Who makes the best 802.11ac router?

We review the only 5

models available today
Networking

It's a tricky time to be in the market for a new 802.11ac Wi-Fi routers are just the ticket for consumers
looking to cut the cord.
wireless router. The safe bet is buy a model
based on the tried-and-true, rock-solid
802.11n standardand I recommend that
you adopt that course if you're looking for a
new router for your small business.
Consumers, on the other hand, may fall in
love with the blistering speed and phenome-
nal range that routers based on the second
draft of the 802.11ac standard deliver.

The performance of each of the five 802.11ac routers that I tested for this story over-
whelms the performance of the Asus RT-N66U, which may be the best 802.11n router
on the market today. Looking to stream high-definition video over your wireless
network? Using an 802.11ac router, I streamed a Blu-ray video ISO imagecomplete
with high-definition Dolby TrueHD or DTS HD Master Audio multichannel sound-
trackfrom a server in my home office to a bridge-connected PC in my home theater,
an acoustically isolated room that some lesser-quality 802.11n routers can't even
penetrate, much less stream media into. I experienced no glitches and no dropouts.

But 802.11ac Draft 2.0 won't crystallize into a bona fide standard until sometime next
year. We went through a similar routine as the 802.11n standard went through its fi-
nal stages. Back then, however, the Wi-Fi Alliance (an industry trade group) assured
consumers that all products based on the 802.11n Draft 2.0 standard and bearing the
alliance's logo would be compatible with hardware based on the final standardas
well as with each other. The Wi-Fi Alliance offers no such assurances this time
around.

So there's a slim chance that these early first-generation 802.11ac routers will be in-
compatible with hardware released after the standard is finalized. Another caveat is
cost: Either you'll have to buy two 802.11ac routers and configure one of them as an
802.11ac bridge, or you'll have to buy one router and a dedicated 802.11ac bridge, in
order to realize an 802.11ac router's full potential. And though the bridge will estab-
lish a wireless connection to the router, you'll need to use ethernet cables to connect
devices to the bridgebecause no desktop or laptop PC currently has built-in
802.11ac network adapters, and no USB 802.11ac network adapters exist. (Broadcom
announced in June that Asus's new G75VW gaming laptop would include a built-in
802.11ac adapter; but as of September 11, Asus's website indicates that the machine
has only an 802.11n adapter. Netgear, meanwhile, has announced a USB 802.11ac net-
work adapter, but as of the same date, it had not yet shipped its A6200.)

So why should anyone consider buying an 802.11ac router? Well, if you're looking to
connect up to four stationary clients in one locationa home theater PC, a smart TV,
a Blu-ray player, and an A/V receiver, for instanceto a wireless network, an
802.11ac network will deliver better performance than anything else on the market.
We're talking real-world throughput of 400 to 500 megabits per second (mbps) at
close range; that's twice the speed of the best 802.11n routers.

And at very long range, where most 5GHz 802.11n routers peter out, an 802.11ac
router can deliver throughput of between 50 mbps and 100 mbpsmore than enough
bandwidth to stream high-definition video. For more details on how the 802.11ac
standard is designed to function, check out "Three-Minute Tech: IEEE 802.11ac" on
PCWorld's new sister site, TechHive.

An 802.11ac router can also operate a concurrent 802.11n wireless network for your
existing laptop, tablet, desktop PC, smartphone, and printer. In this sense, an
802.11ac router delivers the best of both worlds. As for the likelihood that the final
802.11ac standard will render products based on the 802.11ac Draft 2.0 standard
obsolete, no one can guarantee that it won't, but in my opinion it's a fairly remote
possibility.

If you're ready to make a leap of faith to the unfinished standard, the next question is
"Which 802.11ac router is best?" I'm glad you asked. Here are my assessments of all
five 802.11ac router models available for sale as of September 10, 2012, based on my
tests:

Asus RT-AC66U

Belkin AC 1200 DB

Buffalo WZR-1800H

D-Link DIR-865L

Netgear R6300

Networking
Asus currently builds the best consumer-oriented 802.11n routerthe RT-N66U
Dual-Band Wireless N900, which I used as a reference device to compare new
802.11ac routers against. After testing the company's $200 RT-AC66U, I believe that
Asus also markets the best 802.11ac router currently available, too, though the offer-
ings from several other manufacturers come close.

The new RT-AC66U and the older RT-N66U look almost identical: Bucking the indus-
try trend of hiding antennas inside the enclosure, both of these routers provide three
removable and upgradable dipole antennas that you can reposition to deliver the best
wireless performance. They're mounted to the exterior of a satin-black, diamond-
plate-finish plastic enclosure. The routers can lie flat, sit semivertically on the provid-
ed stand, or be mounted to the wall.

The RT-AC66U provides two USB 2.0 ports, so you can attach both a USB hard drive
and a USB printer, and then share the devices over the network. I didn't evaluate try
to connect a printer to the router's USB port, but the RT-AC66U was very fast at trans-
ferring files to and from an attached 500MB 2.5-inch USB hard drive. Asus is working
on a new Android and iOS app called AiCloud that will enable users to sync, access,
and store data on an attached hard drive, using a multitude of devices over the
Internet. Update: Asus has since released new firmware that enables AiCloud. If
you've purchased an RT-AC66U, you can download the firmware here. According to
Asus, AiCloud will also allow you to access any PC on your wired or wireless net-
work from the Internet without the need to install client software on each machine. I
have not evaluated this new firmware.

Whether you plan to use your router to stream media, to host files, or to download
files using P2P services such as BitTorrent, the RT-AC66U has you covered. It offers
DLNA and iTunes servers for video and music, ftp and Samba servers for file
hosting, a VPN pass-through for secure remote network access, and a program called
Download Master for downloading Torrent files to an attached storage device, with-
out requiring a host PC.

This dual-band router can run a 450-mbps 802.11n network on the 2.4GHz frequency
band and a 1.3-gbps 802.11ac network on the 5GHz frequency band simultaneously.
The RT-AC66U I tested arrived from the factory with its 5GHz radio configured to
deliver 80MHz of wireless bandwidth (draft 802.11ac).

Benchmarking 5GHz 802.11ac performance

I used an AVADirect laptop equipped with a 2.5GHz Intel Core i5-3210M CPU, 4GB
of memory, and an integrated Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 Wi-Fi adapter to run
my benchmark tests. The Ultimate-N 6300 can send and receive three simultaneous
150-mbps spatial streams (450 mbps in total); most adapters are limited to handling
two (300 mbps in total). This was all the streaming I needed to evaluate the RT-
AC66U's 802.11n performance (on both the 2.4- and 5GHz frequency bands). To mea-
sure the router's 802.11ac performance on the 5GHz frequency band, I configured a
second RT-AC66U as a media bridge and connected that to the AVADirect's ethernet
port.

To test the router, I positioned the client successively at five spots inside and outside
a 2800-square-foot, ranch-style home (distances from the router are noted in each
chart below). I used the open-source IPERF benchmark (and the JPERF Java graphical
front end designed for it). To measure the router's downlink TCP throughput, I set up
the laptop as a server and used a desktop PC hard-wired to the router as the client.

At close range, with the client 9 feet away from the router and in the same room, the
RT-AC66U was more than twice as fast as the reference 802.11n router, delivering
TCP throughput of 466 mbps. This was the second-highest performance of the five
802.11ac routers I tested at this location (the Netgear R6300 was slightly faster).

I was surprised to discover that the RT-AC66U performed even better when I moved
the client into the kitchen, 20 feet away from the router with one wall in between. I
suspect that the media bridge was being oversaturated at the closer proximity,
though the orientation of the media bridge is another variable. In the bedroom, the
bridge faced the router: In the kitchen, it was perpendicular to the router. Whatever
the cause, the RT-AC66U's TCP throughput jumped to a staggering 525 mbps at this
locationthe fastest performance in the field by a wide margin.

The next two benchmark runs took place inside my home theater. This is a room-
within-a-room design, with four walls of 2-by-4 framing and drywall inside four
walls of 2-by-6 framing and drywall, with about 6 inches of dead air and fiberglass
insulation separating them. My intent was to optimize the room's acoustics, not to
build a Faraday cage, but many lesser routers and other wireless devices have had
trouble penetrating it. However, none of the 802.11ac routers I tested had any difficul-
ty reaching the client in this room, and three of themincluding the RT-AC66U
sustained TCP throughput at more than twice the rate of the reference 802.11n router.
As you can see from the chart below, the Asus was the fastest of them all, at 192
mpbs.
Since many people will want to connect the gear in their home entertainment system
to an 802.11ac network, I decided to measure TCP throughput with the media bridge
inside the built-in equipment cabinet in my home theater (the floor-to-ceiling, wall-
to-wall cabinet is constructed from cabinet-grade plywood, including the back). The
RT-AC66U's TCP throughput dropped by just a few megabits per second in this
scenario. In fact, I found that I could wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO im-
age of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Home Server 2011 machine in my
home office to a home theater PC in the entertainment center, including its high-defi-
nition soundtrack.
The RT-AC66U's performance dropped off only slightly when I moved the client and
the media bridge to the first of my two outdoor locations, an exterior patio enclosed
by three walls and one half wall with glass windows. In the real world, I doubt that
anyone would try to set up a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and
finding an outlet (and likely an extension cord) are too inconvenient. But I wanted to
see what kind of range the RT-AC66U would deliver, and I wasn't disappointed. It
was the second fastest (behind Netgear's R6300) among the five routers I tested.
The RT-AC66U's performance was even more impressive when I moved the client
and bridge out to a picnic table completely outside my house. At this location, the
router and client were 75 feet apart and separated by three insulated interior walls,
and one insulated exterior wall clad on one side with fiber-cement lapboard. Under
these conditions, the reference 802.11n router delivered TCP throughput of just 30.2
mpbs, but the RT-AC66U roared along at a whopping 125 mbps. The only thing more
surprising that the number is the fact that the Asus finished in second place at this
location, bested by the D-Link DIR-865L, which delivered 152 mbps.
Benchmarking 2.4GHz 802.11n performance

Though you can ostensibly set the router's firmware to forcibly bond two 20MHz
channels within the 2.4GHz frequency band to create a single channel with 40MHz of
bandwidth, the RT-AC66U automatically backed down to using a single channel
when it detected other 2.4GHz wireless networks operating nearby (nevertheless, the
router's firmware stubbornly indicated that it was operating a 40-MHz channel).

I assume that this behavior is in preparation for eventual Wi-Fi Alliance certification,
since the trade group requires "good-neighbor" behavior of this type, though the Wi-
Fi Alliance has not yet implemented a certification program for 802.11ac routers. In
my opinion, the router was unnecessarily deferential. My home sits a on a 10-acre lot,
and my neighbors' routers are far away. Usually, my network client adapters don't
even indicate that the neighboring routers are there at all.

On my 2.4GHz 802.11n benchmark tests, the RT-AC66U performed slightly below the
average marks for all five 802.11ac routers, especially at close range (in the bedroom
and kitchen tests).
When the distance between the router and the client was greatest, however, the RT-
AC66U bested the rest of the field, with the exception of its reference-point cousin,
the RT-N66U. In the test charted below, the client and the router were 75 feet apart.

Benchmarking hardwired ethernet performance

The RT-AC66U's four-port gigabit ethernet switch performed as expected, delivering
TCP throughput of 943 mbps.

To evaluate the RT-AC66U's performance as a network-attached storage device, I

connected a 500GB Western Digital My Passport USB drive to one of the router's USB
ports. I used a stopwatch to time how long it took the unit to copy a few files from a
PC to the drive over the network (a write test), and then I copied a few files from the
USB drive to the networked PC over the network (a read test). The PC was hardwired
to the network.

I created a large-file test by ripping a DVD (Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk to Dawn)
to the PC's hard drive. Copying this 4.29GB file from the PC to the portable hard
drive required 289.7 seconds (about 4 minutes, 50 seconds). This was the fastest time
of the five 802.ac routers I tested, but it was slightly slower than the reference RT-
N66U 802.11n router. The D-Link and Belkin routers were off the chart here, with
scores of 1233 and 2211 seconds, respectively. I couldn't benchmark the Buffalo WZR-
D1800H at all on this measure, because the router didn't recognize my NTFS-format-
ted hard drive.
Surprisingly, the RT-AC66U was slower at copying (reading) the large file from the
USB drive than it was at writing to the drive. On the other hand, as the chart below
makes clear, the two Asus routers were faster than most of the rest of the field on this
measure.

Unless you rip a lot of movies from DVD or Blu-ray discs, you'll rarely move a single
large file to a hard drive attached to your router. A more common task is to move
batches of small files back and forth across your network. To evaluate each router's
performance in this scenario, I created a single folder containing 595MB of small files
(subfolders containing music, graphics, photos, documents, spreadsheets, and so on).

On this task, the RT-AC66U delivered the fastest write performance of any of the
802.11ac routers I tested; it was bested only by the Asus 802.11n router I used as a ref-
erence point.

When it came to retrieving the batch of small files from an attached hard drive, none
of the routers were especially fast. The RT-AC66U took third place, behind the refer-
ence RT-N66U router and Netgear's R6300 802.11ac router.
Bottom line

Several of the new 802.11ac routers turned in excellent performance on one test or
another, but the Asus RT-AC66U was the best overall. It delivered the top benchmark
scores performance on two of my 802.11ac wireless tests, two of my 802.11n wireless
tests, and nearly all of my hardwired tests (it was part of a three-way tie for first in
this category).

The router is feature-rich, too, with DLNA compatibility for home entertainment use,
a built-in iTunes server, an integrated BitTorrent client, and more. And Asus has pro-
duced an attractive, user-friendly front-end for tweaking its firmware. I wish that
more router manufacturers would follow Asus's example of using external antennas
that allow users to fine-tune range and performance.

If you're ready to take the plunge into 802.11ac Draft 2.0 and you don't mind paying
top dollar, this is the router to buy.

Note: This review is part of a roundup. Click here to read the introduction to the sto-
ry and find links to the other 802.11ac routers reviewed at the same time.

Update: This story was updated on September 13 to inform readers that Asus has
now released the firmware required to make use of its AiCloud tool.