Here come the
802.11ac routers, and a little ahead of schedule at that. Networking manufacturers were talking up the new wireless standard at CES in January, promising to have product ready by the fall. Asus is the latest to join the still-small club of companies to release a router that uses the new 802.11ac standard. The sharp-looking
Asus RT-AC66U is available now at the usual retail suspects for about $200.
As an 802.11ac router, the RT-AC66U broadcasts on both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands, providing theoretical speeds of 450Mbps and 1.3Gbps, respectively. And just as you did with your Wireless N router, you're going to see slower speeds than the max. Even so, the new technology is certainly going to provide a significant performance increase over older models. Asus points to the dual bands as being a great way to separate your day-to-day network activities (surfing, email, downloading) from bandwidth-consuming movie streaming and gaming.
Sporting three antennas, the RT-66U will be hard to miss, unless you hide it behind your monitor: the router is VESA mountable. Other features worth noting are support for
DLNA servers and
IPV6, as well as four Gigabit LAN ports. It also has two USB ports for printers and network storage and such. Asus tells us that the router is meant for anyone - it's designed to have CD-free, easy setup for novices, but the configurability enthusiasts want.Either way, keep in mind that you're likely going to need to pick up some adapters to bring your existing devices up to, er, speed.
Joshua Gulick
Josh cut his teeth (and hands) on his first PC upgrade in 2000 and was instantly hooked on all things tech. He took a degree in English and tech writing with him to
Computer Power User Magazine and spent years reviewing high-end workstations and gaming systems, processors, motherboards, memory and video cards. His enthusiasm for PC hardware also made him a natural fit for covering the burgeoning modding community, and he wrote
CPU’s “Mad Reader Mod” cover stories from the series’ inception until becoming the publication editor for
Smart Computing Magazine. A few years ago, he returned to his first love, reviewing smoking-hot PCs and components, for
HotHardware. When he’s not agonizing over benchmark scores, Josh is either running (very slowly) or spending time with family.
