Nearly ten years ago, when I moved into a house with some property, I upgraded my old Linksys wireless N router (the classic blue and black that was the standard at the time) to an Asus RT-AC68u that could cover my whole spread. The Asus RT-AC68u wound up becoming the new benchmark router and the router of choice for most tech blogs, and had the ability to support everyone from casual to professional users. It’s still recommended by many today. Only I didn’t exactly buy an Asus RT-AC68u, I bought an Asus RT-AC68w for $10 less, and this was my first indication that Asus sucks at naming things.
Breaking down the Asus naming scheme, RT stands for “router.” Simple enough. AC is the wifi protocol, which is to say this primarily supports wireless AC (most routers are backwards compatible with wireless N and G as well). 68 is the model number. Asus has a dizzying array of router models, generally the higher the number the more features and higher price tag. Finally, the “u” stands for…well I’m not really sure what the “u” stands for, but it most assuredly doesn’t stand for “black.”
Back in 2013 the Asus RT-AC68u was a fairly new router with a high price tag. I was also broke, having just spent all my money on a house. So when I came across the RT-AC68w for $10 less I was excited but skeptical. I searched everywhere for the differences between the “u” and the “w.” As we’ll see later, little letters and numbers tacked on to the name of an Asus router can mean a big difference between products (I’m looking at you RT-AC66u and RT-AC66u b1). After quite a bit of searching, I discovered the only difference between the RT-AC68u and the RT-AC68w is that the “w” stands for “white,” as in the housing and antennae are white instead of black. The “u” does not stand for “black.”
Asus seems to have discovered their naming scheme was difficult to follow and has since simplified it to use names such as “AC1900” where the first two letters are the wifi standard, and the last four digits are the model…no, the model family…no, but it’s easy so it’s the model. I honestly have no idea.
I recently attempted to expand my home network by adding a second node out by my pool. Since I already owned an Asus router with AiMesh capabilities, this was a relatively simple task of purchasing another AiMesh compatible router which can be found in this handy list provided by Asus. Since I know that Asus has renamed the RT-AC68u to the AC1900, I popped over to Amazon where I found an AC1900 on sale for $50. Without looking too much into the name I ordered it and waited for it to arrive. Upon arrival I was disappointed to find that my new AC1900 didn’t work with AiMesh, and that it wasn’t an RT-AC68u at all. It was an RT-AC67P. What the hell?!
In simplifying their naming scheme, Asus has grouped many legacy models into the same named product with a sub-name providing their old model number. Like that time Honda renamed all their models the Accord, but then added a little letter after denoting if it was the Civic or the Ridgeline or the Odyssey. Oh that’s right, they didn’t because THAT WOULD BE STUPID!
In this example above, the AC1900 is both the RT-AC68u(w) AND the RT-AC67P. You as the consumer just need to know to look deeper. I found this to be the most egregious with the AC1750. The new name, AC1750, has replaced the RT-ACRH18, RT-AC65, RT-AC66u b1, RT-AC66u, RT-AC66r, and possibly more but I gave up at some point. I actually wound up buying an AC1750, twice. The first one to arrive was an RT-AC66u, which seems to be a fine router to be used as a secondary node, only it can’t be used as a node because it doesn’t support AiMesh. For that you need the little “b1” on the end of the name and to spend an extra $10. So in the end I wound up buying the AC1750 that was $59 instead of $49 and ultimately after purchasing three routers finally arrived at the router I needed to expand my network.
While I was fairly careless in my router shopping, resulting in multiple returns and about an hour wasted troubleshooting, the fact remains I shouldn’t have to be that careful when shopping for a router. As it stands, Asus currently sells 43 different wifi routers and mesh network systems on their website, and retailers are still selling many more legacy models such as the ones mentioned above. For the layperson and the professional alike, it can be seriously difficult to spot the differences between models with different names as it is, without adding in the complexities of having multiple models with the same top-line name. And this doesn’t even touch on the fact that Asus has started adding letters to the back of the new model names, such as the AC1900P, where “P” seems to stand for “Protection.” If Asus didn’t make some of the best consumer grade routers available today, I would just switch to another brand. In fact, this whole process made me seriously consider junking my Asus router and switching to Ubiquiti as many of my coworkers have done.