Asus 802.11ac routers. Any opinions?

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26 May 2008
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Hi all.

I am considering one of the above routers to replace my aging D-Link router as supplied by virgin.

I can't run wires due to the upstairs locations of two PC's.

Has anyone any experience of 802.11ac and how it fairs with multiple users gaming and streaming HD content, or how well such a router fairs when combined with an attached HDD for sharing media and files with PC's, DLNA etc?

Thanks
 
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Most people just have the rt-n66u with tomato in some form.

The rt-ac66u is, at present, just a marketing gimmick unless you have adapters to take advantage of that many bands which you personally don't need and would have to buy in addition to the extra £60 of the base unit cost over the n66 too.

In addition the stock firmware on the ac (basically a trimmed down version of tomato asus put their own gui on) has had issues if you google it and requires a different flashing method if you wanted to take it down the tomato route which unfortunately is likely to create an expensive brick in it's case.
 
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I'm not sure I agree, 802.11ac.ac is not a gimmick. That logic can be applied to anything really, cars are gimmicks unless you have fuel to take advantage of them etc. It's just a given if you expect 802.11n speeds you need a 802.11n router and WiFi adapter, as the same with .ac

OP, I've currently got an ASUS RT-N56U and it performs the tasks OP you've describe perfectly well. The only downside is when I use USB storage, transfer rates onto that aren't great at 5-6MB/s, using stock firmware. However I achieve the maximum possible bandwidth of about 17MB/s over WiFi to my server over the 5GHz band and everything else functions fine on the 2.4Ghz. DLNA works ok and my TV can pick up files that are stored on the USB drive just fine. I'd assume that the RT-AC66U would be similar as they're part of the same family although it too has USB 2.0 ports so i don't know if it uses a different driver stack as something is limiting my transfer speeds to the USB drive and it would seem to be software based.
 
Soldato
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Hondon de las Nieves, Spain
I now own an AC66U and previously owned an N56U.

I bought the N56U to work as the router along with my Virgin Superhub. It started off working pretty well, however i got a couple of drop outs often and found it struggled when pc's were all doing a lot (Son using online gaming, me streaming video to one room and the wife streaming video to another room)

I replaced it with the AC66U, and i've had very few problems in the last 6 months. The transfer rate increased from about 5-6mb/s to about 9-10mb/s which can make a difference when transfering a lot of data. We also found there was much less buffering pauses when streaming video.

I've not tried attaching a HDD as i have my home server wired up to the router.
 
Soldato
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London
I now own an AC66U and previously owned an N56U.

I bought the N56U to work as the router along with my Virgin Superhub. It started off working pretty well, however i got a couple of drop outs often and found it struggled when pc's were all doing a lot (Son using online gaming, me streaming video to one room and the wife streaming video to another room)

I replaced it with the AC66U, and i've had very few problems in the last 6 months. The transfer rate increased from about 5-6mb/s to about 9-10mb/s which can make a difference when transfering a lot of data. We also found there was much less buffering pauses when streaming video.

I've not tried attaching a HDD as i have my home server wired up to the router.

Im running shibby tomato firmware on mine as well and it has been rock solid with much better coverage than my old d-link
 
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OP
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Well I may consider the following items, I would like to improve my lag and ping when playing games online, without having to ask my son to stop streaming HD movies from the internet and having multiple browsers open.
It would also be nice to have a cheap shared network storage solution that works with DLNA and can be accessed from work I guess.

Asus RT-AC66U 802.11ac Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit Router
Asus PCE-AC66 Dual Band 5GHz Wireless - AC1750 PCI-E Adapter
Hitachi 4TB Touro DX3 Desktop External USB 3.0 Hard Drive
 
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If you can afford the AC, go for it. Some smart phones have already started implementing it.
It's going to be the future so it will certainly future proof you.
If you dont want to stretch that far go for the 6U, both of them will do the job you want so just depends how much you want to spend.
 
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