Share What You Know: ASUS RT-AC3200 News, Release Date, Price and Expectations

[ddarko]

Is Asus ever going to officially announce that this product will never come to market or is it just going to never speak of it again? At this point, the router has been delayed so long that events seem to have overtaken it, what with the new announcements of the latest marketing buzzwords and features at CES. I can't say I'm disappointed that tbere won't be a release of what seems like would have been a horribly buggy product but the history of this drawn out vaporware is unusual.

 

[thiggins]

It's announced. Will be shipping shortly.

 

[ddarko]

Not trying to be a smart aleck but is this "announced and released shortly" estimate any different from the other "announced and released shortly" estimates in the past that came and went? In this thread alone, Asus said on October 20, 2014:

Here is what I Know -

Expecting North America release within 45 days. I will update the community once we have a firm release schedule set with the resellers.

which then got changed on November 13 to December:

Delivery Update -
The AC3200 will be delayed by about a month to market. After a long beta period we decided to tweak the hardware and a few other items. I will have an update in a couple of weeks as to a firm US release schedule at retail.

Late November was also the estimate that Asus told Michael Brown at PC World in October after he described - pretty accurately - the router as "vaporish" in his review of the Linksys EA9200:

(Update: Asus tells me the RT-AC3200 it announced in June will finally ship in late November.)

So I'm a little skeptical. At this point, I guess I'll believe it's been released when I see it on shelves. I don't really see why Asus would want to release it at this point. Wouldn't their time and resources be better spent if they canceled this router and shifted resources to the refined and more mature chipsets announced at CES.

 

[Richard1864]

Not trying to be a smart aleck but is this "announced and released shortly" estimate any different from the other "announced and released shortly" estimates in the past that came and went? In this thread alone, Asus said on October 20, 2014:



which then got changed on November 13 to December:



Late November was also the estimate that Asus told Michael Brown at PC World in October after he described - pretty accurately - the router as "vaporish" in his review of the Linksys EA9200:



So I'm a little skeptical. At this point, I guess I'll believe it's been released when I see it on shelves. I don't really see why Asus would want to release it at this point. Wouldn't their time and resources be better spent if they canceled this router and shifted resources to the refined and more mature chipsets announced at CES.

I'm also skeptical, especially since I've been all over the Asus US site and can't find ANYTHING there about this router, no recent announcement or anything, not even in the Press Releases. Can we have a link to the latest announcement please?

 

[RMerlin]

All I can say is that the router isn't vaporware, as I can see Asus making a lot of progress toward supporting it in their firmware source code with each new GPL release (their Smart Connect feature seems to be lightyears ahead of the cut-down support Netgear implemented in their own R8000 based on what I can see in the source code).

Remember that the RT-N66U came to market nearly a whole year late, and went through a complete redesign. The AC87 was also delayed by a few months as it went through a casing redesign (and they even changed the LEDs at the last minute - the one I have at home has white leds, while the released product has blue leds).

If they ship too quickly, people complain about being paying betatesters. If they delay to finetune things out, people complain about the delays. I guess they just can't win.

 

[ddarko]

If they ship too quickly, people complain about being paying betatesters. If they delay to finetune things out, people complain about the delays. I guess they just can't win.

Of course they can win - they can release the product when they say they're going to release it or not say anything about a release window! No one is asking them to do the impossible here and your characterization of the criticism is broad and unfair. Really, the November 13 announcement that Asus was going to "tweak" the hardware suggests that Asus was nowhere close to locking down the hardware/software when Asus said on October 20 that the router would be released within 45 days. Asus jumped the gun when it shouldn't have said anything about timeframe and it jumped it again when it said the router would be out in December.

My own specific beef is the repeated announcements of an imminent release followed by the lack of follow through. I'd have no complaint if they had said nothing or just said "it'll ship when it's ready." But don't put out a timeframe like "the next 45 days" or "in December" if you're not going to meet it. I think the criticism of the way Asus has handled this imminent-for-months-now product release is fair and justified and was a mess of their own making, not because people have unreasonable expectations.

 

[RMerlin]

Of course they can win - they can release the product when they say they're going to release it or not say anything about a release window!

The first problem there is the competition. If Asus hadn't announced the AC3200, then everyone would keep asking if they would have any product based on the Xtream platform. Or, they would assume that they don't, and run straight for the competitor, who has no beef in both announcing, and releasing unfinished products. Netgear's initial release (I don't know if it was fixed since then) was disabling a large portion of the Broadcom Xtream featureset, which was the ability to intelligently move clients between the two radios based on various criteras.

I'm not saying this is right, just saying that, unfortunately, this is how the market works these days.

As for getting more accurate timetables - one big problem with development is, it's difficult to accurately predict. You can predict how long it takes to build a house, because it's a very straightforward thing. But software and hardware design? You aren't just doing the same thing you've done over and over, but developing something unique. That means, you encounter a lot of issues during development. Bugs in need of fixing (both software and hardware). In debugging, there is only one thing certain: it's impossible to predict how long it will take. You can find a bug in 5 mins, or it can plague you for weeks, if not months. Put a few of those random bugs into a planned product development, and you can end up easily overshooting any time estimate.

Again, not saying that this is right, or that this is fine. I'm just saying that, this is the way things are in 2015, and it's characteristic of the high tech industry in general, not just of a particular case here.

For a pretty well known example, look at Windows Vista. One year into development, MS realized it was a train wreck, they scrapped the code, and started all over from scratch. This led to a 12-18 months delay in their release schedule, and still the shipping product was less than stellar.

 

[IAAI]

Is Asus ever going to officially announce that this product will never come to market or is it just going to never speak of it again? At this point, the router has been delayed so long that events seem to have overtaken it, what with the new announcements of the latest marketing buzzwords and features at CES. I can't say I'm disappointed that tbere won't be a release of what seems like would have been a horribly buggy product but the history of this drawn out vaporware is unusual.

Here is the router pic from CES



I still don't know why they keep changing designs

 

[jegesq]

That's a lot of antennas! Let's hope that when it does release it's better received than Windows Vista was (I confess, I had no issues with Vista at all...and I love Win 8.1 too). Was there anything from CES mentioned about an actual release date? Possible MSRP?

 

[aublumberg]

Is Asus ever going to officially announce that this product will never come to market or is it just going to never speak of it again?

They showed it at CES http://videos.abt.com/v/1756021085/asus-rt-ac3200-wireless-router-ces-2015/

 

[IAAI]

That's a lot of antennas! Let's hope that when it does release it's better received than Windows Vista was (I confess, I had no issues with Vista at all...and I love Win 8.1 too). Was there anything from CES mentioned about an actual release date? Possible MSRP?

antennas in the ac3200 are different than ac87

to me the device looks a little bit bulkier than ac87

I guess this router might cost 279 - 299 - Tim said it will be released soon

-----------
Vista was not so bad coming from XP , Win 7 was and still excellent

can't stand 8.1

see different options due to circumstances - same could happen with this router. I guess this router going to be excellent because they took their time building, tuning and testing.
----------

 

[doubleroll]

Let's hope the Asus Ac3200 router's smart connect algorithm works better than Netgear's X6...which was pathetic at best.

 

[IAAI]

Let's hope the Asus Ac3200 router's smart connect algorithm works better than Netgear's X6...which was pathetic at best.

I m afraid that smart connect will slow down the recent/up to date cell phones/tablets with 2x2 capabilities, and will consider 3x3 and up as for fast lane . If this happened it will congest the slow 5Ghz lane with too many hand held devices + new laptops and leave the fast lane reserved for almost nobody .

I hope i m wrong [emoji28]

 

[RMerlin]

I m afraid that smart connect will slow down the recent/up to date cell phones/tablets with 2x2 capabilities, and will consider 3x3 and up as for fast lane . If this happened it will congest the slow 5Ghz lane with too many hand held devices + new laptops and leave the fast lane reserved for almost nobody .

I hope i m wrong [emoji28]

Unlike Netgear's cutdown implementation of Broadcom's band steering, Asus's Smart Connect seems able to act based on different criteria. The steering policy is user configurable.

 

[IAAI]

Unlike Netgear's cutdown implementation of Broadcom's band steering, Asus's Smart Connect seems able to act based on different criteria. The steering policy is user configurable.

Here is a pic of smart connect

Select any of these two Smart Connect options:
• Tri-band Smart Connect: Select this option if you want
to enable Smart Connect for 2.4GHz, 5GHz-1, and 5GHz-
2 frequency bands at the same time, and automatically
connect your devices in your network to the best band for
optimal speed.
• Standard Setup: Select this option if you want to set up
three bands independently. Smart Connect is disabled
under this option

 

[RMerlin]

Here is a pic of smart connect

That's just the initial setup wizard. Based on the source code, I see it should be possible afterward to fine tune it.

 

[doubleroll]

Sounds promising. Hope it gets released soon!

 

[got_milk]

Sounds promising. Hope it gets released soon!

You and me both. I'm looking to move up to AC from my RT-N66U as I'm starting to have AC-capable clients in the house now and this is the one I'm waiting for to make the jump.

 

[Gary Key]

Pre-orders for the AC3200 will go live today at Newegg, TigerDirect and Amazon. Shipments will occur next week, finally.

 

[NightOwl326]

Pre-orders for the AC3200 will go live today at Newegg, TigerDirect and Amazon. Shipments will occur next week, finally.

Seeing how Asus has not sorted out the issues on the 87u yet, it amazes me that there are those ready to jump on the 3200 fresh out of the gate.