ASUS RT-AX53U (AX1800) Dual Band WiFi 6 Extendable Router, USB, Subscription-Free Network Security, Instant Guard, Parental Control, Built-in VPN,…

The product is good. With WiFi 6 enabled I get an overall great signal strength throughout the house and the same goes for WiFi 5 mode on the router. Although there are some backward compatibility issues for WiFi 5 or earlier devices while connecting to the router with WiFi 6 mode enabled. Also the routers web UI, sometimes, freezes and could be a bummer at this price point.

For tech enthusiasts, if you’re planning to install custom firmware like AsusWRT-Merlin, please do not buy this. This product has a mediatek processor, and they do not support this line of processors, they only work with Broadcom chipsets. There’s only OpenWRT at the time of this review, which I haven’t tested on this router. I’ve tried OpenWRT with my previous routers, and it wasn’t stable enough to give reliable internet connectivity, so assuming the same for this router, I didn’t take the chance.

Amazon for some reason for not accept the return. The support guy (name was Amit) said he’ll initiate the return in 24hrs, but never got an update. I purchased this product for a very specific use case. I’m very disappointed with Amazon this time around.

Settings are not that easy but asus os has every type of feature. Quite advance 👍

Coming from Netgear R6220, I am quite disappointed with this router in terms of GUI functionalities.

The UI is so suffocating I could barely want to hover into the tabs, Some pages display improper information. Though this is the day 1 review. I felt, Asus should have kept the GUI simple like Netgear.
It feels like I am in a BIOS settings page.
I understand Asus main theme is like gaming and over visuals. But for home routers, they should have made it simpler. This is my opinion.

On the other hand, the device surely looks premium with its build. From far distance, the long antennas make it look quite cheap.

Wifi signal is strong and I get good speeds from far ranges. Dead zones are now minimized.

Security Features: If you are a tech savy, I recommend not to be fooled by the AI protection and Security features it provides.
It just forwards the DNS requests to popular content inspection Servers which takes care of the Safe browsing. At the end the device is still sending the request to the external DNS servers for packet inspections.

If you are tech literate, I would recommend to setup a personnel DNS server using Adgaurd/pi-hole, which are absolutely free.

Overall, I would recommend this product but this might disappoint folks who are coming from Netgear. Apart from that it is a decent router.

Router is very good.
Range is good. 2.4ghz frequency range is too good. 5ghz frequency is good for short range and limited to the same floor. Cannot expect 5ghz in the first floor.
Packing was good.