Asus RT-AC68U review

Asus means serious business with its new 802.11ac router range. The RT-AC68U uses TurboQAM to take its 2.4GHz Wi-Fi connection up to a theoretical maximum speed of 600Mbits, while its 5GHz wireless has a theoretical throughput of 1,300Mbit/s. The router has a Gigabit WAN port so you can connect it to a cable or fibre modem supplied by your ISP.

For connecting other devices, the RT-AC68U has four Gigabit LAN ports, a USB port and a USB3 port, that latter two of which you can use to connect an external hard disk, plug in a mobile broadband dongle to provide an in-case-of-emergency net connection, or share a USB printer over your network.

In addition, the RT-AC68U is one of the best-looking bits of network hardware we’ve seen recently. Although, like other 802.11ac devices, it’s larger than many routers you might have encountered recently, its plastic chassis is well-made and attractively textured. An integrated stand holds it upright, which improves airflow and minimises the router’s footprint. Like most recent 802.11ac routers, you can’t wall-mount it.

The router’s wireless networks are enabled but unsecured by default, so your first step should be to connect to the router’s web interface and run through the configuration wizard. This also establishes your internet connection and prompts you to secure your router with a better password. The web interface isn’t particularly attractive, but it’s easy to navigate around and includes some extremely useful features.

These include up to six wireless guest networks: three on each band. These are ideal if you want to give visitors access to the internet, but not your local network, and you can even set a time at which they’ll expire, which is particularly useful if you want to leave them open rather than password protecting them. There are also basic parental controls: actually a time management screen that lets you determine when specific devices will and will not be allowed on the network, so you can keep the kids offline during the night.

We tested the AC68U’s wireless capabilities with our Centrino 2 laptop’s integrated Wi-Fi adaptor, but this is relatively old hardware now and can’t match the full speed of an 802.11ac router at 5GHz, nor does it support 2.4GHz TurboQAM. At 2.4GHz, we got transfer speeds of 40Mbit/s at 1m, 32.7Mbit/s at 10m and 9.7Mbit/s at 20m when using our laptop’s Wi-Fi. The next step was testing with Asus’s £60 USB-AC53 Wi-Fi adaptor, which roughly doubled throughput, achieving speeds of 87.6Mbit/s at 1m, 65.8Mbit/s at 10m and 23.6Mbit/s at 20m.

In our 5GHz test, even our laptop’s integrated wireless chipset worked well with the router to produce speeds of 70.2Mbit/s at 1m, 63Mbit/s at 10m and 25.5Mbit/s at 20m. Using a proper AC wireless dongle again more than doubled performance, producing speeds of 158.45 at both 1m and 10m, which slipped to a still-fantastic 70.6Mbit/s at 20m. Even better was the router’s performance in conjunction with the £70 PCE-AC68 PCI-E wireless adaptor, which saw it maintain a transfer speed of 149.9Mbit/s at a distance of 20m and 209.7Mbit/s at 1m.

This is one of the most expensive routers around, and few people will be able to justify the price of both this and the PCI-E adaptor required to achieve its optimal wireless transfer speeds. However, if you need the very fastest Wi-Fi around, this is the Ultimate router for you.