The Asus RT-AC3200 is the latest in a trio of tri-band routers on market, rivaling the
R8000 from Netgear
and the
EA9200 from Linksys
. Similar to the others, the router did well in testing, proving itself to be great for homes with lots of local heavy Wi-Fi needs, but an overkill product for others.
What's more, the Asus RT-AC3200 has a few things that make it stand out. These include a robust and fun-to-use Web interface, a slew of excellent network-monitoring features, a built-in VPN server and the ability to connect to multiple Internet sources at a time. This means, it can also be a capable gateway for a small office.
Comparing apples to apples, the Asus RT-AC3200 has the most to offer among the three. Still, whether or not it's worth the $299 price tag (directly converted before taxes, about £196 or AU$385) depends on if you have the need for its power. Most people won't, and will see no difference when compared to a much cheaper AC1900 router, such as the
Asus RT-AC68U
, the
Netgear R7000
or the
Linksys WRT1900AC
.
That said, while it doesn't hurt to get the Asus RT-AC3200 if you can afford it, it's generally a better idea to pick a router that fits your needs without breaking your bank on this this list of top 802.11ac routers.
Josh Miller/CNET
Understanding the AC3200 Wi-Fi standard
In the development of Wi-Fi, the current AC3200 designation is somewhat unnatural. Instead of increasing the speed of each wireless band, Broadcom decided to add an extra band to an existing dual-band Wi-Fi chip to make up its 5G XStream chip which powers all AC3200 routers. That said, an AC3200 router, for now, is like a AC1900 router, plus another 5Ghz access point all built into a single box. (For a deeper dive on Wi-Fi standards, check out this this handy feature.)
To be specific, the Asus RT-AC3200 has three separate access point: one 2.4Ghz access to support all 2.4Ghz 802.11n/g/b Wi-Fi clients and which caps at 600Mbps; and two 5Ghz access points to support 5Ghz 802.11ac/n/a clients, capped at 1300Mbps each. This means despite the total bandwidth of 3,200Mbps at a given time, the router's fastest theoretical speed to single clients is 1300Mbps at most, which is the same as an AC1900 router.
So, why two 5Ghz bands? For better bandwidth allocation leading to optimal speeds. Generally, for compatibility, a wireless band works at the slowest speed any of the the connected clients supports. With two separate 5Ghz bands, both high- and low-end clients can operate in their own band, hence at their top speeds without affecting each other. On top of that, two 5Ghz bands also helps reduce the stress on each of the bands when there are many connected clients fighting for router's bandwidth. It's like adding more lanes to a freeway, which is helpful when there's a lot of traffic.
And the keyword here is traffic. If you have just a few 5Ghz clients, especially those of the same standard, having the second 5Ghz band doesn't amount to anything at all. It's just redundant. Also note that you'll only benefit from the faster speeds when doing data-intensive local tasks, such as file transfers, media streams and so on. For Internet-based applications like Netflix streaming or file downloading, chances are you'll see no difference between this tri-band design and a dual-band AC1900 setup simply because the router's speed will always be faster than the speed of your Internet, but it can't speed up your service provider's Internet connection.
Josh Miller/CNET
Powerful hardware, familiar design
It was a bit of deja-vu for me reviewing the RT-3200 since it looks almost identical, though slightly larger, to the
RT-AC87U
and shares the same set of features, as well as the interface. The biggest difference between the two is the RT-AC3200 is a three-stream, tri-band router while the RT-AC87U is a quad-stream, dual-band one.
That said, the RT-AC3200 is huge with six detachable antennas. Despite the large physical side, the router has just the usual four gigabit LAN ports and one gigabit WAN (Internet) port on the back. There's enough space to add another row of LAN ports to it. Also strange, the router has two USB ports but only the USB 2.o port is placed on its back while the USB 3.0 port is in the front.
Due to the much faster speed, the USB 3.0 port is the preferred port to host a permanent storage device, and having this port on the front will translate into a messy setup when you want to the router to also serve as a network storage server.
The RT-AC3200 does have one minor design improvement over its older brother: the array of status lights on the front now protrude out, instead of facing down, allowing you to see them even when looking at the router from the top.
On the inside, the RT-AC3200 packs powerful hardware. It runs a Broadcom BCM4709 dual-core 1Ghz processor with 256MB of DDR 3 system memory and 128MB of flash storage. In all, it has enough power as a small server and is currently among the most powerful routers on the market.
Screenshot by Dong Ngo/CNET
Easy setup, excellent Web interface
The RT-AC3200 shares the same setup process as routers from Asus released in the last few years, which is very easy. All you have to do is plug the router in and point a browser from a connected computer to the router's default IP address (192.168.1.1). The first time, the interface will greet you with a Web-based wizard, which walks you through a few steps, including creating a password for the interface itself and the Wi-Fi networks.
By default the router has its Smart Connect feature turned on, meaning all bands (2.4Ghz and 5Ghz) are combined into one single network and the router will automatically connect clients to either band depending on the clients' Wi-Fi standard. However, you can also manually name the three bands as three separate networks. In this case, you will have three Wi-Fi networks, one for the 2.4Ghz band and two for the 5Ghz band.
After the initial setup, you can always go back to this interface to manage the router as well as to customize other settings and features. The interface is very well-organized and easy to use. It has an interactive network map that displays the connected devices in real time. You can click on a connected device to interact with it or view more information about it. Clients connected to the router are also sorted by the connection method, including wired, and by which wireless network they're connected to.
From this network map, you can also quickly access the router's other settings, such as Dynamic DNS, Wi-Fi settings, the settings of the Internet connection (WAN) and so on. You can also access other settings by using different sections of the interface. For the most part, everything is very clearly explained or self-explanatory.
The Web interface is not perfect, however, since there's at least one minor caveat: while you can easily assign a fixed IP address to a connected client, once the IP is assigned, the client is now remembered by its MAC address, instead of its name. The MAC address is a string of numbers and letters, therefore it is very hard to know which client has which IP address when you have multiple clients on the IP reservation list. This shortcoming has been present in many other routers which share the same interface, and I was surprised Asus hasn't fixed this.
Apart from the router's settings, you can use the Web interface to manage the router's many features.
Feature-rich but still too expensive
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