ASUS RT-BE88U Dual-band WiFi 7 AiMesh Extendable Performance Router, 4K-QAM, MLO, Dual 10G ports, SFP+, Four 2.5G ports, Four 1G ports, 34G WAN/LAN capacity, Subscription-free network security, VPNs

I would only consider buying an Asus router and I have had a few in the past, the RT-AC68U, the RT-AC86U, the RT-AX82U and the RT-AX86U. Now I have the GT-BE98. Not everything was perfect along the way, the RT-AC86U lost its Gb WAN and would only run at 100, so that hastened one of the upgrades along the way. I did try a Zen WiFi mesh system, but that was so unstable, it had to be returned. Asus routers are highly configurable and operate an outstanding mesh system, called AiMesh, which makes whole home WiFi a breeze.No review would be complete without talking about the price. This router has just about everything and you pay for that. No one is forced to buy such an expensive router, so anyone buying it is a volunteer to the price-tag, so I am not going criticise the price.After using the GT-BE98 for a couple of weeks, I would call it impressive. Physically, it is big, very big and no amount of styling is going to detract from it looking the wrong side of ugly. Yes, it does look like an upside-down cybernetic giant spider! With the size comes the power consumption. Not really a criticism, because if you are going to spend a very large amount of money on router like this, you are probably not going to be put off by the fact that it uses over 20 watts of electricity just to be idle and goes above that when under a load.Features are just vast, you get WiFi 7, which hopefully adds a bit of future-proofing, you get a 10Gb LAN port, a 10Gb WAN port, 4 x 2.5Gb LAN ports and just one 1Gb LAN port. The LAN ports are fast, very fast, to a point that I noticed a difference when web browsing on my PC coming from the RT-AX86U to the RT-BE98. The array of features in the firmware is nothing short of staggering.WiFi does not seem to have much more reach over my AX router, but it is faster and access to files on my NAS appears much faster. It should be noted that I have not tried WiFi 7 clients yet, so that will (hopefully) impress even more. When at a distance from the router and the WiFi signal is weak, it does carry more data and speedtests do show solid performance, so the signal does not travel much further, but is useful for further.I have the router setup on a wired 2.5Gb LAN connection for an AiMesh system with my RT-AX86U as a node. My previous AiMesh system was with the RT-AX86U as the router and the RT-AX82U as the node and that was perfect and stable for many years, but was starting to fall over, with buffering and other glitches appearing, where there were no hints of problem for years. It was ready for a re-set and if I was doing that, it would be with a new router.As you might expect with a recently released router, there will be issues to iron out in the firmware. Before adding any settings, there was the obligatory firmware update and I manually added the settings that had worked so well in my previous AiMesh setup.In my original review (based on Jan 2024 firmware), I listed three bugs which caused me some concern, all now appear to have been resolved in the April 2024 firmware update, so this review has been updated to remove details of the no longer relevant bugs and the rating has been raised to 5 stars.

Asus RT-BE88U Woah what a Router, its full of features & settings to cater for everyone's needs. I got the router a few days ago, and its been Fantastic so far. The Design is the same as the Asus RT-AC88U, but has a golden style to it. It seems abit more warmer that the AC88U but thats due to all the processing for the faster network speed such as 2.5Gb or 10Gb LAN ports. The Wifi 7 speed has been amazing on my phone & Wifi Laptop. Its super fast on both 2.5Ghz & 5Ghz bands. Wi-Fi 7 Technology Utilizes the latest Wi-Fi 7 standard, supporting 160MHz channel bandwidths, Multi-Link Operation (MLO), and 4K-QAM for enhanced wireless performance. Its easy to create a separate Guest network or Internet Of Things network, So you can now have a wireless network for older Devices that run on 2.4Ghz and have a separate network for your Newer devices that use things like WPA3, MLO. The Router has loads of options for configurations. make sure you backup the settings before you go playing with them, So you can easily revert back. It’s a bonus you can download the Asus app and control the router from your mobile phone. The router features a nice design with removable antennas & options for wall or ceiling mounting. It offers value for money for all that it does. I'm glad I bought it and would highly recommend it.

GT-BE98 - Don't Bother!I had high hopes for this router. We had bought the AXE11000 and that was pretty awful, dropping connections, wouldn't accept a drive in the USB ports without malfunctioning. So this seemed like as though it would have been a better bet, faster processor, more ram, what could possibly go wrong?At first, everything seemed ok, we have anything up to 20 devices connected at any given time, and that's including the IoT devices. I had set up an IoT guest network, which seemed to work ok initially, but the signal strength for that network was particularly poor, and so things kept dropping off and not reconnecting. I added everything onto the main 2.4Ghz network and things still kept dropping off, sometimes reconnecting and often not.I then noticed that this router did not seem to like Apple devices, of which we have at least 5 or 6. Again, the router logs were showing that the signal strength for the Apple devices was really low, sometimes as low as -100 in the same room as the router! And if that was't weird enough, we have a Mac upstairs that was dropping off and back on the network and I went and removed all traces of our network from it and then logged it back on, and the signal went from virtually nothing, to excellent in just a few clicks. By the end of the day, it was back to -100, -90 etc. Same for an iPhone 14 Pro Max, even when in the same room as the router and connected to one of the 5Ghz bands (I'll come to those later), it would be reported in the logs as a really weak signal, and that it was deauthorizing constantly, on and off, all day long. Macbook was the same. Really odd.My NAS supports link aggregation, as does the GT-BE98, so I set it up. Within a few hours, the router had globally disconnected everything, and continued doing so, every few hours, even when idle. The logs showed nothing about the link aggregation, but there were lots of error 30, and kernel errors, but relating to other devices around the time of the global disconnects. I undid the link aggregation and the global disconnects became fewer.This router, is also marketed as being able to support a hard drive from its USB ports, so I did a test. My music library, on a 2.5" SSD and the global disconnects started again. Tried a couple of other different drives, and ways of formatting the drives, but it just did not like having anything plugged into the USB ports with data on that can be accessed over the network. Why bother marketing this as a feature?The firmware. As with many Asus routers at the moment, especially 'high end' ones, like the BE98 that have been abandoned, is partuclarly buggy and completely unsupported. Even the web UI that looks like a 90s w a r e z site, glitches and sometimes partially loads, requiring you to close and reopen, but then you are met with a message saying that you are logged in twice, and this happens on Safari and Firefox. If you can get hold of Asus support from the UK, it's the same, scripted instructions to reset this and start from scratch, or turn this feature off etc. The latest firmware for the BE98 is broken in so many ways that there would not be enough room here to list them all. Just know, that if you buy one of these, there is no aftermarket firmware, Merlin do not support it, and the only other fork, Gnuton, only has an old beta version available, so you are in the hands of Asus, who don't seem to care that people have paid the best part of £700 for a router, and for that money, they expect it to not only work, but to be reliable, supported with firmware updates, and worthy of the price tag. This router is not worthy. It does not give you stronger wifi. It struggles with wired connections. The build quality is pretty poor at this price, just cheap, cast plastic parts with the usual awful ROG styling that makes it look like a huge dead spider.Reverted back to our old router and all the issues went away.On my travels to find a replacement, it seems that a lot of current Asus routers are like this, so it's time to look elsewhere. There has got to be better than this for the money. Asus need to get their finger out and get pushing out some much needed firmware updates to fix all the bugs and broken 'features'.