ASUS RT-AC3200 Wireless-AC3200 Tri-Band Wireless Gigabit Router, AiProtection with Trend Micro for Complete Network Security
In a trio of tri band routers on market, the Asus RT-AC3200 is the latest. This router is great for homes having lots of local heavy Wi-Fi needs. The few things the make the Asus RT-AC3200 stand out include a slew of excellent network monitoring features, a robust and fun to use interface, ability to connect to multiple internet sources at a time and a built-in VPN server. This means, the RT-AC3200 can also be a capable gateway for a small office.
Design and hardware:
The RT-AC3200 looks almost identical but slightly larger to the RT-AC87U. The only difference between the two is that the RT-AC3200 is a three-stream tri band router while RT-AC87U is a quad-stream dual band. Measuring 290 × 188 × 58mm and weighing almost 1kg, the router is an imposing unit. The styling, aggressive and angular look may not be up to everyone’s taste but it has reasonably subtle design.
It has excellent build quality with stout plastics throughout. There is ample ventilation and the four rubber feet help to keep the device firmly in place. The router includes a full selection of status LEDs on the router’s front edge. The LEDs allow you to see much about your network at a glance. A minor design improvement over its older design is that the status lights now protrude out instead of facing down enabling you to see them even when you look at the router from top.
It is a huge router with six detachable antennas. The router houses just usual four gigabit LAN ports and one gigabit internet WAN port on the back, despite the large size of the router. There is enough space to include another row of LAN ports to it. It features two USB ports, one USB 3.0 port is located on the front and USB 2.0 port is placed on its back.
The USB 3.0 port is preferred to host a permanent storage device due to its faster speed but the front placement of its port results in a messy setup when you want the router to serve as a network storage server.
The RT-AC3200 packs powerful hardware inside. it runs on a Broadcom BCM4709 dual-core 1GHz processor with 128MB of flash storage and 256MB of DDR 3 system memory. The router has enough power as a small server and is among the most powerful routers on the market.
Features:
The RT-AC3200 shares many helpful features that are collectively available in other Asus routers. The two main features include Adaptive QoS (quality of service) and AiProtection.
AiProtection is powered by Trend Micro, and is designed to protect entire home network from malware and viruses from the internet. If a client is already infected, this feature will stop it from sending out personal information and it works quite well.
Adaptive QoS prioritizes Internet bandwidth according to the type of traffic such as gaming video and audio streaming, file transferring, VoIP/instant messaging, Web surfing and other. You can arrange these categories by priority by using the mouse and router will take care of the rest.
On top of that, the RT-AC3200 also features a function called apps analysis that allows real time monitoring of internet activity of any connected client and the total upload and download bandwidth being used. It is a very helpful if you want to find out which application or client is abusing the internet connection.
The RT-AC3200 supports nine coexisting guest Wi-Fi networks (three on each band). All of these networks are disabled by default but you can turn each on via a click. The two USB ports of the router can be used for multiple purposes such as hosting cellular modems, external hard drives or USB printers. The router has a built-in PPTP VPN server which is able to host up to 10 remote clients.
Setup:
It shares the similar setup process as of other routers from Asus that were released in last few years. The setup is very easy. You just have to plug in the router and point a browser to router’s default IP address -) from a connected computer. First time, the interface will provide you a Web-based wizard which guides you through a few steps which include creating a password for the Wi-Fi networks and interface itself.
By default, Smart Connect feature of the router is turned on which means that all bands 2.4GHz and 5GHz are aggregated into a single network and router will connect clients to either band automatically depending on the clients Wi-Fi standard. You can however manually name three bands as three separate networks. You will get three Wi-Fi networks in this case, one for 2.4GHz band and the two for 5GHz band.
After the initial setup, you can go back to the interface to manage router as well as customize other features and settings. The interface is easy to use and very well-organized. It has an interactive network map which displays connected devices in real time. To view more information about it or to interact with it, you can click on a connected device.
You can also access the router’s other settings quickly from this map. The settings include Wi-Fi settings, Dynamic DNS, settings of internet connection WAN and so on. You can also use other sections of the interface to access other settings. For the most part, everything is self-explanatory and clearly explained.
One minor caveat of the Web interface is that while you can assign a fixed IP address easily to a connected client, but once the IP is assigned, client is not remembered by its name but its MAC address. Apart from the router’s settings, the Web interface can be used to manage router’s many features.
Pros:
Lot of features
Powerful fast interface
Decent overall performance
Cons:
Only one USB 3.0 port
expensive
The Asus RT-AC3200 tri-band router is a beast that sports a futuristic design. It is a solid 5GHz performer and is a feature rich router which is worth investing.