ASUS DSL-AC88U AC3100 Modem Router Review

Interface: USB Sharing, Storage and Printers

ASUS’ DSL-ACC88U router and the ASUSWRT software offers a great functionality when it comes to the connected USB devices. You can share attached storage in various ways, connect USB printers and turn them into network printers, and even connect cellular USB modems.

A lot of the functionality is accessible right through the dashboard. You can launch the Media Server, AiDisk, and Download Master from here. You can also safely eject connected storage from here.

All the USB functionality is collected on one page that explains each function. Clicking it will then take you to the initialisation part of that function or the actual function itself if you already did the initialisation.

AiDisk

The AiDisk function is an FTP server combined with ASUS’ DDNS service. It allows for easy remote access to USB drives connected to the router.

The setup is done quickly. All you need to get it running is to set your access rights and decide whether you want to use ASUS’ DDNS service.

Media Services and Sharing

The media server is an easy way to share media from connected drives directly to your media players and smart TVs.

The Samba shares are for your Windows based systems, but Mac OS also supports Samba.

We can also enable the FTP sharing function here without the ASUS DDNS feature combination that we saw above.

Network Printer Server

A network connected printer is a lot more fun than a USB printer. Why? Because you can access it from any system on your network rather than just the one it’s connected to. Why have multiple printers in the household if one could do the trick.

3G/4G Cellular WAN

The DSL-AC88U supports three types of WAN connections and cellular is one of them. Here you’ll need to enter the details from your SIM card and then you should be ready to go.

Download Master

Downloading new content is fun and exciting unless it takes a long time and you don’t want to occupy your system with it. For this, you get the Download Master which allows the router to handle this and store the downloads on a USB connected drive.

The download client supports Bit Torrent, NZB, and aMule.

There are various options from authorisation over encryption to port settings.

You can add new download tasks by file or URL.

AiCloud 2.0

The AiCloud function turns your home network into a mini-cloud system just for you.

There are various things you can use it for such as basic file access but also file synchronisation.