports, SFP+, 4X 2.5G Ports, 4X 1G Ports, 34G WAN/LAN Capacity, Network Security, Built-in VPN

Still a pretty new router, so it has some bugs, mostly with MLO. Not so 'future proof' as it's lacking wifi 7. However, it has great range, typically great Asus security features, and seamless dual Wan, making it especially good if your main internet goes down, as it can use your mobile data via USB tethering. Recommended more for business and Voip - better choices out there if you are a hard-core gamer.

This is the classic Asus design, but the computer power inside and the WiFi 7 speed establish a clear improvement in performance. The online management interface is intuitive as always. The router is great because it has so many ports that it can function as your household switch at the same time, with 4x2.5Gbit ports, 4x1Gbit ports, a 10 Gbit WAN in port, and an SFP+ port that can be used as an additional 10 Gbit port if desired. WiFi performance to my iPhone provides a 1.4 Gbit/s speed test result for download, the same as my wired connections (and the max from my internet provider). Note that there is no 6GHz band, but this is useless to most users unless you are within 25 feet, and line of sight with no walls or obstructions. You would only need 6GHz for a gaming room setup or similar. Cannot be beat for the price (got it for $279).

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!!

This router has been amazing! The setup was smooth, and the speed boost was immediately noticeable. We have multiple devices streaming, gaming, and doing schoolwork all at once, and it handles everything without lag. I really like the parental controls and security features they’re easy to use and give great peace of mind. The signal range is strong throughout the house, and the dual 2.5G ports make it even better for future-proofing. Definitely worth it if you want fast, reliable WiFi.

I was (maybe still am) a diehard ASUS guy, might have to consider other options after this though. The router worked great for about 2 weeks then it lost internet connectivity, after rebooting it once or twice I was able to get it running again. Fast forward 2 more weeks & my internet was crawling slower than dial up! I did a speed test & was amazed at the result. Tried rebooting the router several times (6 or 7) & it would not connect to the internet at all. I have an old RT-AX85U router that this replaced because I needed more ports. I hooked it back up & it took right off. I guess I'll just use my old reliable 4 port AX86U with a switch & the BE88U is getting returned. Attached are my speed test screenshots. The 1st is the BE88U & the 2nd the AX86U. I hope that this was just a bad router & not that ASUS's quality is going down. For the price of this router I expected much more that what was delivered. One other thing to note is that the ports on the back seem sort of close together. If you have an ethernet cable that has a little more covering on the end, it is really tight.

So the one downside to this router is that it doesn't support the 6Ghz band. The (sort've) good news is that downside won't matter to most since not many wireless devices, other than the routers, supports that 6Ghz band as of mid-late 2024. AND the major wireless chipset OEM's don't seem interested in pushing that band all that hard in ANY devices for probably the next year or so. Uses too much power while also being rather short range and expensive to implement. In some countries its looking like it may not even get used ever due to potential interference issues! Also the very few devices that do support the 6Ghz band often do so in a way that causes issues since support is so poor in general. Issues which force you to either disable it anyways or cause large performance degradation in a real world setting. These issues also don't seem to be getting fixed any time soon either since apparently that support costs real money. On top of all that the 6Ghz band doesn't even matter all that much in a practical real world setting even if you can get it working with your devices since its rather short range only. Think a max range of 10' (so ~3m) or so at best typically for 6Ghz since the signal attenuates even more rapidly than 5Ghz band does. Basically nearly no one but a rarified few (the only practical real world scenario where it makes sense and could be used is for wireless backhaul links between different routers to form a short range but high speed mesh network....which is a nifty but very specialized application) should care about that 6Ghz band so that it isn't supported by this router won't be a issue for most and you can probably safely ignore it. The great news is the rest of the WiFi7 features are well supported and working great: 4K-QAM, MLO, and various anti signal congestion tech. +++THAT IS THE STUFF THAT ACTUALLY MATTERS IN WiFi7!!+++ It will make all your wireless devices work better together and will make them all, to varying degrees, faster due to improved signalling efficiency while doing it. That being said it won't work miracles. If you already have a good WiFi6 or 6E router I'd probably keep it so long as its working fine. WiFi7 won't be a huge upgrade for you. If you have a older WiFi5 (aka 802.11ac), or something even older than that, then yes WiFi7 can actually be a pretty big upgrade that is worth it you. Personally for me what I wanted was something that was reliable, had good firmware support, didn't have all the issues that the 6Ghz band routers were experiencing, wasn't too expensive, and had 10Gbe ports. This router fits that bill perfectly! ASUS usually makes a solid router, this one is going to have 4yr firmware support, and the SFP port is upgradable to whatever 10Gbe solution that you could want. Having 4x 2.5Gbe ports on top of 4x 1Gbe ports built in is pretty nice too. Lots of home networks can probably get away with not using a separate switch at all with this thing. I had to reboot a few times to get the router working well with my cable modem but other than that a wired set up (they push the cellphone app hard in the directions, its not needed) went fine. I will say that for some reason the login page didn't want to load in Firefox so I had to use MS's Edge. Not a big deal but seemed odd to me that was necessary. For USB3 performance I tested this with a Corsair Survivor Stealth USB3 flash drive that can easily write or read at 200MB/s+ on my PC. I got around 120MB/s write and 170MB/s read speed off of it when plugged into this router. Not bad but a tad slow for a new 2024 router I'd say. I can get around 1.7Gbps wireless performance moving files around on my phone (which supports WiFi 6 but not 6E) when connected to this thing if I stand within 10'. At the other end of the house, which I estimate to be ~30' away, I get around 1.5Gbps. More than fast enough for me! Signal coverage is great. The whole house (2100sq ft) and the yard (about .3 acre) is in range and gets good reception. The real star of the show to me was the 10Gig performance though! I'm getting around 8.6Gpbs through my wired connection (Cat6a) which is a incredible upgrade from 1Gb!! Moving around a 100GB file only took a bit more than 8 minutes!!! I took a star off since I think the price is still a tad high, USB3 performance is a bit ho hum, there is no USB3 port on the front of the router, and while I don't plan on using it this router does lack 6Ghz band. Otherwise this is a very slick upgrade for anyone looking to get 10Gbe (finally!) while also updating their wireless standard to the latest and greatest.

Great, does router and wifi stuff. Has the ability to connect to a VPN for a whole house privacy setup.

TL; DR: After a couple days of service we're happy with this router's ease of installation/setup & performance so far. Details: This was purchased as our old router (a 2018 ASUS GT-AC5300) was starting to lock up/fail randomly, and more computers in our house have 2.5G network ports, so the old one was becoming a bottleneck. Physical installation was simple, unplug/replug the ethernet cables from the old one into the new, the WAN port and 2.5G/1G ports are clearly labeled. We did take an extra few seconds to make sure the right ports were used for 2.5G-capable devices vs our media center setup on a 1G router (while it wouldn't affect function, no reason to waste the port until/unless we get a 2.5G capable switch in there). Depending on your ISP's top speed, you can configure this router to use a slower 2.5G port as the connection, and free up the 10G for use with a fast switch inside your home. The option's presented during initial setup, and not hard to find on the WAN page if you switch your network config/ISP service. Getting the router software configured was easily the hardest part, and it wasn't hard, but there were some surprises - things that may or may not make a difference for you, as we're a tech-heavy household. The default subnet for the router was 192.168.50.xxx, which caused some issues with our devices as they were in 192.168.1.xxx on the old system - I had to reboot one of the hardwired computers to get assigned a new IP, and find and configure the new router, Windows release/renew wasn't cutting it for some reason. Once that was done, we were able to change the subnet, configure the router for our ISP, and get online again within ~5 minutes. Windows 11 on our laptops saw the new Wifi name & noted that the new connection was more secure (supports WPA3 over WPA2, so that's nice). If you're an ASUS router user currently, you'll probably find the interface very familiar, they haven't changed the configuration UI significantly from the AC5300 I mentioned above. We host a couple of web services inside the house for external use, and configuring them into the new router was virtually identical to the last time the changes were made on the old one. One issue we've had with ASUS routers still holds true, their DDNS doesn't allow you to easily put your new router in and update to the old DDNS name, it's marked as reserved for a month, so we had to take a new one. We do appreciate the graphic portmap in the UI, showing exactly which ports are in use, if there were a hardware issue this would make it obvious if we had a system fail to connect. While we haven't seen a big difference speed-wise, we also haven't replaced all the switches in our home with ones that would support the faster connection, so we weren't expecting to see the full benefit yet - but we can at least say it isn't worse.