ASUS product roadmap

[wakaba]

I'm considering buying an AC-87u or AC-68u to replace my current N56u. However, I'm not in a huge hurry at the moment; I could stand to wait a few months or even a year. My understanding is that the tech in the AC-87u (wave 2 or whatever) is still pretty new. Might ASUS release a hardware revision of the AC-87u, or even a new model that is similarly powerful but significantly more efficient/reliable, in the future? Or is the product roadmap basically just a progression of more and more powerful / feature-packed products?

 

[snakebite3]

I'm considering buying an AC-87u or AC-68u to replace my current N56u. However, I'm not in a huge hurry at the moment; I could stand to wait a few months or even a year. My understanding is that the tech in the AC-87u (wave 2 or whatever) is still pretty new. Might ASUS release a hardware revision of the AC-87u, or even a new model that is similarly powerful but significantly more efficient/reliable, in the future? Or is the product roadmap basically just a progression of more and more powerful / feature-packed products?

These are their next routers.
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ASUS_RT-AC5300
https://wikidevi.com/wiki/ASUS_RT-AC88U
I'm guessing they'll announce it in DEC or Maybe next year.

 

[wakaba]

Thanks.
So basically they won't be releasing any new routers in the AC1900 or AC2400 range in the future? I don't need too much wireless power (AC68u level would do) but I would like a router with more processing power so that I can, e.g., run higher-speed VPN on the router.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks.
So basically they won't be releasing any new routers in the AC1900 or AC2400 range in the future? I don't need too much wireless power (AC68u level would do) but I would like a router with more processing power so that I can, e.g., run higher-speed VPN on the router.

There will be no more AC2350/2400 class routers. Those are first-generation 4x4 with Quantenna 5 GHz. They are replaced by AC2600 and AC3100 classes.

AC2600 is QCA-based 4x4 with MU-MIMO and AC3100 is Broadcom 4x4 with MU-MIMO.

AC5300 is Broadcom based "tri-band" (two 5 GHz radios). Basically a 4x4 version of their AC3200
Xtreme architecture.

I wouldn't expect significant VPN throughput improvement. That requires a processor with an encryption engine like the Caviums.

 

[System Error Message]

Thanks.
So basically they won't be releasing any new routers in the AC1900 or AC2400 range in the future? I don't need too much wireless power (AC68u level would do) but I would like a router with more processing power so that I can, e.g., run higher-speed VPN on the router.

You could always get a PPC based router with hardware encryption or TILE based although there arent many choices when you need throughput for VPN or complexity. It would really nice to see a different type of consumer router that strays from common configs. A quad core ARM A15 or the new 64 bit ARM or perhaps a multi core PPC based router. Cooling shouldnt be a problem since i have an 8 core ARM 64 bit tablet that runs cool when i put heavy loads, runs close to 2 Ghz and doesnt overheat. If ASUS revised cooling and did some better quality control with the router's cooling than they could develop such routers. They could source the SoC from qualcomm and use their SoCs for mobiles because they have hardware acceleration in them including media encoding/decoding, the hexagon CPU and MU-MIMO in their new chips.

I really wish they made the routers more modular such as with upgradeable ram, CPU and miniPCIe for wifi. I really would appreciate having more ethernet ports and esata along side usb3 and usb2 but everyone just makes the same thing.

 

[RMerlin]

I wouldn't expect significant VPN throughput improvement. That requires a processor with an encryption engine like the Caviums.

Based on the clock increase alone, I'd expect the newer Broadcom routers to get around 20-30% performance gain on OpenVPN performance.

What would make a more interesting difference would be for Broadcom to switch to an ARMv8 based CPU, with AES-NI support, such a Cortex A53 or A57. I don't know what kind of performance gain this would bring, but I suspect it might be pretty decent. They could take advantage of it for WPA2 crypto as well (unless they already have hardware-based AES assistance in their newer radio SoCs).

 

[CooCooCaChoo]

You should also consider the Google OnHub router.

https://store.google.com/product/onhub

Its got some insanely good specs.

 

[System Error Message]

You should also consider the Google OnHub router.

https://store.google.com/product/onhub

Its got some insanely good specs.

This is way better than what all the brands have been producing in hardware specs but it doesnt have a switch chip.

 

[wakaba]

Thanks all. The Google OnHub sounds good. I might consider it, as well as the airport extreme.

 

[RMerlin]

This is way better than what all the brands have been producing in hardware specs but it doesnt have a switch chip.

And a lot of its features are still MIA. It has an USB port that doesn't do anything, a Bluetooth interface that isn't used by the firmware, etc...

 

[System Error Message]

And a lot of its features are still MIA. It has an USB port that doesn't do anything, a Bluetooth interface that isn't used by the firmware, etc...

yeah it has the hardware but not the firmware. However they went with the right choice of hardware compared to the broadcom A9 CPU. They needed hardware NAT just to make it fast. The krait 300 are better then the A9s but i wish they had quad core variants and also utilised the GPU as an accelerator. There was a linux router project that involved 2 GTX 480s managing to get 100Gb/s of NAT. It may say routing but it still used tables just like NAT.

 

[BWR]

I would like a router with more processing power so that I can, e.g., run higher-speed VPN on the router.

Split the functions - powerful wired router and wireless access points of your choice.

 

[wakaba]

Split the functions - powerful wired router and wireless access points of your choice.

Any recommendations for consumer-friendly wired routers?

 

[System Error Message]

Any recommendations for consumer-friendly wired routers?

Some consumer brands have wired router versions. The other things you can look at for very fast speeds are things like ubiquiti, mikrotik, pfsense, juniper. It really depends on throughput but for one thing do not look at the routing performance on their products because NAT performance is lower than routing performance. Pfsense is the easiest to configure and results in the fastest speed (except for the mikrotik CCR) for NAT and VPN on a normal PC.

It seemed to me like broadcom shoved their chips to the consumer manufacturers because there is no consumer router that uses the PPC CPU or ARM A15s or qualcomm kraits. sure you can get fast routung with a7s and a9s but not with VPN and any other application.

there was one brand that sold dedicated NICs that had its own usb port, microphone port, ram and flash and the idea was that it would take network related load away from the host OS/CPU including VOIP, downloading, qos etc. the NIC had a 400mhz PPC CPU running firmware achieving gigabit throughput on its own. The CPU has been there for a while but consumer manufactures just didnt use it despite the fast software performance. Even apple used PPC in their early Macs.

 

[Swingtop]

You should also consider the Google OnHub router.

https://store.google.com/product/onhub

Its got some insanely good specs.

One of the specific reasons I got an ASUS router, is that all US brands are likely infected with NSA backdoors. There has not been such a report for ASUS (yet). Having a Google router would just be the same as handing all your stuff to the NSA (and friendly agencies), on a silver plate.

 

[System Error Message]

One of the specific reasons I got an ASUS router, is that all US brands are likely infected with NSA backdoors. There has not been such a report for ASUS (yet). Having a Google router would just be the same as handing all your stuff to the NSA (and friendly agencies), on a silver plate.

Same as tp-link routers have backdoors to china, netgear backdoor to US too. Thats not to say that any hardware sold in the US has a backdoor.
Feel free to do some sniffing and blocking suspicious traffic.

 

[sfx2000]

One of the specific reasons I got an ASUS router, is that all US brands are likely infected with NSA backdoors. There has not been such a report for ASUS (yet). Having a Google router would just be the same as handing all your stuff to the NSA (and friendly agencies), on a silver plate.

Most "backdoors" are the result in bad code, not state agency mandates - with as much attention that the security industry (e.g. white and black hat hackers) have put on consumer grade routers, every one of them has been the result of bad code either from the chipset vendor (board support packages) or OEM content/value added software/services.

Now, 3 and 4 letter agencies, they watch the security community as much as anyone, so perhaps they'll leverage into those bugs just like anyone else, but I highly doubt that any OEM would willingly oblige and purposely put in a hidden back door - just doesn't make sense from a business perspective.

 

[sfx2000]

It seemed to me like broadcom shoved their chips to the consumer manufacturers because there is no consumer router that uses the PPC CPU or ARM A15s or qualcomm kraits. sure you can get fast routung with a7s and a9s but not with VPN and any other application.

Nothing wrong with the Broadcom Cortex-A9 based SoC's - it's just that we're all doing more on our LAN's/WLAN's, and services like VPN are more common than it was a couple of years back, and we're hitting a resource wall.

I'd like to see more bandwidth inside the router - more memory, wider memory paths - many of the consumer grade routers are 256MB RAM with a 16 bit path to memory - keeps the chip count down and circuit boards cheaper - and for most purposes, that's ok - until one runs a memory intense application like OpenVPN, which does thrash memory (Application to Kernel, back up to OpenVPN, back down into the kernel) that performance really starts to suffer.

LAN-WAN bandwidth is another opportunity for the OEM's and chipset vendors to improve upon - it's fairly common in the G20 countries to see 100Mbit/200Mbit connections, and Gigabit is ever more available, and the current SoC designs this is becoming a bottleneck - so improving the Switch (whether discrete or embedded) is a way to improve things there.

The software stack for routing - again, like above, many of the consumer grade routers route the WAN connection in the linux kernel - Broadcom with their CTF.ko try to put some smarts back into the switch, but it's limited in utility, as many have noted (and also it's closed source, but that's another discussion perhaps already aired and discussed), but seriously, there are architecture improvements that should be done sooner than later..