Asus RT-AC5300U 802.11ac Router - 4x4 MU-MIMO with Broadcom XStream
by Ganesh T S on September 2, 2015 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Networking
- Asus
- Broadcom
- 802.11ac
- Wi-Fi
Asus announced the RT-AC5300U 802.11ac router using Broadcom's tri-band Wi-Fi chipset at IFA 2015 today. This is meant to be a flagship router with AC5300 speeds (1000 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 2167 Mbps on each of the 5 GHz bands for a total of 5333 Mbps theoretical bandwidth). The router uses Broadcom's latest Wi-Fi chipset along with the XStream platform concept.
As a recap, Broadcom's XStream involves combining two discrete 802.11ac radios in a single board, thereby allowing for two different channels to be simultaneously active in the 5 GHz band. Essentially, this concept combines two Wi-Fi routers in one. Initially introduced in a six stream configuration using Broadcom's second generation 802.11ac chipset, it was even demonstrated by Asus at Computex 2014. At CES earlier this year, Broadcom updated their 802.11ac portfolio with some new products sporting Wave 2 features. D-Link also simultaneously announced their ULTRA series using Broadcom's chipsets. The DIR-895L AC5300 was the flagship that combined the Broadcom 4x4 MU-MIMO solution with the XStream concept. The Asus RT-AC5300U being announced today uses the same platform (BCM4709, a 1 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 based processor combined with three BCM4366 radios) and has similar features.
Broadcom's proprietary NitroQAM / TurboQAM technology helps in low-latency and high bandwidth requirement scenarios (as long as the client side also has Broadcom silicon). The router sports eight external dual-band detachable antennae. Internally, there iis 128 MB of flash and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM. The other features are standard - 1x WAN and 4x LAN Gigabit ports, 1x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0 port.
The router will be available for purchase sometime in Q4 2015. There is no information on the pricing yet.
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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.