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

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...Read more

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...Read more

I use this router for a specialized dd-wrt application. I runs fast and is easy to upgrade to dd-wrt. I particularly like all the storage and memory on this thing. It's got 32 MB of flash and 128 MB of memory and a 480 mhz processor, which is over twice as fast as the WRT54GL.

The downside is that the TX power is calibrated differently than most dd-wrt routers and defaults to 17. That's where it needs to stay. If you try to move much off of that, the router starts acting very flakey.