Review on 🔒 ASUS RT-AC87U AC2400 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router with Aiprotection Lifetime Security powered by Trend Micro, Adaptive Qos, and Parental Control by Tio Kotaki

Have been using it for a few months. I subscribed to a VPN service (VyprVPN), so I use the router's VPN client capabilities to route most of the devices in my house through the VPN (using the OpenVPN protocol) to protect my privacy from my ISP to protect and limit my ISP's ability to throttle Internet based on what IPs I'm connected to (e.g. Sling TV, Netflix, Hulu, etc.). I started with ASUSWRT firmware (ASUS stock), but then after some research I switched to ASUSWRT MERLIN because I needed to do policy-based routing (I route traffic from most devices on my LAN through VPN, but there are a few , which I have to send unencrypted over the global network to my ISP). . Oddly enough, ASUSWRT MERLIN has this functionality and is really reliable – but you need to be very careful here – at the time of writing this review, the two latest versions of ASUS MERLIN (380.68.2 and 380.68.0) seem to have a serious bug , which causes the VPN portion of the UI to crash permanently once you implement policy-based routing. After a few hours of trying to figure out what the problem was with no luck, as a last resort I flashed the 380.67.0 version to the router and then everything worked fine. Later it became known from the release notes (should have read them earlier!) that for version 380.68.0 the VPN part of the user interface was fundamentally revised - that's where the problem must have occurred. Let's hope this gets fixed in a future release (they come out once a month or two). Otherwise this router was great. With dual-core 1000MHz processors, the VPN client has increased throughput with 256-bit OpenVPN encryption (powered by VyprVPN). WiFi works great on both bands. I have four working SSIDs - two of which are for guests (you can restrict guest network users to internet access and keep them off your intranet). WiFi signal strength and connectivity was good, even in my old house with stucco walls (the wire mesh behind the plaster seriously interferes with any WiFi signals). In the same room as the router, I have a computer with a Rosewill RNX-AC1900PCE, 802.11AC Dual Band AC1900 PCI Express WiFi adapter/wireless adapter/network card, and on the 5G band it's constantly connecting to the router at over 1 gigabit --- pretty awesome. The router UI is really well thought out and easy to use (perfect if you're not very good with routers). Finally, the reliability of the router was excellent - nothing broke in two months and I never had to restart the router. In general I am very satisfied. :)