In 2018 many of us are finding that the routers that we have in our homes
whether provided to you to by our Internet service providers or ones that we've had
there for years are really starting to show their age and are really limited in
terms of providing us the overall coverage that we're looking for the speeds that
we're looking for the flexibility to grow with the number of devices and the
different types of usages that we're gonna have within our homes as well as
also the rich level of functionality we might be looking for, whether it's the
improved aspects of security maybe streamlined the ability to be able
to share Wi-Fi as well as prioritize and manage the overall Wi-Fi experiences
within your house with all this in mind ace us work closely with Intel on a new
generational chipset that's been purpose-built for the current generation
of Wi-Fi and for the next generation of devices that are coming to market be
able to offer you a device that's gonna offer you a great Wi-Fi experience
whether that's gonna be in terms of range speeds management as well as a
whole lot more and to boot you're also gonna have the ability to actually
upgrade this unit over time by taking advantage of the latest generation mesh
networking technologies so let's find out a bit more about the Asus Blue Cave.
Taking a closer look at the blue cave you'll see that it doesn't look like a
traditional router first and from us it's got a very compact overall design
and has a very distinctive appearance of course with that cutout in the center
and the pearlescent blue that's present there in addition to that there's no
external antennas now this was really designed from the get-go to be able to
offer a great stylized aesthetic in the home in the office in the bedroom
the kitchen wherever it is that you might want to have a great Wi-Fi
experience. At the same time there was a lot of challenges in being able to design to
develop a router that looked like this but didn't compromise on the performance
that you would want in a high-quality and extremely capable Wi-Fi router. Now
while you might immediately take notice of the looks on the Blue Cave what's
really most important is what's on the inside
Asus closely worked with Intel and their actual R&D team that developed the
latest generation wireless chipset which is inside the blue cave in fact the
actual chipset that's here can generally go one-on-one against some of the
highest and A2211 AC wireless routers that are out on the market but
the base specifications the unit is an AC 2600 Wi-Fi router now what this means
essentially is that it offers a bi-4 antenna configuration for 2.4 and for
five gigabits operation the reason why this is important is that the latest
generation of smartphones, tablets, televisions, and many different types of
Wi-Fi enabled devices are now seeing an increased number of antennas inside of
those devices for the latest generation of smartphones for instance they feature
a 2 by 2 antenna base design when combined with a router that supports
that same type of configuration or higher, you can see significantly higher
speeds and offer a world greater range and overall a better Wi-Fi experience
for that device
while aesthetically pleasing the Blue Cave definitely offers up the
performance that you would want from a high-end router. Now beyond this high-end
antenna configuration the Blue Cave also features a high-end dual-core based
processor. This is important is because a higher-end dual-core processor in this
router allows it to have more processing capabilities that not only manage a
higher number of devices but also be able to take advantage of a lot of the
more specialized functions and features which are built-in here and these are
can really become advantageous when you talk about monitoring prioritization
security and many of the other functions and features that are going to be very
special on the Blue Cave. Now for users that are gonna be interested in specific
aspects in terms of connectivity outside of course your general 2.4 and 5
gigahertz connections the Blue Cave is also gonna offer four Gigabit Ethernet
ports and a USB 3 port. That's gonna be great especially if you're gonna want to
have locally attached storage it's available to you in your network so you
can drag-and-drop things like music movies video files and any other type of
content that you want to be able to share across your systems at home
now while specifications might be important and they really help to define
the overall experience that you're gonna have with the router equally as
important is gonna be the overall setup experience and in this respect the
blue cave is extremely easy. You have two options you can either utilize the
app that you can download of course to any type of mobile device both iOS or
Android and allow you to get up and running within a couple of minutes or
you can also jump into a web-based interface that will allow you to have access
to the rich and deep comprehensive features that really allow you to go
ahead and take it to the next level when it comes to network prioritization
security management and so much more now once you've completed the setup there'll
be a lot of options that are available to you within the app or within the web
interface to allow you go ahead and really be able to take your network to the next
level in a couple of different ways. One option might be in terms of how you can
monitor and manage your network you'll have options where you can essentially
actually closely monitor every single device that is on your wired or wireless
network and actually see how much bandwidth is being utilized for those
devices. An example is if you want to see how much YouTube is being streamed to
let's say a notebook or to a television or to a console you can see that
information. Do you want to be able to see the websites that are being visited
you can also see that information and this can be really helpful if you're
essentially overall just trying to gauge how much bandwidth is being used in your
network and or not you want to be able to prioritize
any specific type of devices take for instance maybe you want to be able to
prioritize a console or a television or a specific smartphone and you always
want to ensure that it's getting the fastest Internet experience possible
that is available to you at the touch of a button and within the app or also
within the web interface. You'll also be able to go and have your router
prioritize specific different types of usage experiences. An example this might be
maybe you want to prioritize your system to always have the most responsive
browsing experience you can do that or maybe it's going to be streaming and
multimedia or maybe it's going to be gaming. All of these options are
available to you to really be able to fine tune and tailor your network
experience. Now in addition to these monitoring and prioritization options
you also have a large number of specific control parameters available to you
whether this is going to be scheduling different types of devices for fixed
times that they have access to the internet whether you want to be able to
pause the different devices connection to the internet or outright block
different devices from connecting the internet this is also something that you
can do for users that are also concerned about security there's technology that's
been built in directly into the firmware for this router. We've worked closely
with Trend Micro, a leading security technology company, to be able to bake in
essential protection from a number of different types of exploits that can
occur when you connect potentially to malicious servers or malicious websites
or even open different types of contents this can occur sometimes by clicking on
different links in an email or clicking sometimes on different posts or feeds
and different types of social media applications. Ultimately what can occur as
essentially your system can be infected by a bot and the information that you
have in your system can actually be sent out without you knowing it to other
parts of the world for all types of malicious type of usage, but thankfully
with the integrated Trend Micro technology it can actually in real time
block those types of malicious servers from being connected to to stop your
information from me actually being sent out. Overall this really helps to
elevate the level of security and protection that you have on your
wireless network now moving beyond our AI protection technology we move into
something that's really interesting and becoming very relevant there are a lot
of users that are now concerned about being able to essentially protect them
and the information that is essentially stored on their devices all throughout
their home and this can now be achieved by leveraging our Open VPN technology
which is baked into the Blue Cave what this'll allow you to do is essentially
sign up for a different type of VPN service and there's a broad number of
them that are available by hosting a VPN service you essentially can disguise or
cloak the different types of devices that you have connected on your wireless
network and this can be advantageous because essentially this can limit the different
types of tracking that can occur as well as data collection that can occur
on the different types of devices that you have connected across your network.
Ultimately helping you to really maintain a sense of ownership for your
information and maintain a higher level of privacy and anonymity. Now in addition
to all the features that we've already talked about. Blue Cave even takes things
further really leveraging itself is as a great addition to your digital home by
fully supporting Amazon Alexa. What this means essentially is that Blue Cave
supports up to 11 commands with more coming down the road to allow you to be
able to go ahead and fine-tune and be able to take advantage of the specific
functions that the router can execute all just by voice activation some of
these include things like enabling a guest network pausing the Internet
putting the router into a media mode which helps to optimize a streaming
experience and even rebooting the router in the event that you need to reset your
router to get back up and running. Now last but not least is going to be a
truly impressive feature which has just been recently introduced for the Blue
Cave and that will be its support for Asus AI mesh. AI mesh is an industry
exclusive option that's only available on Asus routers but essentially what it
allows you to do is pair compatible Asus routers including a second Blue Cave if
you wanted to add a secondary one to be able to significantly increase the
overall coverage of what you would have compared to one single router now
traditionally to be able to go ahead and have let's say additional coverage in
previous generations with different Wi-Fi routers you might utilize
something that's called a range extender or repeater
but repeaters had a lot of issues one they could be finicky in terms of how
you set them up. two they would generally have half the speed that you would have
compared to your primary router once they were connected to the router they
would commonly also have a secondary network name meaning
you would have to essentially disconnect from your primary router and then
connect to the repeater extender and this would really break the overall
seamlessness of your overall Wi-Fi experience. All the way around they
weren't necessarily always that effective at really extending the
overall range they weren't as consistent in terms of providing great speed more
complicated to set up and definitely more complicated to commit consistently
connect to the advantage you have with a imesh is it pretty much resolves all
those issues. We use a specialized what's called backhaul technology to allow it
to talk to directly to the other let's say Blue Cave if we were pairing two
these together to be able to have a very high quality high-speed and stable
reliable connection. When there are two units paired together this significantly
increases the overall coverage range helps maintain an extremely high level
of performance but also offers you a simplified experience in that you're
gonna have the same network name same password and with seamless roaming all
throughout your wireless environment. So wrapping things up if you've ultimately
been really looking to be able to improve your Wi-Fi experience in your
home or in your business or whatever it is that you need your Wi-Fi experience I
definitely would recommend checking out the Asus Blue Cave this product has
really been designed from the ground up to not only look great but offer an
extremely high level of performance regardless of how you measure
performance whether you're talking about the overall coverage or they're talking
about the speeds they're going to be offered by the router as well as
offering rich levels of connectivity in those Gigabit Ethernet ports and USB 3
connectivity as well as the features and functionality like advanced security and
anonymity protection as well as deep monitoring and control aspects for your
network and of course also having that ability to even extend and enhance your
network via AI mesh all really show that you're gonna have an extremely great
Wi-Fi experience if you're looking to be able to upgrade that experience with the
ASUS Blue Cave.