Previewed and announced during CES 2014, ASUS has now officially launched its ASUS RT-AC87 router. The RT-AC87 is the world's first Wave 2 802.11ac router with 5GHz speeds of up to 1.73Gbps and is powered by Quantenna's QSR1000 4x4 Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) chipset.

Thanks to the Quantenna's QSR1000 chipset, the RT-AC87 features four external antennas and Universal Beamforming in order to maximize the range, improve signal strength and performance, even for older 802.11abgn clients. The RT-AC87 can reach speeds of up to 1.73Gbps and thanks to MU-MIMO technology can stream content to multiple devices.

Unfortunately, Quantenna's QSR1000 chipset comes at a price as the ASUS RT-AC87 only features a single USB 2.0 port, in addition to four Gigabit Ethernet ports, of course.

The aforementioned MU-MIMO technology allow the RT-AC87 to form groups of multiple devices that can be served simultaneously. As far as the security is concerned, the ASUS RT-AC87 features AiProtection with Trend Micro which uses real-time network monitoring to detect malware and other intrusions before it reaches any device.

It also comes with pre-installed enhanced ASUSWRT user interface and AiCloud 2.0 which makes the setup of the router as well as the setup of the network cloud very easy.

The new ASUS RT-AC87 router is currently only limited to North America and has an MSRP of US $269.99.







Source: ASUS.com.