Since many people will want to connect the gear in their home entertainment system to an 802.11ac network, I decided to measure TCP throughput with the media bridge inside the built-in equipment cabinet in my home theater (the floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall cabinet is constructed from cabinet-grade plywood, including the back). The RT-AC66U's TCP throughput dropped by just a few megabits per second in this scenario. In fact, I found that I could wirelessly mount and stream a Blu-ray ISO image of the movie Spiderman 3 from a Windows Home Server 2011 machine in my home office to a home theater PC in the entertainment center, including its high-definition soundtrack.
The RT-AC66U's performance dropped off only slightly when I moved the client and the media bridge to the first of my two outdoor locations, an exterior patio enclosed by three walls and one half wall with glass windows. In the real world, I doubt that anyone would try to set up a media bridge outdoors because dragging the bridge and finding an outlet (and likely an extension cord) are too inconvenient. But I wanted to see what kind of range the RT-AC66U would deliver, and I wasn't disappointed. It was the second fastest (behind Netgear's R6300) among the five routers I tested.
The RT-AC66U's performance was even more impressive when I moved the client and bridge out to a picnic table completely outside my house. At this location, the router and client were 75 feet apart and separated by three insulated interior walls, and one insulated exterior wall clad on one side with fiber-cement lapboard. Under these conditions, the reference 802.11n router delivered TCP throughput of just 30.2 mpbs, but the RT-AC66U roared along at a whopping 125 mbps. The only thing more surprising that the number is the fact that the Asus finished in second place at this location, bested by the , which delivered 152 mbps.
Though you can ostensibly set the router's firmware to forcibly bond two 20MHz channels within the 2.4GHz frequency band to create a single channel with 40MHz of bandwidth, the RT-AC66U automatically backed down to using a single channel when it detected other 2.4GHz wireless networks operating nearby (nevertheless, the router's firmware stubbornly indicated that it was operating a 40-MHz channel).