Innovation Award – Hardware.info
“If the highest performance is what you want, we would advise you to order two RT-AC86Us and use them with AiMesh firmware.” – HARDWARE.INFO
ASUS AiMesh is the ultimate home WiFi solution that lets you enjoy a stable, seamless and secure wireless connection anywhere in your home. With powerful features, exceptional ease of use and no trade-offs between WiFi range and maximum speed, you can finally experience WiFi the way it should be.
“If the highest performance is what you want, we would advise you to order two RT-AC86Us and use them with AiMesh firmware.” – HARDWARE.INFO
“This is the eighth consecutive year Asus has won our Readers' Choice Award for its routers. As usual, the company receives excellent satisfaction ratings across the board.” – PC Magazine
AiMesh is an innovative feature that connects multiple compatible ASUS routers to create a whole-home WiFi network. It’s a flexible and scalable solution that enables you to mix different ASUS router models, so when it’s time to upgrade your network, there’s no need to get rid of your existing hardware. Whenever you need more coverage or want new functionality, just add another compatible router to your AiMesh network at any time.
Each router is capable of superb performance on its own, so when they're working together in an AiMesh system, they're unbeatable. In our own testing using the latest ASUS RT-AC86U router, we achieved 463Mbps speeds at long distances, even after we ran out of signal using a router from an off-the-shelf multi-hub system. This means that with AiMesh, your network can cope with demanding tasks like 4K UHD streaming even at the remotest corners of your home or garden!
AiMesh can create a single, house-wide network name so there’s no need to constantly switch between networks as you roam around your home. AiMesh keeps an eye on the signal strength to your device, and switches it seamlessly to another source if necessary. If you prefer separate network names for each frequency band, you can do that as well — AiMesh is designed to work the way you want!
If there’s a disruption on any part of AiMesh network, self-healing capability immediately replaces a failed router using the remaining router connections. So your connection will not be disrupted and you don’t even notice a thing.
A rock-solid data 'backbone' connects all the AiMesh-enabled routers, with AiMesh intelligently choosing either a wired connection* or the optimal frequency band — 5GHz or 2.4GHz. With tri-band routers, it will dedicate one of the two 5GHz bands to inter-router communications.
You trust your connected devices with your credit card numbers, online banking passwords and other personal information, but not all devices support antivirus protection — that’s why you need ASUS AiProtection. It’s built into AiMesh routers, so it can protect personal data across the entire AiMesh network, making sure your privacy is protected on all your devices. AiProtection updates itself automatically and, best of all, it’s free for the life of your AiMesh router without any subscription fees.
A step above standard firewalls, the commercial-grade intrusion prevention system (IPS) performs in-depth scans of inbound and outbound internet data to block all common attacks. Thanks to Trend Micro data center on the cloud, this AiProtection feature updates itself whenever a new patch is available, ensuring your protection is always up-to-date
Cyber threats often disguise themselves as normal advertisements or download links, so you might unintentionally click malicious websites or download files that compromise your home network. AiProtection uses Trend Micro's cloud database to identify and block known malicious sites, preventing infection even before you click.
If an already-infected device connects to your AiMesh network, it prevents any personal data on the device from being compromised by detecting and blocking that device’s connection with the malicious server. The list of malicious servers stays in sync with Trend Micro’s cloud database, ensuring AiProtection gets the latest intelligence to protect your network.
With AiMesh, great features like AiProtection, Adaptive QoS and Parental Controls work across the entire network with easy central control of all settings from the ASUS Router mobile app or ASUSWRT, ensuring that no-one can bypass them by connecting to a different router. Just remember to always connect your highest-specification router to your internet service.
With an AiMesh system, you can take control of how children spend their time online, no matter where they are in the house, since parental control settings are applied across the entire AiMesh network. You can group devices and view internet activity by person, schedule screen time and block specific types of websites and applications — all via the ASUS Router mobile app right on your smart phone.
View each family member’s internet activity on a clear graphical dashboard showing the peak time and what kind of content they are viewing. You can group devices that belong to your children to view aggregated data and apply scheduled block times and content filters with just a few taps.
Check the box when editing a device and profile, and the preset automatically applies filters for inappropriate content to all their devices.
Reserve valuable family time or help your children develop responsible behavior by selecting scheduled time periods to block internet access on specific devices.
Block specific categories of mobile apps and websites and apply these settings to all devices belonging to individual family members. The advanced filtering integrates Trend Micro’s Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine to filter not only by website URL, but also by the internet packets themselves, which means it filters content viewed not only in a web browser, but also within mobile apps on your devices.*
All connected devices on a home network share the same internet bandwidth, so when multiple people and devices are connected, it’s common to experience slowdowns when gaming or streaming videos. AiMesh routers have great features like Game Boost (Adaptive QoS) and wtfast game acceleration to prioritize gaming traffic across the network, ensuring the smoothest possible gaming experiences no matter where you are in the home.
ADVANTAGES | |||
AiMesh Wi-Fi System | Ordinary Mesh System | Traditional Performance Router | |
Easy installation | |||
Seamless roaming | |||
Wider coverage | |||
Powerful performance | ** | ||
Rich features | |||
Setup and manage via either a PC or a mobile app | |||
DISADVANTAGES | |||
Weak single-node coverage | |||
Average performance | |||
Limited features | No disadvantages | ||
Complicated setup | |||
Connection gap between router and repeater | |||
** Single router compared to single mesh node |
Disclaimer:
*Comparison results are based on bi-direction speed tests performed in a controlled ASUS lab environment, using a single RT-AC86U, a tri-band tri-hub and a dual-band tri-hub mesh router.