Happy Holidays from Asus! The Asus RT-AC86U review (it went on sale, finally)
As I alluded to on my prior article about the Netgear CM1000, there is a time for everything, and lately I've really been having to monitor the viewing habits of our children more and more closely as they both get older and thus more capable of figuring out how to get to content and of course in my book content hasn't exactly been going uphill either if you catch my meaning. YouTube in particular is easily accessible from our Roku TV's main menu (we have a smart TV with Roku integration), and it's easy for the kids to binge watch lesser quality content on Amazon too that is frankly annoying to me as an adult to put mildly and I feel is not good for them to watch too much either just like eating too much candy can give you a stomach ache: too much lower quality content (or even just too much media regardless of quality) seems to impact the attitudes of our kids negatively. How does this have to do with a router? I thought this was an article about the Asus RT-AC86U? Yup, it is, we're getting there...
So I've been feeding a Patriot 256GB USB 3.1 stick that's plugged into our Roku TV home videos that I've taken (which they can easily access from the Roku Media player), ripped copies of blu-rays and DVDs from our archive (which I meticulously re-encode in Handbrake with overnight processing for optimal playback with highest results for the Roku 4K TV) and have implemented time scheduling on my existing/former Asus RT-AC68U router (not to be confused with the Asus RT-AC86U which we'll be discussing) so that they can either put in a DVD/Blu-Ray, watch something on the TV antenna (we have no cable TV, but have buddy ears), or watch something on the USB stick during scheduled time controls. Unfortunately enabling time scheduling cuts off all internet to the smart TV, which although stops YouTube dead in it's tracks and Amazon thus there is no fighting over the remote and turning the TV off at scheduled times, or our eldest waking up before us and watching inappropriate material but, it also cuts off PBS kids app which has a lot of content the kids like unfortunately and is safe, particularly the younger ones. Fortunately the Asus RT-AC68U has Parental controls which I did apply restrictions to media streaming on the Roku TV's MAC ID, which does stop YouTube from just it (so my wife can still watch YouTube on her iPhone and the MacBook Pro vs had I done a straight URL or content filtered it out it would block it from all devices, not just the TV) however I found on the Asus RT-AC68U, it just doesn't have the whereforall to maintain both time scheduling on the Amazon fire sticks, and parental controls on the Roku at the same time: I had odd network failures particularly on the Amazon Fire Stick plugged into the TV in the main bedroom just refused to work over 60% of the time and was sluggish when it did work the other roughly 40% (which was always post-rebooting to get it working). Also I found network responsiveness as a whole on all devices was more sluggish with the controls on. Thus I resorted to just turning off the controls as the Asus RT-AC68U just couldn't handle it and fighting over the remote at times and unplugging the TV, etc as needed.
Enter the Asus RT-AC86U.
I do my technical reading and have been less than impressed with the 2.4ghz performance and 5ghz performance frankly on newer routers vs the performance of my pre-2014 non-FCC governed power levels on my (former) Asus RT-AC68U (newer routers have caps on power levels). But the Asus RT-AC86U on not all but some benchmarks out there on the web sounded promising. Considering it uses the same / similar antenna approach to the famed Asus RT-AC68U I had, I assumed it could potentially be a true replacement candidate, and it (RT-AC86U) supports beamforming and the new dual core 1.8ghz ARM with 512MB of RAM vs the older dual core 800mhz ARM with 256MB of RAM on my RT-AC68U, the Asus RT-AC86U probably would handle those parental controls without a hitch was my theory and maybe give me slightly better browsing performance on complicated websites as it would appear the Asus RT-AC86U is geared towards gamers that are keen on lower latency with those CPU specs thus it should handle multiple quick requests much better IE complicated websites that have lots of data (think Flickr, many ecommerce websites or P2P services). Spoiler: I was right on most if not all counts.
Recently the Asus RT-AC86U went on sale. At first I said to myself, nah, I don't need it. It's still "expensive" even on sale. But, after I pulled the trigger on the Netgear CM1000, it gets easier to say yes to additional network equipment, besides it was on sale, and the Asus RT-AC86U is rarely on sale and would nicely complement my new Netgear CM1000 via futureproofing my network. I ordered one needless to say hoping it would cure some of my recent issues with Parental controls and complicated websites sometimes behaving less than optimal.
It arrived pretty promptly. But before I swapped it out, I first did some baseline network testing of data rates and power levels at 3 critical spots in the house on my existing Asus RT-AC68U before replacing it: the cat room/wash room (where my laptop sits on the charger at night), the back room where Wi-Fi can be spotty on my iPhone and I sleep at night when I'm on swing or night shifts and the living room where we browse the internet on our MacBook Pro and iPhones a lot during the day.
After replacing the Asus RT-AC68U with the Asus RT-AC86U I re-ran the same tests meticulously mimicking the prior conditions, but, unfortunately didn't take into account what channel differences the two routers auto-picked! Thus I had to remove the RT-AC86U and plug back in the RT-AC68U and re-run the tests on the Asus RT-AC68U with the channels the Asus RT-AC86U chosen but forgot to write down the original channels chosen by the Asus RT-AC68U. Of note, the Asus RT-AC86U chose channels that were more efficient interesting enough. I’ve matched the channels for testing purposes.
RT-AC68U
3.0.0.4.384_32799
-73dBm
234Mbps
Cat Room 5ghz
-60dBm
195Mbps
Cat Room 2.4ghz
-75dBm
176Mbps
Back Room 5ghz
-59dBm
195Mbps
Back Room 2.4ghz
-50dBm
878Mbps
Living Room 5ghz
-47dBm
217Mbps
Living Room 2.4ghz
RT-AC86U
3.0.0.4.384_45149
-66dBm
351Mbps
Cat Room 5ghz
-52dBm
237Mbps
Cat Room 2.4ghz
-69dBm
234Mbps
Back Room 5ghz
-51dBm
195Mbps
Back Room 2.4ghz
-41dBm
1300Mbps
Living Room 5ghz
-24dBm
195Mbps
Living Room 2.4ghz
I found that the Asus RT-AC86U easily won almost across the board with every Wi-Fi test I could throw at it. Benchmarking my internet bandwidth for kicks showed no improvement (not that I was expecting any as I was already getting max provision after upgrading my cable modem, and my Wi-Fi data link rates were exceeding my provision, but you can always hope perhaps more efficiency on behalf of the router would lead to some kind of gain). I did find however as anticipated that I could enable parental controls and filter out media streaming on the Roku 4k TV thus blocking YouTube, but permitting PBS Kids, and also run time scheduling on my Amazon Fire Sticks successfully, all without slowing anything down or any issues with connection drops that I was seeing on the RT-AC68U. Good. Lastly of interest I noted Flickr had some hiccups (things would struggle more than they would on the Asus RT-AC86U) on my former Asus RT-AC68U, the new Asus RT-AC86U seems to handle Flickr with much more ease, as did Home depot's website. My deals websites also seemed to behave better which are also littered with high volumes of content from varying sources thus giving the router a run for it's money, which it does so without issue.
I did coincidently decide to try to reshare out my 8TB external drive to the Asus RT-AC86U as it'd be nice not to have to plug in my MacBook Pro periodically for backups and archiving RAW files from my camera but still get good data rates. Unfortunately I'm still getting around 20MB/sec writes over Wi-Fi to it on the new RT-AC86U just like the old RT-AC68U. I feel this issue requires a deeper dive as it may be MacOS SMB handling or hard drive file format compatibility with the router as I noted folks on the internet that are getting higher data transfer rates are using NTFS formatted disks, not a MacOS supported protocol for say Time Machine backups which means those are A. Windows Clients and B. Probably a more natively supported File Structure for the router itself. I noted HFS+ and FAT32 behaved about the same on my MacBook Pro, ExFAT would be seen by the router, but refused to mount for whatever reason. I haven't tried NTFS yet, but may. I also need to dig on the web and see if perhaps there is some protocol flags for SMB on the MacOS side of the house that may need to be adjusted.
Overall I'm very happy that I now can have parental controls and have device availability as well as have some additional performance on higher complexity requests in addition to better data rates and slightly better range. It's better than giving up any ground which you don't want to do when upgrading a router, that is to trade one thing for another; you should be able to have you cake and eat it too, which in this case, was a successful cake and eating moment. If only I can nail down the network file transfers from my Mac, but that's not as high priority, it's a would be nice. Besides, having a Time Machine hanging off of your WAN, even if it's firewalled, is not exactly good security practice...
Friday, January 25, 2019