After teasing the industry with a preview earlier this year at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Asus today officially launched its RT-AC87 dual-band wireless router. It’s the first Wave 2 802.11ac router for consumers and it’s powered by Quantenna’s QSR1000 4×4 Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) chipset, which gives your home network a bit of future-proofing. What’s special about MU-MIMO is that it allows for multiple streams to be beamed to multiple clients simultaneously, up to eight in theory though Quantenna’s QSR1000 chipset supports 4 spatial streams. This is a boon for crowded networks, which pretty much applies to everyone these days — think about a typical family of four, each with a PC, tablet, and smartphone, plus whatever other devices you have connected wirelessly. The rub is that you need compatible adapters to take advantage of the technology, but you have to start somewhere. Asus equipped the RT-AC87 with four external antennas and Universal Beamforming support for added range and signal reliability. The AC2400 designation translates into up to 1.73Gbps on the 5GHz band in 802.11ac mode and up to 600Mbps via 802.11n. The RT-AC87 will be available “shortly” for $270 MSRP.
