That's really dreaming, majority of consumer routers can barely handle gigabit and fall flat on their face trying to handle NAT for a real gigabit connection.
Then the wireless improvements are still just as useless. I care for local networks, to drive up adoption. Also, just about any decent 802.11ac router has plenty enough CPU to handle gigabit. 10gig is harder, but not impossible with the use of offloads.
Most 802.11ac routers (especially the ones not using MIPS processors) can forward packets at gigabit speed without trouble. But for the most part, they can't keep up if you ask them to do anything smart with the packets, like QoS or sometimes just NAT+firewall. Their CPUs are largely good enough for current uses and connection speeds, but they're definitely not able to do perform the full range of tasks all at gigabit speed.
10GbE isn't going to get cheap until somebody can make 10Gb PHYs that can operate at power levels appropriate for the consumer market.
Yes and No. It is useless for just a few clients as everything will not be so different from a similar AC WiFi Device and if access is 90% Internet which is the bottleneck. It is useful though for a lot more clients as WiFi is half-duplex and speed is shared between all clients.
What is the point of this besides looking cool? You'll chew through nearly all 5Ghz spectrum, but will have poor coverage. Can't have two APs spread around the house on separate spectrum.. and this is worse if you're in a high density location. Imagine if you have a couple neighbors with this device, talk about no clear wireless spectrum.
Devices like this are ridiculous and only make WiFi worse for everyone else and are ultimately no for the user than a simple 1Gbps Ethernet connection.
Are there even any 4-stream 802.11ac Wave 2 client devices out yet?
Once clients actually support MU-MIMO we may have something, but in the consumer space this will be a very poor upgrade for most. Spend the money on more APs, even if just 802.11n. Signal strength and SNR are king.
Enterprise is another story, but clients still need to support MU-MIMO.
There's 21 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band. Now, you won't get the most bandwidth out of the spectrum using only 20 MHz channels, but that's a lot of room for neighbours. Especially when you consider how short of range you get in the 5 GHz band.
Sure, if you bump the channels to 180 Mhz there's only ~3 non-overlapping channels, but who's going to do that?
You don't need 4-stream clients to make the most of this. It supports MU-MIMO. The MU is for multi-user. Meaning, you can support 4 separate single-stream MU-MIMO clients simultaneously (so long as they aren't all in the same physical direction).
Granted, this is a bit overkill for a home network, especially with only gigabit links for the wired side of things. But it's certainly neat to see how much tech can be crammed into a single AP like that. :)
Now to wait for the MU-MIMO goodness to trickle up to the enterprise wireless gear.
Spectrum is a major problem, and you can't really count DFS channels as usable. Also, this site and this product are targeted at gamers and technologists. Standard consumer width will be 80Mhz, with gamers pushing that to 160Mhz. No one will deploy with 20Mhz outside of stadiums and convention halls. Spectrum gets really crowded fast with this product that takes up to 320Mhz of spectrum on its own.
MU-Mimo doesn't do anything until MU-Mimo devices are ubiquitous. Unfortunately.
From the link: "One problem with this technology is that it doesn’t up the maximum speed a single user sees, what MU-MIMO delivers is higher aggregate throughput for more users at a time who all connect to the same base station."
So this is excellent when you have multiple users at home all playing, watching youtube, netflix, working, streaming and downloading the latest linux distro from torrent. If your a single with no kids, than its not that much of big deal. Its just solving the really crowded wifi spectrum problem for multiple users.
MU-MIMO is a very hyped tech, but what is missing are devices. MU-MIMO doesn't work until devices are available that support the tech. In wireless, the device is typically the weakest link, not the AP.
I feel like we really need something better than just 1Gbps wired link for typical parts if routers are actually capable of dishing out that much bandwidth to clients.
The industry is working to standardize 2500BaseT and 5000BaseT over existing Cat5e/6 cables to feed these faster wireless routers, without incurring the expense of a move to 10GbE. But with the number of companies involved, it's not a quick process.
There's a group of companies that formed an alliance to push this at: http://www.nbaset.org
idk what fun fantasy world you live in but 1) the switches are still expensive. 2) then the bigger issue that arises is that the cat 5e cable installed in most buildings wont handle 10gbe. Even cat6 maxes at like 35m of length if its bundled with other cable. To get the equivalent length of a cat 5e cable @ 10gb/s one must install cat6a ...regardless of what type of wire ive seen it estimated that the labor cost of replacing a cable in a large existing building is roughly $300 a run. that all adds up a lot quicker than replacing just the switches with the new 5gbe standard that can use cat5e
Personally I would be pretty satisfied with 5GbE as that would be faster than my home server could read and write to disk (~500MB/s)... but at the same time, if 10GbE were to become more mainstream the price really would come down and not be that big of an issue.
I just want a nice little 8 port 10GbE switch for my home network for $300 or less that will get me through the next 8-10 years. Is that too much to ask?
I'm starting to seriously question the design philosophies of router companies - not just this from Asus, but the latest top-of-the-line models from Dlink and others too. Sure, these are over-the-top, enthusiast products. But they're still designed in a way that makes it utterly impossible to place them unobtrusively. Which is an absolute must for a product that a) needs to be placed according to what gives the best signal, not where it looks the best, and b) is essentially a home infrastructure component.
Also, am I right in thinking that the tri-band nature of this means that it'll provide three separate SSIDs? I get the need for this kind of solution with dual band tech, but this is starting to get silly. I just don't see the gain - even with a gigabit internet connection (which, in the real world, nobody has), you won't be consistently saturating even a single of those AC connections. Unless, of course, you're running a server business, or something. In which case you wouldn't be using a wireless network at all.
You don't have to use 3 separate SSIDs. You can use the same one across all radios, and the client devices will attach to whichever one gives the strongest signal automatically. If you use a single SSID, some routers are also smart enough to steer clients to the 5 GHz band for better performance (not sure if that would work with multiple SSIDs or not).
Using a single SSID makes the "load-balancing", for lack of a better work, happen on the AP side of things, automatically. Using separate SSIDs for each radio/band requires you to manage the load / radio selection manually on the clients side of things.
Too bad that it's only *really* useful if you use a pair of them for a wireless media bridge.
AFAIK at this moment there are no USB adapters that are better than around AC1200 and the pcie adapters go up to AC1900, and most have relatively poor performance.
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Shadow7037932 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Wow. Do want. Hopefully, not too expensive a few months after launch.faiakes - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Is this a spider?Is the matrix upon us?
phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Place it upside down on a top shelf in a dark room and film people walking into the room. :)bill.rookard - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
I'm thinking a mini version of Stonehenge. :)stephenbrooks - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
Sauron's headgeartyger11 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Rumors are saying to expect a $400 price. :(ZeDestructor - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Can we slow down on the wirless wankery and start shipping cheap 10gbit stuff already?freeskier93 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
That's really dreaming, majority of consumer routers can barely handle gigabit and fall flat on their face trying to handle NAT for a real gigabit connection.ZeDestructor - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Then the wireless improvements are still just as useless. I care for local networks, to drive up adoption. Also, just about any decent 802.11ac router has plenty enough CPU to handle gigabit. 10gig is harder, but not impossible with the use of offloads.Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
Most 802.11ac routers (especially the ones not using MIPS processors) can forward packets at gigabit speed without trouble. But for the most part, they can't keep up if you ask them to do anything smart with the packets, like QoS or sometimes just NAT+firewall. Their CPUs are largely good enough for current uses and connection speeds, but they're definitely not able to do perform the full range of tasks all at gigabit speed.10GbE isn't going to get cheap until somebody can make 10Gb PHYs that can operate at power levels appropriate for the consumer market.
ZeDestructor - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
It's obviously getting there though, with the Xeon-D boards.. A little of boat-pushing would be nice instead of more wireless wankery...zodiacfml - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Yes and No. It is useless for just a few clients as everything will not be so different from a similar AC WiFi Device and if access is 90% Internet which is the bottleneck. It is useful though for a lot more clients as WiFi is half-duplex and speed is shared between all clients.VikingDude151 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
What is the point of this besides looking cool? You'll chew through nearly all 5Ghz spectrum, but will have poor coverage. Can't have two APs spread around the house on separate spectrum.. and this is worse if you're in a high density location. Imagine if you have a couple neighbors with this device, talk about no clear wireless spectrum.Devices like this are ridiculous and only make WiFi worse for everyone else and are ultimately no for the user than a simple 1Gbps Ethernet connection.
Are there even any 4-stream 802.11ac Wave 2 client devices out yet?
juhatus - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Please read here why its said to be wave2.http://semiaccurate.com/2015/04/27/qualcomm-talks-...
VikingDude151 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Once clients actually support MU-MIMO we may have something, but in the consumer space this will be a very poor upgrade for most. Spend the money on more APs, even if just 802.11n. Signal strength and SNR are king.Enterprise is another story, but clients still need to support MU-MIMO.
phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
There's 21 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band. Now, you won't get the most bandwidth out of the spectrum using only 20 MHz channels, but that's a lot of room for neighbours. Especially when you consider how short of range you get in the 5 GHz band.Sure, if you bump the channels to 180 Mhz there's only ~3 non-overlapping channels, but who's going to do that?
You don't need 4-stream clients to make the most of this. It supports MU-MIMO. The MU is for multi-user. Meaning, you can support 4 separate single-stream MU-MIMO clients simultaneously (so long as they aren't all in the same physical direction).
Granted, this is a bit overkill for a home network, especially with only gigabit links for the wired side of things. But it's certainly neat to see how much tech can be crammed into a single AP like that. :)
Now to wait for the MU-MIMO goodness to trickle up to the enterprise wireless gear.
VikingDude151 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Spectrum is a major problem, and you can't really count DFS channels as usable. Also, this site and this product are targeted at gamers and technologists. Standard consumer width will be 80Mhz, with gamers pushing that to 160Mhz. No one will deploy with 20Mhz outside of stadiums and convention halls. Spectrum gets really crowded fast with this product that takes up to 320Mhz of spectrum on its own.MU-Mimo doesn't do anything until MU-Mimo devices are ubiquitous. Unfortunately.
juhatus - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
From the link: "One problem with this technology is that it doesn’t up the maximum speed a single user sees, what MU-MIMO delivers is higher aggregate throughput for more users at a time who all connect to the same base station."So this is excellent when you have multiple users at home all playing, watching youtube, netflix, working, streaming and downloading the latest linux distro from torrent. If your a single with no kids, than its not that much of big deal. Its just solving the really crowded wifi spectrum problem for multiple users.
VikingDude151 - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
MU-MIMO is a very hyped tech, but what is missing are devices. MU-MIMO doesn't work until devices are available that support the tech. In wireless, the device is typically the weakest link, not the AP.Gasaraki88 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
You don't need MIMO clients to get the MIMO benefits on the router.phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, October 14, 2015 - link
But you do need MU-MIMO clients in order to get the benefits of MU-MIMO on the AP. MU-MIMO is different from regular MIMO.jeffkibuule - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
I feel like we really need something better than just 1Gbps wired link for typical parts if routers are actually capable of dishing out that much bandwidth to clients.Aoleus - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
The industry is working to standardize 2500BaseT and 5000BaseT over existing Cat5e/6 cables to feed these faster wireless routers, without incurring the expense of a move to 10GbE. But with the number of companies involved, it's not a quick process.There's a group of companies that formed an alliance to push this at:
http://www.nbaset.org
ZeDestructor - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Just suck it up and move to 10gbit already. It's really not _that_ expensive anymore.jdub_06 - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
idk what fun fantasy world you live in but 1) the switches are still expensive. 2) then the bigger issue that arises is that the cat 5e cable installed in most buildings wont handle 10gbe. Even cat6 maxes at like 35m of length if its bundled with other cable. To get the equivalent length of a cat 5e cable @ 10gb/s one must install cat6a ...regardless of what type of wire ive seen it estimated that the labor cost of replacing a cable in a large existing building is roughly $300 a run. that all adds up a lot quicker than replacing just the switches with the new 5gbe standard that can use cat5eCaedenV - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Personally I would be pretty satisfied with 5GbE as that would be faster than my home server could read and write to disk (~500MB/s)... but at the same time, if 10GbE were to become more mainstream the price really would come down and not be that big of an issue.I just want a nice little 8 port 10GbE switch for my home network for $300 or less that will get me through the next 8-10 years. Is that too much to ask?
bigboxes - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Man, that is one ugly router. Look at the footprint of that thing. Think they could attach a few more antennas to the casing? LOLIt's got more Gee Bees!
SpartyOn - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
If you fold those antennae flat, you could turn this into the flying Frisbee of Doom. Imagine whipping this at your Ultimate Frisbee mates.yy0c - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
It looks so ugly...Asus they're good at technology, but they don't have any tastes...Valantar - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
I'm starting to seriously question the design philosophies of router companies - not just this from Asus, but the latest top-of-the-line models from Dlink and others too. Sure, these are over-the-top, enthusiast products. But they're still designed in a way that makes it utterly impossible to place them unobtrusively. Which is an absolute must for a product thata) needs to be placed according to what gives the best signal, not where it looks the best, and
b) is essentially a home infrastructure component.
Also, am I right in thinking that the tri-band nature of this means that it'll provide three separate SSIDs? I get the need for this kind of solution with dual band tech, but this is starting to get silly. I just don't see the gain - even with a gigabit internet connection (which, in the real world, nobody has), you won't be consistently saturating even a single of those AC connections. Unless, of course, you're running a server business, or something. In which case you wouldn't be using a wireless network at all.
boraski - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
I think the point is to place them obtrusively. It's a conversation piece. I think it looks cool and I would have fun showing it off.sligett - Tuesday, September 8, 2015 - link
Oh yes, it's a coffee table router! You put it out to impress the neighbors.phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link
You don't have to use 3 separate SSIDs. You can use the same one across all radios, and the client devices will attach to whichever one gives the strongest signal automatically. If you use a single SSID, some routers are also smart enough to steer clients to the 5 GHz band for better performance (not sure if that would work with multiple SSIDs or not).Using a single SSID makes the "load-balancing", for lack of a better work, happen on the AP side of things, automatically. Using separate SSIDs for each radio/band requires you to manage the load / radio selection manually on the clients side of things.
PliotronX - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
Are they serious?Makaveli - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
Have to agree with you all this thing is fugly.I just spent $175 on a R7000 now running Asus merlin I think i'm good for a few years.
Considering I kept my DGL4500 in service for 7 years.
etamin - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
That's not a router. That's a tarantula.Zermus - Saturday, September 5, 2015 - link
The Borg router is upon us.RealBeast - Saturday, September 5, 2015 - link
Too bad that it's only *really* useful if you use a pair of them for a wireless media bridge.AFAIK at this moment there are no USB adapters that are better than around AC1200 and the pcie adapters go up to AC1900, and most have relatively poor performance.
SO other than epeen, what's the point?
phoenix_rizzen - Thursday, October 15, 2015 - link
Enabling multiple 802.11ac clients to connect without completely stomping on each other?Michael A. Bobo - Thursday, June 2, 2016 - link
4×4 separate antennas for transmitting and receiving signals alongwith MU-MIMO Broadcom with crazy looks. Amazing Router so Far.I checked it out on http://www.pickmyrouter.com/asus-wireless-ac5300-t... as well.