ASUS (RT-N16) Wireless-N 300 Maximum Performance single band Gaming Router: Fast Gigabit Ethernet, support USB-Hard Drive and Printer and Open source DDWRT

by Asus

• Powerful CPU provides a high-performance throughput; Support up to 300,000 sessions for extensive P2P clients
• Network Standard: IEEE802.11b, IEEE802.11g, IEEE802.11n Draft; Interface: WAN: 1x RJ45 for 10/100/1000 BaseT
• USB: 2x USB2.0; Antenna: 3x external antenna; Operating Frequency: 2.4 ~ 2.5 GHz
• Sensitivity: ANT0 -75dBm, ANT1 -75dBm (at 54Mbps data rate), Firewall: NAT and SPI (Stateful Packet Inspection)
• Encryption: Supports 64/128-bit WEP; WPA-PSK, WPA2-PSK; WPA-Enterprise, WPA2-Enterprise; Radius with 802.1x

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 8.5 x 1.6 inches ; 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B00387G6R8
• Item model number: RT-N16
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (338 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #27 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Routers
  • #85 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Networking Products
• Date first available at Amazon.com: October 12, 2009

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

Wireless N Surfing, Scanning, and Printing All with One Router

ASUS RT-N16 provides users with high performance wireless N connectivity, lightning fast Gigabit Ethernet, and incredible versatility. Whether you choose to use is as a print server, BitTorrent hub, FTP storage, ultra-fast Wireless N router, or all of the above at the same time, it's an all-in-one router you'll wonder how you used to manage without it.

Right out of the box, the RT-N16 gets you up and running in only five clicks through its simple 3-step CD-free installation. And thanks to its streamlined EZ Quality of Service (EZQoS), you can effortlessly optimize bandwidth for gaming, video calls, downloading or whatever else you choose. Download Master is a BitTorrent client that shifts download duties from the PC directly to the router-attached storage via the two onboard USB ports. This allows you to download and share files wherever you have Internet access without going through a PC. For even more convenience,  ASUS AiDisk transforms a connected USB device into an FTP server for remote transfers. Plugging in a USB All-in-One printer, you can share both printer and scanner functions between all networked PCs.

The ASUS RT-N16 also features 300Mbps throughout on a 2.4GHz wireless band, four standard 10/100/1000 LAN Ethernet ports, and one inbound Ethernet port.

 

Key Features

• Sleek wireless N (300Mbps) router delivers up to 14x faster speeds and 6x farther range than 802.11g routers¹ (Learn more)
• Gigabit Ethernet for high performance LAN networking
• EZ User Interface (EZ UI) with a simple 3-step setup gets you up and running within minutes(Learn more)
• EZ Quality of Service (EZQoS) Bandwidth Management gives you a simple way to optimize Internet speeds for gaming, browsing, file sharing, and VoIP/ media streaming (Learn more)
• Built-in printer server for sharing All-in-One USB printers within your home or office (Learn more)
• EZ Switch lets you quickly enable router, repeater, or AP modes directly with a flip of a switch
• AiDisk is your personal FTP server that you can access anywhere you have the Internet (Learn more)
• Download Master lets you download from the Bit Torrent site to the connected USB storage device directly thru the router without having to leave your PC on (Learn more)

Learn More

Faster Transfers. Wider Coverage.

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Experience up to 14x faster Internet and up to 6x wider connection ranges compared to previous generation wireless G routers with the ASUS RT-N16 wireless N router.1 Whether you're streaming HD video or video chatting with a friend, wireless N connectivity lets you do more faster. And where other routers fail to connect when placed far away, the RT-N16 router gives you the wireless freedom to roam even further and enjoy high-speed networking nearly anywhere in your home or office. Get bandwidth on demand with EZ Quality of Service (EZQoS) to dynamically set Internet speed priority for browsing, online games, Internet applications (such as Bit Torrent), and voice/video streaming. The EZQoS is simplified for ease of use – just click on the image you want to set and it adjusts instantly.

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Easy, Quick Setup in a User-Friendly Interface

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The RT-N16 features EZ UI, a simplified user interface for quick setup, access to Internet-enhancing utilities, and a helpful troubleshoot guide that users at all levels will appreciate. Quick 3-Step Internet Setup The moment you connect the RT-N16 you will automatically be guided through an easy 3-step, manual-free setup. 1. Plug the router in your network and wall socket 2. Complete the installation wizard 3. Open your favorite browser and start surfing

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	Your Entire Network in One Picture
View larger	Within the EZ UI, you can see your entire network all at once with real-time status updates for each connection. This simplified network map makes it easy to check for any issues with connections to other PCs or printers and manage your network settings.

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	Your Personal All-in-One Print Server
View larger	Print, scan, and share directly from connected USB printer, scanners, and storage devices via the RT-N16's USB port. With the wireless printer server function built into the RT-N16, you can centralize your printing and scanning for your entire home or office network into one location. For a current printer support list, please click here.

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The Ultra Versatile Download Master

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The RT-N16 router sets itself apart from ordinary routers by offering Bit Torrent and FTP server functionalities. BitTorrent Share your movies, music, games, and other files with the included Download Master application that utilizes the BitTorrent P2P protocol for downloading and seeding Torrents to and from the connected USB storage device. What’s more, you can shut off your PC after setting up a torrent file to continue the download, PC-free. Download Master also lets you customize how you choose to share with custom bandwidth allocations when seeding. FTP Create your own personal FTP Server with ASUS AiDisk located within the EZ UI, and upload or download files from the connected USB storage device to any Internet-accessible PCs. Perfect when you forget documents at home or when sharing large files, FTP access grants you the ability to safely secure and access your treasured data through your router. This feature can also work without having to leave your PC on.

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What's in the Box

• RT-N16 router
• Ethernet Cable
• Application CD
• Power Adapter (12V 1.25A)
• Quick Starter Guide
• Setup Guide
• Warranty Information Card

Specifications

• Ethernet Port: WAN: 1 x RJ45 for 10/100/1000 Base T; LAN: 4 x RJ45 for 10/100/1000 Base T; Support 802.3 with max bit rate 10/100/1000Mbps, support auto cross-over function (MDI-X)
• Host Processor: CPU: BCM4718; FLASH: 32MB; DDR2: 128MB
• USB: 2 x USB 2.0 ports
• Antenna: 3 x external antenna
• Power Adapter: AC inputL 100V ~ 240V (50~60Hz)
• Operating Frequency: 2.4GHz
• Data Range: 802.11n Draft: up to 300Mbps ; 802.11g: 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, 36, 48, 54Mbps; 802.11b: 1, 2, 5.5, 11Mbps
• Output Power: 15~17dBm (g mode), 17~19dBm (b mode), 12~17dBm(n mode)
• Encryption and Authentication: Supports Open System, Shared Key, 64/128-bit WEP, WPA-Personal, WPA2 Personal, WPA-Auto-Personal, WPA-Enterprise, WPA2-Enterprise, WPA-Auto-Enterprise, Radius with 802.1x
  
  

© 2010 ASUS Computer International. All specifications and terms are subject to change without notice. Please check with your supplier for exact offers on selected models. Products may not be available in all markets. Product may not be exactly as shown in photos. (1) Maximum wireless signal rate derived from IEEE Standard 802.11g and draft 802.11n specifications. Actual data throughput will vary. Network conditions and environmental factors, including volume of network traffic, buildings materials and construction, and network overhead, lower actual data throughput rate. Environmental factors will adversely affect wireless signal range. Wireless range and speed rates are relative performance measurements based on the wireless range and speed rates of a standard Wireless G product. Maximum throughput based on draft 802.11n devices.

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ASUS PCE-N13 - Wireless N PCI-Express Adapter Add a wireless-N PCI-Express adapter to your desktop and the blazing fast speed of your network without wires. This versatile adapter can also be made into a wirelss Access Point for sharing Internet connection with other PC's.

ASUS TS Mini SOHO Server (500GB Storage) The new ASUS Small Office Home Office (SOHO) Server TS mini helps you centralize your files to improve data management, enhance media streaming, and better utilize home networks. The 500GB version offers 500GB of internal storage, 500GB of ASUS WebStorage and much more.

ASUS O!Play Air - Wireless N TV HD Media Player The ASUS O!Play Air takes multimedia enjoyment to the next level with wireless 802.11n support. Access your favorite music, movie, and photo collection from the attached storage devices, or stream them right from the HTPC, media servers or home PCs on your network.

Product Description

Asus RT-N16 Gigabit Wireless Router w/ USB Storage & Printer & Media Server

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 90 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Inexpensive but Feature-rich High Performance Router December 6, 2009

By S. Sen

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.

74 of 79 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars RT-N16 and firmwares March 5, 2010

By E. Helms

Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

58 of 61 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rocky start at first but smooth sailing now June 21, 2010

By Captain Awesome

Amazon Verified Purchase

First off, let me say here and now that a good router is one of the most difficult components to choose. I had some specific requirements which were as follows...

1) Stable wireless signal, ie not dropping all the time, also decent range and good throughput.

2) At least 4 gigabit ports for switching.

3) Dual band simultaneous

4) DD-WRT support.

5) NOT be a linksys (last 2 experiences were horrible)

6) $100us or less

Honestly, I went into this thing looking for a dual band router, specifically a simultaneous dual band router. All of them though apparently suffered from poor 5ghz range, throughput or some shortcoming or the other. I looked around and found a whopping total of 1 device I have that uses a dual band wireless card. So really, whats the advantage of dual band if the 5ghz is weak and slow. What do we do with the weak and slow? Shoot it. So I shot the 5ghz most humanely.

From there, my choice became clear. I have been playing with this asus for a few days now with DD-WRT and its great. You are able to create policies that will block torrent access via ports. You can also select specific clients to which the policy is applicable. There are also time of day settings where all policies can be implemented on the DAY and TIME you want. VERY sexy. So ive set up a policy on mine that can block ALL torrent access while keeping the Internet accessible.

There's also a dedicated internet killing option that totally kills ALL internet access, leaving only local file access in tact. Again, this can be set on an individual client basis.

At first I had a lot of issues with the wireless signal dropping during file transfers even with Asus' latest firmware. After much frustration, it turned out to be the wireless adapter I was using was faulty. I switched over to another and instantly the problem went away.

So far I just managed to get a solid, stable 150Mbps using a Belkin expresscard adapter while another laptop with the Intel 5300agn adapter reached 300Mbps quite easily. Even so, strangely enough, I got faster transfer rates with the Belkin using Windows 7 despite its slower connection speed.

The wireless coverage is sufficient as all areas of the small-medium single level house receive at least a 'good' Windows signal rating through a mixture of wood partitions and concrete walls. While the Asus will be used primarily for N connections on channel 6, I also have a Linksys RT160n on channel 1 as a secondary access point to handle guest machines and wireless g connections.

I've heard many complain about overheating on this unit but while transferring data through both wired and wireless connections simultaneously in a ~ 26c room, it NEVER gets more than slightly warm to the touch.

In closing, here are some pro's and cons I have identified in my week with this router.

Pros

1) Blazing wired performance through its 1Gbps switching ports
2) Fast, stable wireless connections that have not dropped as far as I have observed
3) dd-wrt compatible for accessing advanced features (MUCH better than the default firmware)
4) Strong dd-wrt community support and updates (there is a lot of help available for this router on their forums.
5) Aesthetically pleasing
6) Fast cpu, memory and storage
7) Blue lights are a nice touch

Cons

1) USB drive setup using dd-wrt is a bit challenging (not a fault of the router itself)