Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

About me and my prior experience with wifi routers: I'm a linux guy with 20 years experience, I like to tweak my wireless routers to make them do extra stuff like wake on lan for my mythtv, or run custom scripts to monitor my house, or whatever. I've used many different linux based WiFi routers in the last 10 years or so, including WRT54G, to WRT600N, WNDR3800 (those you can hack, but WiFi is still not reliable with openwrt for me which is a shame for a WiFi router), to the less friendly WNDR4500 (powerful when I bought it, but couldn't install 3rd party builds on it back then). I really wanted to like and buy the WRT-1900AC until I saw that linksys mislead us, and it's only about a year later, that it's starting to see some open source support, and it's not fully working yet. To be fair, my WNDR4500 Wifi has been rock solid, but I only use it as a Wifi bridge, not even as a router, and run nothing on it since the stock firmware won't let me run what I need. The Review: I'm not going to review on the Wifi aspects of the RT-AC3200, other reviews have done this and honestly the Nighthawk X6 and RT-AC3200 are going to be pretty close since they use the same chipset. Note that most bad reviews are from people with basic Wifi issues and setup problems that could happen with all WiFi routers. The Asus however offers smartconnect aka band steering, the option of moving your WiFi clients automatically from 5Ghz #1 (high band, more speed, less range), 5Ghz #2 (low 5Ghz band, a bit less speed, a bit more range), and 2Ghz (less speed but much more range). The Nighthawk only supports handoff between its two 5Ghz bands. Smartconnect as of April 2015 still causes problems for many, and most turn it off for now, but 1) it will get better so you can turn it on later, 2) if you don't mind tweaking, it can likely be made to work for you depending on your clients. Google for "rt ac3200 smart connect missing manual" to hopefully get 5Ghz->2Ghz handoff working for you. There is also a reported issue of frequent disconnects on the Asus (hourly). This is due to a WPA key rotation option you can turn on and doesn't work well with some clients. Don't use it, and you should be fine. Now, let's get to open source. While you might not care about supporting the company that does a better job supporting the opens source community all those products are now based on, Asus provides you with a router you can install your own 3rd party linux programs on. If you are hands on and/or know linux, you likely very much care about this. This is my first router which supports open source out of the box, you can add your own software trivially and don't have to wait a year or more for a working open source build of dd-wrt or openwrt, with sometimes only half working wireless due to binary driver problems. Again, for comparison, my linksys WNDR4500 is only going to be getting dd-wrt now after 2 years, and I'm a bit wary of how that's going to turn out (after way too long of no real working open source support). Another example was the linksys WRT-1900AC, supposed to be the ultimate hacker router. It barely works with openwrt one year later, with manual work, and it's not stable yet. Asus RT-AC3200: unpacked it, turned on sshd, ready to add 3rd party open source software. Asuswrt is already great, it's based on tomato-usb (open source router platform) and out of the the box you can install 3rd party linux software (perl, whatever) with Entware. I'm glad I gave my money to Asus just for that. Google Entware asuswrt-merlin for details on this. Then there is a developer who makes the asuswrt-merlin build: you get a few extra features on the base router too while keeping working wireless. It's so good out of the box that I have no need to install openwrt on it should it exist later. So this router strongly exceeded my expectations. Thank you Asus. Minuses so far: - $300 is obviously a steep price, but it's market rate for now - Asus support is supposed to be good on the phone, but I Emailed networking_support@asus.com on a monday early morning. Heard nothing 24H later.