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Odd Looking Asus RT-AC5300 Router Claims World’s Fastest WiFi

Friday, Sep 4th, 2015 (10:07 am) - Score 8,686

One of the problems with the new generation of ultrafast home broadband services is finding a router that can keep pace. The good news is that ASUS’s new RT-AC5300, which looks like some sort of alien tech, might just have the answer with its total combined “world’s fastestWiFi speed of 5334Mbps.

Asus has spent the past few years building up a reasonably good reputation as a manufacturer of high performance routers and their last top-end kit was the tri-band wireless RT-AC3200, which retails for around £200 and is itself no slouch in boasting a total combined 802.11ac based WiFi speed of 3200Mbps (3.2Gbps).

Admittedly one of the problems with such routers is with ensuring that you have WiFi adapters and related devices that can keep up with such performance, but that hasn’t stopped Asus from continuing to improve upon their first-generation tri-band routers by announcing the AC5300.

The AC5300 harnesses Broadcom’s NitroQAM technology and a 4×4 MIMO antenna design (four-transmit, four-receive), as well as “AiRadar” universal beamforming (this concentrates the signal directly towards a receiving device), to deliver network speeds of up to 1000Mbps on the 2.4GHz band and up to 2167Mbps on each of the two 5GHz bands.

Asus also uses Tri-Band Smart Connect to automatically select the fastest of the three available frequency bands for each device, based on the device’s speed, signal strength and how busy each band is. As a result of all this the AC5300 claims an improved WiFi signal coverage of up to 500 square meters.

Asus RT-AC5300 Feature Highlights

* Link Aggregation (802.11ad) can combine two LAN ports into one superfast 2Gbps wired connection using two network cables.

* DLNA Media Server

* FTP and Samba File Servers

* 1 x USB 3.0 port

* 1 x USB 2.0 port

* 4 x Gigabit LAN Ports

* 128MB Flash Storage

* 256MB DDR3 RAM

* AiProtection uses real-time network monitoring to detect malware, viruses and other intrusions before it reaches your PC or connected devices (database provided by Trend Micro)

* AiCloud 2.0 links your home network and web storage services, including through a special app for iOS and Android devices

At the time of writing there’s no word on how much the new router will cost when it hits retail over the next few months, although with the AC3200 costing around £200 then we’d expect the AC5300 might attract a price of perhaps closer to £250; this is very much premium top-end kit so far as consumer routers go.

Mind you for most consumers this sort of performance is simply an unnecessary overkill, particularly since the majority will have home broadband connections that deliver well below even 100Mbps. On top of that such performance usually means a router that draws a lot more power, thus impacting your electricity bill, albeit admittedly not by much (we don’t yet have the power specs).

In addition, the AC5300 doesn’t have any integrated ADSL, VDSL or DOCSIS modems, so if you’re planning to use it alongside such services then that may require a bridged connection to your existing router or modem (we tend to prefer a simple single device setup to multiple hardware units, which gets ugly and sucks too much power).

Obviously the same old caveats with WiFi will also apply. Yes all that technical wizardry will improve the signal, particularly if you have a supporting adapter, but at the end of the day a home wireless signal is only designed to extend so far and pesky things, such as walls, people, cats and doors, will always work to significantly reduce the peak performance.

We also suspect that the new design has also been created with cats in mind, most likely to stop them sleeping on top of the device. But they’ll probably find a way around that too, they always do.. always.

Mark-Jackson
By Mark Jackson
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook and .
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