Asus Finally Ships Second-Gen Gigabit Router For Connected Homes Real Reviews July 24, 2014 News & Updates views: 3949 After its launch at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this January, Asus is now shipping the Wave 2 802.11ac routers, currently within the US. The Asus RT-AC87 Dual-Band Gigabit router will deliver speeds up to 1.73Gbps on the 5GHz frequency band for hyper-connected homes and offices. What are Wave 2 routers for? So what’s new about Wave 2 routers? The Wave 2 router is designed to handle multiple connections at work and home. It will give you over 2-and-a half times the speed of its preceding IEEE wireless standard and will ably handle connectivity to all devices simultaneously using Wi-Fi. This it does through a chipset technology called Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output or MU-MIMO. This will mean much higher speeds for HD video streaming, gaming and sharing large files. (Your current home router supports speed in megabits per second or mbps but Wave 2 routers deal in Gigabits.) How is this different from the Wave 1 generation of 802.11ac routers? Gigaom.com explains: “Wave 1 and older Wi-Fi routers can only connect a single device at one time, meaning multiple devices queue up and take turns accessing its signals. Those connections are limited by the Wi-Fi speed of the device, which is often a fraction of what your router supports. But MU-MIMO assigns those different connections to different spatial streams.” Other than speed… The RT-AC87 comes with four external antennas to maximize its range. The inbuilt AiProtection is designed to detect malware in the Internet traffic in real-time and stops it before reaching your connection. Further, AiCloud 2.0 converts the router into a personal cloud server that syncs, shares and streams content stored on the network or attached USBs. The RT-AC87 is on sale in North America on Best Buy for $279.99 (Rs.16,808).