ASUS RT-N66U Dual-Band Wireless-N900 Gigabit Router + 500GB Western Digital Elements USB 3.0 Portable Hard Drive $170 + Free Shipping

i bought this for 200 recently. this is the only router i have never bothered to flash ddwrt and used the asus version of ddwrt out of the box.

range is great. i got more by changing the antennas too.

Cause I am able to stream movies from outside my network using AiCloud on my ipad. I am able to wake on lan from outside my network. Able to stream full rip blu ray from the hard drive to xmbc. I was never able to do any of these things with my previous router. The range on this router is amazing. Was not able to get full speed on my Asus zenbook (blaming the wireless card on the notebook) but with this router I am seeing 150Mbps. I purchase this router for $125.00. If I knew what a big diff a router make I wouldve spent 150-200

I got this router on Black Friday for $129.99, so here are a few responses based on two months of experience:


You can still get normals routers at familiar price points; routers like Asus RT-N66U/AC66U and the Cisco Linksys E4200v2 are really top of line routers with noticable improvements. Starting from the basics, the range and speed of the RT-N66U can be 2-3 times greater than a cheap $50 router. The stability is rock solid; in two months, I have not been dropped from the network a single time, nor have I had to reset the router for any reason. The N66U is "dual band", with separate functionality for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequencies (5 GHz has less interference from other household devices like microwave, but has sharper attenuation going through walls). More, it can set up multiple SSIDs on each frequency, including guest networks that are isolated from your home network sharepoints. One last point is that the N66U has two USB ports, and with a USB hard drive, you can effectively set up a NAS along with a network printer.

Check out http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/la...charts/bar for a quantitative comparison of routers. You'll see the RT-N66U near the top in many categories.


I've been a DD-WRT person up until this router, but the Asus firmware has improved to the point where the benefits from 3rd party firmware are not worth the effort. The Asus stock firmware does in fact have QOS and Access Restrictions, in addition to quite a lot of other features like a media/DLNA server, FTP access to attached storage, and a minimal cloud storage system. One worthwhile 3rd party alternative is Asuswrt-Merlin, which is an enhanced version of Asus's firmware maintained by some dude with too much free time.


There is actually an AC version of this router, selling for some $30 more. The RT-AC66U has mixed reviews on the firmware so far, and my impression is that the N66U is more popular. And regardless, there aren't too many devices that use AC yet anyways... does anybody have an idea what the timeline will be like for this transition?


To a scientist, statements like this are infuriating. You have essentially conducted an experiment with one trial and no control, and wildly extrapolated to an incorrect conclusion. Quality control isn't perfect, and customer service experiences will vary, but you cannot draw correct conclusions from your own singular experience without an idea of the "broader picture."" In layman's language, the statement "my product was defective" does not translate to "every product Asus manufactures is defective"; "I had a bad customer experience with Asus" does not mean that "everyone has a bad customer experience with Asus and also Asus is way worse than every other company." By running without a control sample, I refer to the earlier post that points out that issuing refurbs for warranty claims is a pretty common industry practice; your lack of knowledge about what other companies do has led to your incorrect belief that Asus alone is a deceptive, unworthy company.

So basically you bought it for the built in software features - WOL, samba/nas with external access. Fair enough.

I was making the (wrong) assumption that everyone who buys this router would run DDWRT or TomatoUSB which can also do all these things and more so I wasn't accounting for Asus' software/firmware.

For the record, the samba/nas performance using attached USB drive on this router is pretty bad ~5-8MB. Yeah its fast enough for a lot of people, but most "real" NAS perform >20MB. The PogoPlug with SAMBA gets ~17-20MB.

2nd you are not going to find any router with NAS that performs better. It is a router first with add-on features.

I really don't want to pay this much so anyone who has recommendations I'd really appreciate it.

I currently have a Linksys Wireless-G 2.4 ghz (54mps) broadband router. I think it's going because I keep having to unplug and re-plug it in several times a week. I need to know what to buy as well as does it matter that we have trouble watching movies thru our blu-ray player. They can't be viewed in hi def (with any company) and we can't make it thru a whole movie w/Amazon without getting an error saying to try back later.

The items I use this for is one desk top, wireless printer, a lap top and 2 iphones.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Well, I guess that's my complaint. Router hardware hasn't progressed however, price seemed to have. The Asus RT-N16/Linksys E3000, which is 3 years or so old, have pretty much the same hardware as the N66U at half the cost. At $120-160, I would expect my router to be able to act as a decent NAS considering a $15 PogoPlug can or even a $30 Android stick.