Satisfying the need for speed, the Asus RT-BE92U Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router brings your home into the Wi-Fi 7 era without breaking the budget.
Wi-Fi 7, also known as 802.11be, is the newest, fastest wireless networking standard for beaming data around your home. Its speed boost is thanks to the addition of faster wireless bands, as well as the ability to combine bands and use wider channels, in order to pump through more data.
The new Wi-Fi standard also boasts features that reduce wireless congestion and interference, such as express lanes for newer Wi-Fi devices, improved load balancing between bands and enhanced dedicated backhaul.
There are plenty of options for bringing Wi-Fi 7 into your home, many of which support “mesh” Wi-Fi to improve coverage. This means the wireless router can act as a central hub, working in unison with satellite hubs spread around the house.
The hubs appear as a single wireless network to your devices, so devices can seamlessly roam between hubs the same way your phone roams between mobile towers to get the strongest signal.
The Asus RT-BE92U supports mesh Wi-Fi, with the option of wired backhaul between the hubs. Yet unlike options such as the Netgear Orbi 970 mesh Wi-Fi 7, Amazon Eero Max 7 or Asus’ own Asus ZenWiFi BQ16, the new Asus RT-BE92U is only a single unit – it doesn’t come with satellite hubs included. Instead, they’re optional extras, which help keep the price down while still offering a level of future-proofing.
Table of contents
First impressions
The Asus RT-BE92U has prominent antennas, as you’d expect, but interestingly, the unit stands upright rather than lying flat. This reduces its footprint and makes it easier to find a good spot for it in your home, plus there’s a wall-mounting bracket in the box for installing the router up high.
Status lights adorn the front of the router, down one side, which make it easy to tell what’s happening at a glance – assuming you’re up close.
The small grey icons are difficult to see, which is great from an aesthetics perspective but frustrating from a readability perspective. The alternative of a large multi-coloured status light, like that on Netgear’s Orbi routers, isn’t to everyone’s taste, but at least it’s easier to interpret from across the room.
Around the back, the Asus RT-BE92U features a WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) button for easily connecting Wi-Fi devices.
As a tri-band router, it generates a standard 2.4 GHz (up to 1032 Mbps) and 5 GHz (up to 2882 Mbps) network. Plus, there’s an extra 6 GHz band for connecting compatible Wi-Fi 6E and Wi-Fi 7 devices. The 6 GHz band can transmit data faster than 5 GHz, up to 5764 Mbps, but over shorter distances.
Thanks to Wi-Fi 7’s Multi-Link Operation (MLO), some Wi-Fi 7-compatible devices can connect to the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands simultaneously and switch between them on the fly. This extra boost gives the Asus RT-BE92U a theoretical combined maximum speed of 9678 Mbps.
This puts it ahead of most sub-$500 Wi-Fi 7 routers, which are only dual-band 2.4/5 GHz and offer much slower speeds. At the same time, the Asus RT-BE92U is still only a mid-range router because it lacks some advanced features compared to the Wi-Fi 7 heavy hitters.
Unlike some of the seriously expensive Wi-Fi 7 mesh router systems like the $3,699 Netgear Orbi 970 and $2,499 Asus ZenWiFi BQ16, the $549 Asus RT-BE92U doesn’t generate an extra hidden band for dedicated wireless backhaul. When running mesh Wi-Fi, this extra band would allow the central and satellite hubs to talk amongst themselves for improved traffic routing. The more you push your Wi-Fi network to the limit, the more you’d appreciate the benefit of this extra band – assuming you were running a mesh.
The Asus RT-BE92U also keeps the price down by limiting its antennas and MU-MIMO (Multi-User Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) capabilities.
MU-MIMO uses multiple antennas for each band to help battle congestion. The Asus RT-BE92U offers 3×3 MU-MIMO on the 2.4 GHz band and 2×2 MU-MIMO on the 5 and 6 GHz bands. More expensive options increase this to 4×4 on every band, which significantly increases both their speed potential and how they hold up under heavy load.
This is part of the reason the Asus RT-BE92U is only rated up to 2882 Mbps on the 5 GHz band and 5764 Mbps on the 6 GHz band, whereas more advanced wireless routers typically double these figures.
As for wired networking, the Asus RT-BE92U sports a 10 Gigabit Ethernet WAN port on the back for connecting to your broadband modem, such as your NBN box. Alongside it are four 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports for connecting your devices around your home via Ethernet cables.
Alternatively, you can use the first 2.5 Gigabit port to connect to your broadband modem and then use the 10 Gigabit port as part of your LAN.
The fact that there’s only one 10 Gigabit port means that, if you’re lucky enough to have a home broadband connection that’s faster than 2.5 Gbps, you can’t connect to the internet at 10 Gbps and also run a 10 Gbps LAN – it’s one or the other. To be fair, some of the more expensive wireless routers have the same limitation.
There’s also a USB3.2 Gen 1 port on the back for connecting external storage, a network printer or a mobile broadband dongle (or Android smartphone) for 4G/5G fallback. AI WAN detection automatically switches between fixed-line and mobile broadband during outages to ensure you stay online.
Asus RT-BE92U specifications and price
| Wi-Fi | Wi-Fi 7 802.11 be/ax/ac/n/a/b/g |
| Bands | Tri band: 2.4 GHz (1032 Mbps) – up to 40 MHz channels 5 GHz (2882 Mbps) – up to 160 MHz channels 6 GHz (5764 Mbps) – up to 320 MHz channels |
| Bandwidth management | 2.4GHz 3×3 MU-MIMO 5GHz 2×2 MU-MIMO 6GHz 2×2 MU-MIMO Bandsteering OFDMA 4096-QAM high data rate |
| Antenna | External antenna x 4 Internal antenna x1 |
| Ethernet | 10 Gigabit LAN/WAN x 1 2.5 Gigabit LAN/WAN x 1 2.5 Gigabit LAN x 3 |
| USB3.2 Gen 1 | USB3.2 Gen 1 |
| Processor | 2.0GHz quad-core Broadcom BCM6765 |
| Memory | 256 MB Flash and 1 GB DDR4 RAM |
| Dimensions | 247.18 x 101.59 x 287.47 mm |
| Weight | 0.79 kg |
| Price | $529 RRP |
| Warranty | 3 years |
| Official website | Asus Australia |
Features
The Asus RT-BE92U Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router bundles an impressive range of free advanced features, for which some other networking vendors charge.
The most noteworthy is subscription-free network security in the form of Asus’ AiProtection Pro, powered by Trend Micro. This includes malicious website blocking, along with infected device detection and blocking.
You’ve also got parental controls and comprehensive VPN client/server features (in collaboration with NordVPN and Surfshark) for secure connections.
The Asus RT-BE92U is capable of creating up to three physical Wi-Fi networks with individual SSIDs to help manage the various devices around your home. Along with a dedicated network for your smart home devices, you can create up to five virtual SSIDs for guests.
When it comes to mesh Wi-Fi, Asus doesn’t include satellite hubs in the box. Unlike vendors such as Netgear, Asus doesn’t actually sell dedicated satellite hubs to extend your network. Instead, Asus’ AiMesh Extendable Network allows you to use other Asus AiMesh extendable routers as satellite hubs. Almost every Asus router is extendable, your Wi-Fi 7 options start at around $500.
When it comes to setting up the Asus RT-BE92U, you can use the Asus Router app or connect to the router’s admin interface using a browser. There’s a good initial setup wizard to help you get connected to the internet and set up your local wired and wireless networks.
The browser interface is well-structured and responsive, separating the basic and advanced features so it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. It’s also easy to see a list of attached devices and which wireless bands they’re using, but you can’t see if they’re taking advantage of MLO to connect to more than one band simultaneously.
It’s still early days for Wi-Fi 7, so compatibility and performance can be a bit hit-and-miss. As such, Asus includes a note in the box reminding you to upgrade to the latest drivers on your Wi-Fi 7 devices to increase the likelihood of getting the best performance (which I did, and it made a significant difference).
The Asus RT-BE92U is rated BE9700, meaning it has a theoretical top throughput of 9.7 Gbps – assuming the connected device can use MLO to combine the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands with the maximum channel width on each band.
That’s a long way from the BE27000 of the Netgear Orbi 970 or the BE30000 of the Asus ZenWiFi BQ16. Once you subtract their dedicated wireless backhaul, that’s still a theoretical top throughput of around 20 Gbps each. To be fair, they’re both a lot more expensive than Asus RT-BE92U, even when you allow for the fact they both come with mesh satellites.
Of course, regardless of make or model, you’ll never see these quoted BE speeds from any router in the real world. As a rule of thumb, the best you’ll achieve is about 50 per cent – so that’s about 4.85 Gbps from the Asus RT-BE92U, if extra-wide channels are in play along with MLO to use every band simultaneously.
Quality
To put the Asus RT-BE92U to the test, I started with a Windows 11 PC with a Gigabyte MBG-GC-WIFI7 PCIe wireless adapter installed. This Gigabyte Wi-Fi 7 adapter supports 320 MHz channels across the 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz bands, as well as MLO for combining bands.
Despite this, Gigabyte’s specs say the wireless adapter only supports speeds up to 5.8 Gbps, so of course, that’s more like 2.9 Gbps in the real world. To be fair, it’s the same with most Wi-Fi 7-enabled notebooks, as they tend to feature the Intel BE200 Wi-Fi 7 card, which is also limited to 5.8 Gbps. As a result, it’s going to be a while until there’s a good mix of devices that can really make the most of Wi-Fi 7.
As a starting point, I tested the Wi-Fi 7-capable Windows 11 PC with my own older Netgear Orbi 760 wireless router, which only supports 5 GHz Wi-Fi 6.
At a range of four metres, it hit 880 Mbps while transferring a 2.5 GB disc ISO wirelessly from the Windows 11 PC to my Orbi 760 router and then via my Ethernet LAN to my Synology Network Attached Storage drive.
Switching out my Orbi 760 router for the Asus RT-BE92U saw the exact same results, hitting 880 Mbps using 5 GHz Wi-Fi 6 as well as 6 GHz Wi-Fi 7. Of course, Wi-F 7 should be faster than 6 but, in this scenario, Wi-Fi 7’s speeds were throttled by the real-world limitations of my LAN – with my Ethernet switches and Network Attached Storage all limited to 1 Gbps speeds.
To really give Wi-Fi 7 a chance to shine, I plugged my MacBook Pro directly into the back of the Asus RT-BE92U using a 2.5 Gbps USB-C to Ethernet adapter. Then I transferred files between the wireless Windows 11 PC and the wired MacBook Pro.
At this point, with the 1 Gbps bottlenecks removed, the Asus RT-BE92U hit an impressive 1824 Mbps transferring data (a new household record). That was copying the 2.5 GB disc ISO from the Windows 11 PC wirelessly to the Asus RT-BE92U, then out through the RT-BE92U’s 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port to my MacBook Pro.
This is actually a slight improvement on the 1750 Mbps that I saw last year when testing the Wi-Fi 7-capable Netgear Orbi 970 in the same scenario. It’s not a completely fair comparison, as updating to the latest Gigabyte Wi-Fi drivers probably helped.
It’s also important to note that this raw speed test comparison doesn’t allow for the Orbi 970’s extra wireless backhaul or its improved MU-MIMO features. If you set up a dozen computers and simultaneously transferred files wirelessly, the Netgear Orbi 970 or Asus ZenWiFi BQ16’s speeds would hold up a lot better than the Asus RT-BE92U under the heavy load. That said, most people aren’t likely to demand this much of their home Wi-Fi network.
It’s also worth noting that the Asus RT-BE92U has MLO disabled by default when acting as a standalone router. Enabling it should improve performance, but it actually saw speeds drop slightly and become less consistent.
Realistically, MLO’s benefits would become clearer over longer distances and when running a mesh Wi-Fi network loaded down with a lot of devices.
Who is the Asus RT-BE92U for?
If you’re just chasing raw Wi-Fi 7 speeds for a handful of devices, then the Asus RT-BE92U is a very tempting option that won’t break the bank. Especially when you’ve got support for mesh Wi-Fi if you want to expand your coverage down the track.
Keep in mind that, in return for spending hundreds of dollars on Wi-Fi 7 rather than thousands, you’re sacrificing a few high-end features that would help you sustain these speeds when your Wi-Fi network extends further and you add more devices with greater bandwidth demands.
Also keep in mind that, to make the most of the Asus RT-BE92U, you need to upgrade to new Wi-Fi 7-capable gear and perhaps also upgrade your Ethernet LAN.
If you’ve only got Wi-Fi 6 devices around your home, you won’t see a wireless performance boost compared to an older, cheaper and slower Wi-Fi 6 router.
Likewise, unless you upgrade your LAN and attached devices to support speeds faster than 1 Gbps, you won’t see a performance boost when transferring data between wireless and wired devices around your home. Plus, you’d perhaps consider upgrading your home broadband connection to faster than 1 Gbps (assuming such speeds are available in your area). All of which gets expensive and is arguably overkill for most homes.
For now, the Wi-Fi 7-capable Asus RT-BE92U is a decent starting point if you’re looking to future-proof your home, but won’t push your Wi-Fi network to the limit.
The post Asus RT-BE92U Tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router review: Speed racer appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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