Asus RT-AC5300U 802.11ac Router - 4x4 MU-MIMO with Broadcom XStream
by Ganesh T S on September 2, 2015 5:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Networking
- Asus
- Broadcom
- 802.11ac
- Wi-Fi
Asus announced the RT-AC5300U 802.11ac router using Broadcom's tri-band Wi-Fi chipset at IFA 2015 today. This is meant to be a flagship router with AC5300 speeds (1000 Mbps on the 2.4 GHz band and 2167 Mbps on each of the 5 GHz bands for a total of 5333 Mbps theoretical bandwidth). The router uses Broadcom's latest Wi-Fi chipset along with the XStream platform concept.
As a recap, Broadcom's XStream involves combining two discrete 802.11ac radios in a single board, thereby allowing for two different channels to be simultaneously active in the 5 GHz band. Essentially, this concept combines two Wi-Fi routers in one. Initially introduced in a six stream configuration using Broadcom's second generation 802.11ac chipset, it was even demonstrated by Asus at Computex 2014. At CES earlier this year, Broadcom updated their 802.11ac portfolio with some new products sporting Wave 2 features. D-Link also simultaneously announced their ULTRA series using Broadcom's chipsets. The DIR-895L AC5300 was the flagship that combined the Broadcom 4x4 MU-MIMO solution with the XStream concept. The Asus RT-AC5300U being announced today uses the same platform (BCM4709, a 1 GHz dual-core Cortex-A9 based processor combined with three BCM4366 radios) and has similar features.
Broadcom's proprietary NitroQAM / TurboQAM technology helps in low-latency and high bandwidth requirement scenarios (as long as the client side also has Broadcom silicon). The router sports eight external dual-band detachable antennae. Internally, there iis 128 MB of flash and 256 MB of DDR3 RAM. The other features are standard - 1x WAN and 4x LAN Gigabit ports, 1x USB 3.0 and 1x USB 2.0 port.
The router will be available for purchase sometime in Q4 2015. There is no information on the pricing yet.
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ZeDestructor - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
It's obviously getting there though, with the Xeon-D boards.. A little of boat-pushing would be nice instead of more wireless wankery...zodiacfml - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
Yes and No. It is useless for just a few clients as everything will not be so different from a similar AC WiFi Device and if access is 90% Internet which is the bottleneck. It is useful though for a lot more clients as WiFi is half-duplex and speed is shared between all clients.VikingDude151 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
What is the point of this besides looking cool? You'll chew through nearly all 5Ghz spectrum, but will have poor coverage. Can't have two APs spread around the house on separate spectrum.. and this is worse if you're in a high density location. Imagine if you have a couple neighbors with this device, talk about no clear wireless spectrum.Devices like this are ridiculous and only make WiFi worse for everyone else and are ultimately no for the user than a simple 1Gbps Ethernet connection.
Are there even any 4-stream 802.11ac Wave 2 client devices out yet?
juhatus - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Please read here why its said to be wave2.http://semiaccurate.com/2015/04/27/qualcomm-talks-...
VikingDude151 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Once clients actually support MU-MIMO we may have something, but in the consumer space this will be a very poor upgrade for most. Spend the money on more APs, even if just 802.11n. Signal strength and SNR are king.Enterprise is another story, but clients still need to support MU-MIMO.
phoenix_rizzen - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
There's 21 non-overlapping 20 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band. Now, you won't get the most bandwidth out of the spectrum using only 20 MHz channels, but that's a lot of room for neighbours. Especially when you consider how short of range you get in the 5 GHz band.Sure, if you bump the channels to 180 Mhz there's only ~3 non-overlapping channels, but who's going to do that?
You don't need 4-stream clients to make the most of this. It supports MU-MIMO. The MU is for multi-user. Meaning, you can support 4 separate single-stream MU-MIMO clients simultaneously (so long as they aren't all in the same physical direction).
Granted, this is a bit overkill for a home network, especially with only gigabit links for the wired side of things. But it's certainly neat to see how much tech can be crammed into a single AP like that. :)
Now to wait for the MU-MIMO goodness to trickle up to the enterprise wireless gear.
VikingDude151 - Wednesday, September 2, 2015 - link
Spectrum is a major problem, and you can't really count DFS channels as usable. Also, this site and this product are targeted at gamers and technologists. Standard consumer width will be 80Mhz, with gamers pushing that to 160Mhz. No one will deploy with 20Mhz outside of stadiums and convention halls. Spectrum gets really crowded fast with this product that takes up to 320Mhz of spectrum on its own.MU-Mimo doesn't do anything until MU-Mimo devices are ubiquitous. Unfortunately.
juhatus - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
From the link: "One problem with this technology is that it doesn’t up the maximum speed a single user sees, what MU-MIMO delivers is higher aggregate throughput for more users at a time who all connect to the same base station."So this is excellent when you have multiple users at home all playing, watching youtube, netflix, working, streaming and downloading the latest linux distro from torrent. If your a single with no kids, than its not that much of big deal. Its just solving the really crowded wifi spectrum problem for multiple users.
VikingDude151 - Thursday, September 3, 2015 - link
MU-MIMO is a very hyped tech, but what is missing are devices. MU-MIMO doesn't work until devices are available that support the tech. In wireless, the device is typically the weakest link, not the AP.Gasaraki88 - Friday, September 4, 2015 - link
You don't need MIMO clients to get the MIMO benefits on the router.