On the back of Asus announcing their new Mesh networking update for their existing Wi-Fi routers they have also announced their first foray into the ‘Smart Router’ market, the Blue Cave. The what? Let’s take a look.
The Blue Cave brings smart features like advanced parental controls, for monitoring, scheduling and controlling your kids’ – or anyone’s – access to the internet. Smart Home integrations with Amazon Alexa and IFTTT at launch, enabling voice control (including Google Assistant via IFTTT recipes) as well as other IoT integrations for automating processes like playing your favourite song when you arrive home, because that wouldn’t get annoying!
Asus also has announced AiProtection built into to the router featuring a subscription-free ongoing security monitoring and management system incorporating Malicious website blocking, intrusion detection and prevention and packet inspection to try and prevent an infected machine on your network leaking your personal data.
The good news, the Blue Cave will come to Australia for an estimated $399 AUD with the local launch date yet to be determined. Asus is currently working on implementing their newly announced AiMesh into the Blue Cave with no firm dates on when the new feature will come to Asus’s newest Smart Home Router
What about the specs you say? The Blue Cave is a Ac2600 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac router with 800+1734 performance. It features a new 4 x internal antenna design and is designed to be placed in full view, as seems more and more to be the trend these days. Ports wise it features a WAN port 4 x Gigabit LAN ports and a USB 3.0 port for media serving.
With features like Game Boost or Media First letting you priorities your gaming or Netflix stream you can also ensure that the most important content on the network gets to where it’s needed. We’ll be interested to see the Blue Cave come to Australia and even more interested to test the Mesh Networking and smart features when they are announced.
If the Blue Cave will let you add mesh networking with all of the smart controls, this is one hell of a router.
