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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inexpensive but Feature-rich High Performance Router, December 6, 2009
This review is from: ASUS RT-N16 - Wireless router + 4-port switch - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n (draft) - external
I have been looking for a router with decent range, speed, support for USB based external NTFS drives and last but not the least, good QoS support for VoIP phones. Another important thing that perhaps everyone wants but forgets to mention is reliability. I expect it to keep on working once it has been setup.
I have had this router for just couple of days so far and cannot comment on reliability yet, but other requirements have been met quite well. The specs were something to die for - 480MHz (capable of 533MHz) processor, 128MB RAM, 32MB ROM and runs Linux with support for bittorrent and FTP right in the firmware. Even the firmware source code is GPLed and anyone with a bit of knowledge in this area can improve it. In fact, DD-WRT (an open source Linux based firmware) is already available and works quite well with this router.
With DD-WRT installed on this router, it becomes quite a powerful computer that can serve as a web server as well as a NAS once you connect an external hard drive to the USB port. QoS and Port Forwarding have been implemented quite well in DD-WRT and is the main reason why I had to install DD-WRT within few hours of receiving the router.
[...]
I would have given the router a 4.5 rating if I could as the firmware it came with had a few bugs. I could never get port forwarding to work and also QoS setup in the original firmware is limited.
Here are some pros -
1. Gigabit ethernet, excellent processor and so the performance. Asus claims 300,000 concurrent sessions, which should be enough to handle even commercial hotspots with hundred users.
2. It has 2 USB ports that support various devices. One could connect a USB printer and a cheap external hard drive at the same time. The printer would work as a network printer (available to all computers in the network) and the USB hard drive will be available as Network Attached Storage to everyone without paying hundreds for one such device.
3. DD-WRT availability. They are constantly improving and adding features. QoS (Quality of Service) is one such feature that is needed in any household that has a VoIP phone and lot of online activity in the background like uploading videos to youtube, p2p, online gaming etc. With proper QoS setup phone service or online gaming shouldn't be affected even with other large scale online activity.
4. The original firmware is image based and looks quite nice. I found it very intuitive.
Cons -
1. Should have been dual band (separate bands for G and N traffic), the chipset supports it. I am running in mixed mode as several of my devices (iPhone, Fuze, Wii) support only G mode and in mixed G/N mode, N components operate predominantly at G speed.
2. The original firmware is buggy and I couldn't get port forwarding to work reliably after several tries. QoS, the main reason behind me upgrading from a D-Link, is not implemented as well as I expected. DD-WRT fixes both issues but first-time owners may not be savvy enough to reload a 3rd-party firmware on their brand new router.
All in all, it's an excellent purchase for the capability and price, especially when you consider Cisco charges more (sometimes twice) for routers with slower processors and much less RAM and flash memory.
Update: Updated the links since Amazon yanked them. Also would like to add that the reliability is quite good so far with DD-WRT. Has been running for 3 days straight and no issues/slowdown etc.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
RT-N16 and firmwares, March 5, 2010
This review is from: ASUS RT-N16 - Wireless router + 4-port switch - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n (draft) - external
I've had this router for a few weeks now. I gave it 3 stars because of the stock firmware, once the firmware is working its an outstanding router.
The firmware that comes with it is terrible. My bandwidth was dropping from to 20mbps after a reboot to about 4mbps after 8 hours of uptime and the asus firmware has no auto-reboot feature that I could find. If you have no intentions of flashing to different versions of the firmware then buy another router. The most up to date firmware that I used was version 9.9.3.7. Hopefully they will come up with some fixes. Firmware and support can be found here: [...]
The first alternative firmware that I tried was DD-WRT. Its a big improvement over the asus firmware. My biggest complaint with DD-WRT was that I could not get the USB printer to work. Note, I was able to get it to work with the asus firmware but it would only print part of the page. With DD-WRT it seemed like there was a lof of Linux commands to get it to work with the printer and usb share. Reference: [...]
Because I wanted to get the printer to work I tried a third firmware called tomato. Tomato has a lot of commonality with DD-WRT (both run linux on the RT-N16) but I have never needed to do anything from the command line. Also, I have printer sharing and USB file sharing (1 terabyte USB drive) working. The traffic graphing seems better with the Tomato firmware then DD-WRT or asus firmware (which didn't do it at all). My biggest complaint about tomato is that there is less documentation than DD-WRT. That being said, I haven't needed to read the documentation to the extent that I had to read the DD-WRT docs. Reference: [...]
I think DD-WRT may be superior to tomato in the area of customization but I'm not sure. It seems like everyone customizes DD-WRT in one way or another while tomato users seem to use the gui that came with the firmware. The ability to customize may sound great but if its a requirement to get it to work and a pain in the butt to do then the joy of customizing starts to wear off pretty quickly.
I installed new firmware at least 6 times in the last 2 weeks before I finally settled on tomato. Each time was a nerve racking experience and I was convinced that I would brick the router. Fortunately it all worked out.
The hardware in the router seems really nice: I'm not an expert but as far as I can tell the processor, amount of ram and memory in this router is much better to the competition. The network connections seem to work fine. The wireless seems to work well. My antennas are always loose and flopping around but I think I can fix that by inserting an o-ring between each antenna and the chassis.
Overall its a great router once you get the firmware straightened out.
I recommend one of the following:
a) If you are the type of person who will not flash the router then buy a different router
b) By the time that you read this asus may have fixed their firmware. Read their forum at [...]
P_ID=WAa6AQFncrceRBEo&templete=2 and see if they have anything newer than 9.9.3.7.
If they do then download it and the stock firmware includes an admin tool to install it fairly easily.
c) If you don't like the asus firmware load tomato by following the instructions on this page ([...]). Note: These instructions require you to first flash to DD-WRT. Make sure that you: Save copies of any web pages with install notes before flashing, find out what the default password is before flashing, download both DD-WRT and Tomato before flashing to DD-WRT, make sure to reset the flash memory after flashing the bios by using the reset button.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great with DD-WRT, March 10, 2010
This review is from: ASUS RT-N16 - Wireless router + 4-port switch - Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n (draft) - external
This is the first router I've used with DD-WRT so I am not comparing this router with other DD-WRT compatible routers.
At this point my RT-N16 is connected to a USB hard drive and, in addition to being a wireless router, is also:
- a Samba server for sharing files among Windows and Linux machines on my local network
- a backup server for local machines
- a subversion code repository
One of the nice things about this router, from the firmware flashing perspective, is that the WPS button on the back can be used to tell it to download a new firmware, even if it's otherwise unresponsive. At one point I managed to get my RT-N16's firmware so messed up that I couldn't access it at all. The WPS trick (push the WPS button while plugging it in) saved me from a bricked router.
I bought this router specifically for the hardware in the box and the capability to run my own firmware on it, and I have been very happy with my purchase. If that's what you're planning to do, I highly recommend the RT-N16.
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