The Asus RT-N66U is one of the fastest and stable routers we have tested.Two 2.0 USB ports,Featuring 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Concurrent Dual-Band Transmissions. The RT-N66U offers a good firewall package with SPI intrusion detection and DoS protection. COMMITMENT BY ASUS. ASUS ASSUMES NO RESPONSIBILITY OR LIABILITY FOR ANY ERRORS OR INACCURACIES THAT MAY APPEAR IN THIS MANUAL, INCLUDING THE PRODUCTS AND SOFTWARE DESCRIBED IN IT. Products and corporate names appearing in this manual may or may not be registered trademarks or copyrights of their respective companies, and are used.
Hey Folks,I thought I'd try my hand at doing a home user review for the new Asus RT-AC66U wireless router - it's my first review of this kind, so apologies in advance if I've gone on too muchAsus RT-AC66U Home User ReviewI use an Asus RT-N66U wireless router in my home network, and recently got the new RT-AC66U wireless router to try out. My current network is reasonably sized and has a mix of wireless and wired clients numbering around 30 devices which use b, g or n.
Its an ADSL internet connection handled by a Netgear DG834G set to modem mode, which connects to the router via the WAN port. Ive been using the RT-N66U for around 4 months now, and despite some initial problems with the firmware, it performs pretty well on our home network.
Looking at the new AC version, it does the same as the older router, with a few notable additions:Multiple HD streaming over wireless.High speed 1.3Gbps + 450 Mbps (Asus quotes 3 x faster than 802.11n)AiCloud for accessing your files on the go (using a new App on Google Play and iTunes).This is a 5th gen dual-band Wi-Fi router, and its quoted speed can reach 1.75Gbps, utilising the Broadcom 802.11ac Wi-Fi controller and by working in both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequency ranges simultaneously. The 5GHz band supports up to 1.3Gbps, exceeding current Gigabit wired transmission speeds and is 3X faster than 802.11n. The router should offer good multi-tasking & very fast streaming it also uses Asuss AiRadar which is meant to intelligently strengthen wireless connections to connected devices which should offer better performance.A little bit about the AC standardIEEE 802.11ac is a wireless networking standard of 802.11, which is currently under development, providing high-throughput wireless local area networks on the 5 GHz band. Standard finalisation is anticipated in late 2012, with final 802.11 Working Group approval in late 2013. In theory this specification will enable multi-station WLAN throughput of at least 1 gigabit per second and a maximum single link throughput of at least 500 megabits per second (500 Mbit/s) thanks WiKi!
@Apachez - sorry I didn't use the IPV6 functionality on the router (my ISP doesn't support it right now as far as I know). Apologies I can't be more help on this@Rudde93 - I had the N66U as well and apart from the potential wireless speeds of the AC there's not much between the 2 routers. The QoS functionality of both the routers is the same, and if you go to user defined QoS you can set up prioritisation based on client MAC's or IP's. The settings vary from Lowest to Highest (5 steps) rather than allocating bandwidth.
I'm running v220 FW on the AC right now (I think the N66 is the same?). Must say that I've not tried the QoS out properly yet as there have been reported issues with it slowing things down and requiring the router to be rebooted. Asus are aware, so we'll see what the next FW update brings.I am using Parental Control right now though, and that seems to work pretty well (though you ned to set aside specific IP's for the clients you want to control, which is a bit clunky.Andy.
I guess this is adressed to AndyMac because of the Asus RT AC^^-u Router. I currently have a failing Linksys and want to replace it, I am Looking specifically very hard at the Asus, the Linksys EA6500 and Netgear6300. For some reason Im leaning towards the Asus RT AC66 U.I was hopeful you could also relate as to how the Asus relates to the other 2 routers Ive listedThere are not alot of Videos on the device and was hopefull you could guide me better, especially with the startup.Thank you in advance. I guess this is adressed to AndyMac because of the Asus RT AC^^-u Router. I currently have a failing Linksys and want to replace it, I am Looking specifically very hard at the Asus, the Linksys EA6500 and Netgear6300.
For some reason Im leaning towards the Asus RT AC66 U.I was hopeful you could also relate as to how the Asus relates to the other 2 routers Ive listedThere are not alot of Videos on the device and was hopefull you could guide me better, especially with the startup.Thank you in advance. Click to expand.Hi,I'm afraid I haven't had experience of either of the routers that you've mentioned - I have used an older Netgear DG834G modem/router, but don't think thats much help to you.The Asus RT-AC66U is a good device though, but is still quite expensive compared to the RT-N66U. As I put in my review, there's not a lot (other than wireless AC) to choose between the two routers, so I would say if AC isn't that important to you, go for the cheaper device.For a guide to set-up, check out the link I posted to the Asus website as it shows how quickly you can get it up and running.
Also note that any videos on the RT-N66U set-up will also be quite similar.Asus have been issuing firmware updates for both these devices quite regularly, and the latest version seems to be quite stable for most users. There are also some 3rd party FW versions out there - I tend to use those tweaked by Merlin.Andy.
Larry,The router broadcasts both on 2.4 and 5.0 simultaneously (you can switch either off). However your Note 2 will only connect to one wireless broadcast at a time.
You will find that the range of 2.4 is better than 5.0, however even with a lower wireless signal, the throughput on 5.0 may be better.I have different SSID's for my 2.4 and 5.0 networks so that I can choose which one my devices use. You can name them the same, but what usually happens is devices choose the wireless signal with the best signal (which may not have the highest throughput). A good way to check wireless signal performance around your home is to use something like inSSIDer.Andy. Yes that helps thanks. So you have a max of 32 MAC address you can assign static IP addresses for (I only need 3 static IPs for my home network for the servers).
The Mac Address filtering is only for wireless clients, not wired clients, so that works for me even if the limit is the same 32 devices. I wouldn't have an issue with the dlink router if it ignored all the wired clients.After reading the various reviews I think I'll get the N66U. It sounds like the firmware is stable and I have no need for ac. Yes, under 'remote access' I meant internet access. The UPnP issues however isn't related to the type of the access. Since AiCloud is essentially a web server it uses ports 80 and 443 (there is no way to change AiCloud's port binding I am aware of). So in order to avoid the situation when these ports are taken over by other application Asus just decided to block UPnP for the ports below 1024.
That applies to both LAN and WAN. In order to re-enable the UpnP for low ports you need to disable AirCloud, enable Telnet access to the router and issue following commands:nvram set upnpminportint=1nvram set upnpmaxportint=65535nvram set upnpminportext=1nvram set upnpmaxportext=65535nvram commitreboot. Thanks to the OP for his AC router review.I have the RT-N66U and no complaints.
I recently setup the embedded VPN server and wanted to share a few small things I learned since Google was not quick to help me this time.The VPN setup is pretty simple but I got off track with the IP addressing. The default router LAN IP was the usual 192.168.1.1 (or I changed it to that) but the default VPN client IP pool was 192.168. VPN clients could login, get their client IP, but not route around the LAN. I switched the VPN client IP pool to 192.168. 1.x, and then VPN clients could access shares on the LAN.
Of course, this took me too long to figure out since I was distracted by name resolution, which turned out to be a non-issue.I have no WINS server to resolve names so my VPN clients simply map a drive v: (Windows Explorer/Tools) to the desired share using path 192.168.1.xsharename, where 192.168.1.x is the static IP of the destination machine. The share permission is set to that machine's user. Which is good enough for this home LAN.The VPN client defines a Windows VPN Connection and logs into the VPN server using the DDNS address and login credentials setup on the router. Then the VPN client accesses his mapped drive v: and logs into the destination machineshare using the permitted Windows user credentials. Two logins.I restricted the VPN server to using the highest level of CHAPS 128-bit encryption. Works great for secure sharing.
Although apparently PPTP can be hacked with some serious effort. The ASUSWRT only supports PPTP. You would need to flash with DDWRT or other to introduce allegedly more secure VPN protocols. Note that when enabled, the router holds FTP port 21 OPEN and PPTP port 1723 OPEN.I discovered a few router IP features I've not seen before on my other consumer router, WRT54Gv1.1. The router uses a hash algorithm based on the MAC address to assign dynamic IPs. The same IP is always assigned to the same network adapter.
Hence, the embedded DHCP server is issuing static IPs dynamically. I did not try hard to disprove this.The router can also be configured to issue specific static IPs to specific MAC addresses. I decided to use this feature to assign a static IP to my VPN destination machine, leaving that machine set like all of the others for DHCP. The DHCP server in the router assigns a hard static IP, not the calculated static IP noted above.After discovering these features, I revised my IP allocation/assignment:192.168.1.0-9 static IPs assigned by me (router 1, 2, etc.)192.168.1.10-19 static IPs defined by me but assigned by the router (actual router limit is 32)192.168.1.20-29 dynamic VPN client IPs assigned by the router to remote VPN clients192.168.1.30-99 dynamic IPs assigned by the router to LAN/WLAN clientsConsider me a fan of this router. And probably the AC version, too!GK.
If you’re looking for a dual-band router with great broadband speeds, very large signal range, simple setup and cloud storage then look no further because the is one of the best routers that meets all these requirements and more.Although its price isn’t very high, this router performs very well and offers a lot of premium features.Note: The RT-N66U supports three 150Mbs data streams simultaneously. Asus RT-N66U Router Review-“Dark Knight”DesignThe exterior is stylish, well built, with a black carbon-fibre feel on top of the case and an array of LED lights for router connection status.
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
March 2023
Categories |