Srinivasan Ramamurthy
Occasional Visitor
I thought I'd add my (disappointing) experience as a note of caution as I don't see a lot of posts reflecting it on this forum (which are mostly positive give or take) which in no small part is why I decided it was safe to dip my toe with AX so I bought the AX88U (coming from rock solid AC88U) and had almost nothing but problems with WIFI. The basic hardware is good with a very capable CPU but the WIFI... my lord. In fairness it worked with most of my devices but is no faster than AC as is to be expected - I didn't really see a speed improvement on my ax ready S10; perhaps slightly but not anything to get excited about. Obviously the big benefits of AX are not really speed and this was not an issue for me. But my wife's Samsung S7 was operating at little better than dial up speed with frequent periodic massive latency (5-10s+) to boot and it didn't play nicely with my LG OLED either with a lot of buffering. I wasted some two hours playing with channels DFS/non DFS and toggling professional settings etc - very little channel interference here (I'm not as advanced a user as many on this forum but I think of myself as quietly competent with a fair understanding of what the settings do).
Ultimately I gave up (life is too short) and thought I'd try the AX11000 instead. Crikey - even worse. I missed Merlin which isn't available on that device but that one didn't solve the problem with S7 or LG OLED but also it didn't play nicely with my Samsung S10 either which has an AX chip(!) and the GUI hung every day or two. In fairness both devices were solid with intel wifi cards in laptops and PC. Generally for me at least, what a mess. Both routers have gone back to Amazon.
I see that many seem to be having an OK or even good experience but my experience is WIFI 6 is far from ready for mainstream at least on Asus. Unfortunately I sold my AC88U before I anticipated that there would be problems. I've since bought the AC86U and haven't looked back. It lacks the LAN aggregation I used for my NAS but I don't need it. Otherwise everything is an improvement over the 88U. It gives better range than the 88U (possibly due to its more upright design in my setting), love the hardware encryption on the CPU for VPN (means much faster speeds via VPN) and more importantly rock solid WIFI and router for all devices not just some.
AX will be great one day I'm sure and may even be now if you are fortunate with your device profile but you are effectively paying a premium price to be a beta tester. My early adopting days are done. I hope whichever choice you make it works out for you.
Sorry to hear your bad experience.
I just purchased & got my AX88U yesterday. And I must say, it works pretty well. I too had an AC88U and my prime purpose of getting an AX88U was to get the OpenVPN performing at close to 100 MBPS. I can now say I'm getting roughly about 83 to 85 MBps....that's really good. So, I can say my purchase was beneficial to me, for the purpose for which I purhcased. I now AIMesh'd my RT-AC88U....and very happy with the overall coverage.
A few observations:
- Is there a way to go all the way till 100 MBPS? Yesterday, when I was at 50 MBPS plan, I used to get about 44 MBPS on OpenVPN. Today when I upgraded myself to 100 MBPS, I am getting roughly 85 MBPS. Is this expected? Or can I extract more juice and go all the way till 100 MBPS?
- I tried to flash Merlin on my AX88U. But the 5 GHz JUST DOES NOT WORK. The radio button was on, but still not working. I tried turning the radio off and then on, but still no luck. Tried rebooting but no luck. Even tried the "Smart Connect" but still I was ONLY connected to 2.4 GHz. Weird Error. @RMerlin or others - any ideas why this is happening?
- For now, I have reverted back to Asus-wrt, but ultimately I'd like to be on Merlin Firmware. But if Merlin's firmware won't run the 5 GHz....it would be a big bummer.
@RMerlin / Others - Please help.
Thanks.