Review on 📶 T-Mobile ASUS Wireless-AC1900 Dual-Band Gigabit Router - Enhanced Network Security with AiProtection by Trend Micro (Renewed) by Michael Domus

UPDATE: 2018-03-27------------------------------------ -- --------- ------------- ------------- Asus seems to have completely disabled AiMesh functionality for all users now T-Mobile TM-AC1900 on ASUS RT-AC68U flashed with the latest firmware update (version 3.0). .0.4.384.20624). After updating via router admin interface you will no longer see AiMesh nodes and have nothing to do with AiMesh, period. Also, after attempting to manually reinstall the same updated firmware, my router reverted to the original T-Mobile firmware! Worse, this could mean there are no future updates for the TM firmware variants running the AC68U firmware. Even Merlin on the SNB forums hinted somewhat cryptically that Asus is starting to streamline the TM-AC1900 routers, and maybe even its custom firmware won't work on them much longer. At some point, people looking for a cheap way to get mesh networking will have to look elsewhere. For this reason I am correcting my rating by 1 star as it is no longer a good buy. Buying for T-Mobile firmware is a terrible idea as they are many outdated versions and pose a huge security risk. You can still flash and update to the latest (as of today) Asus firmware, but note that AiMesh has stopped working and there may not be any more firmware updates, period. For now, the party is over.------------------- ------------------------------------ -- ------------ -------------- I bought 3 of these to flash with the latest ASUS RT-AC68U firmware and set them ready for Mesh -Networks with the latest Asus firmware with AiMesh support. 1 of 3 blocks was completely bricked up and stuck in the loading loop, so when I returned the broken block I bought a 4th one. I was able to successfully flash 3 working devices with ASUS firmware and then update them to the latest firmware with AiMesh support. For some reason my 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless chips were assigned the same MAC address somewhere along the way, resulting in the devices not being able to see each other. I had to roll back the fully updated firmware for each device to my computer and edit the 5GHz MAC address by adding 4 (in hex). After that everything went smoothly. I have a 300Mbps/10Mbps connection through my ISP and wired devices are getting full bandwidth. The 5 GHz wireless range is 180 to 280 Mbps from anywhere in the house with 3 devices (1 master, 2 nodes) in mesh mode. Wi-Fi calls don't drop when moving between objects, so everything seems to be working fine. With just 2 devices (1 master/1 node) I'm getting around 150-165 Mbps at the outside edges of my house, so 3 might be a bit overkill for my house (2500 sq ft). hp When running a speed test with T-Mobile firmware, my 300Mbps download speed consumed up to 100 percent of the 1st processing core and 65 percent of the 2nd processing core. In the latest ASUS firmware, this usage drops to 70 percent on the 1st core and 5-7% on the 2nd core while maintaining the same download speed. T-Mobile firmware is very outdated and not optimized.