ASUS RT-N16 Wireless-N Gigabit Router

10 Review to this product

• 

  T. Cook
  November 12th, 2010 on 10:56 am

  Rating

  This currently is the best DD-WRT compatable 802.11N wifi router on the market.
  
  Specs are really, really great with Broadcom 4718 chipset + 128MB RAM and 64MB Flash.
  
  After immediately flashing with most current DD-WRT firmware this unit has been ROCK SOLID ! An excellent replacement for my 6 year old WRT54Gv2.

  Only downside (and really not an issue for most) is the chipset/radio only does 2.4GHz frequency. So 802.11B, G, and N are supported. No 5GHz 802.11A support.
• 

  Dan
  November 13th, 2010 on 11:45 am

  Rating

  Gives fair wireless range out of the box, and becomes very useful after replacing the firmware with DD-WRT — in addition to all its routerly duties, it’s now serving as an OpenVPN endpoint for me.
• 

  m0ngr31
  November 14th, 2010 on 9:36 am

  Rating

  I wasn’t the biggest fan of the default firmware, but it worked fine. I put the Tomato firmware on and this little guy just screams! I’ve had it for a few months and have never had to restart it or anything! I plugged in my 750GB USB external drive to it, and with Tomato it is able to stream videos via upnp to my Xbox 360. The specs on it are just great and it’s been the best router I’ve ever had the pleasure of using. Very happy with my purchase!!
• 

  Michael W. Miller
  November 14th, 2010 on 1:47 pm

  Rating

  I also purchased this router based on a recommendation from the team at DD-WRT. I have been using a WRT-54G for several years and have always been a fan of the specialized firmware DD-WRT offers.

  Let me just say this thing is a night-and-day difference between any Linksys router I have tried. When using the internal web configuration this thing is FAST (both on the stock firmware, and with DD-WRT flashed on it). I was actually pretty impressed with the stock firmware’s configuration and could have been happy even leaving that on there, except for a few advanced features which were missing.

  The presence of two USB ports is also very nice. These can be used for FTP storage, or sharing a printer with special firmware. Highly, highly recommended. For the price this has a substantial amount of horsepower, even on the stock firmware I had no problem running hundreds of connections which used to slow down my Linksys routers.
• 

  S. Holt
  November 14th, 2010 on 2:10 pm

  Rating

  This router is wonderful once it is loaded with Tomato Firmware. It has a fast processor and 128Mb of RAM on board. Replacing my old routers with these.
• 

  Bryan Gibb
  November 15th, 2010 on 4:25 am

  Rating

  I bought this router after extensive research knowing that the functionality, stability and ease of use was greatly enhanced with 3rd party firmware such as DD-WRT and Tomato. Many are happy with the stock firmware, but this is also a very popular router to install 3rd party firmware due to the ease of installation and the feature set available for the price. Since I loaded Tomato on the router, so I have no experience in judging the stock firmware. Loading Tomato is a simple process, I highly recommend it (Find out more at: [...]). The firmware is very well thought out and gives you access to many features are either buried deep in stock firmware or really aren’t accessible at all. I have not had any stability problems.

  I am unable to comment on wireless N range and speed, but have not had any issue with wireless G. I have read that some people feel the lack of dual band is a huge negative, but most people don’t need dual band right now.

  With the tomato firmware, I was able to hook up a usb printer and access use the router as a print server which worked well. Some have complained about transfer speeds when plugging in external storage devices, but I haven’t tested this for myself yet.

  For the price, this router really can’t be beat right now.
• 

  Captain Awesome
  November 15th, 2010 on 9:10 pm

  Rating

  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)
• 

  H. Klein
  November 16th, 2010 on 9:16 pm

  Rating

  I bought this router because of its two USB ports; they let you connect a hard drive and a printer – and they become accessible by everyone on the network. Bottom line: this works just as advertised.

  I read comments here from people who couldn’t get this to work, so I was skeptical at first. I hooked up the router to the cable modem, fired up my browser and it automatically showed the router login page. At first the router didn’t want to connect to the cable modem, but I decided it could be the modem’s fault too – so I simply power-cycled it once whith the router remaining ON. Tada! Those two now recognized each other and a few clicks later I was connected to the internet. No cryptic settings or addresses, it just worked.

  Hooking up the USB hard disk drive (HDD) was a snap. Just plug it in and after clicking on the suggested “status update” link, the drive showed up on the overview picture (pretty neat). I could immediately start browsing around on the HDD. Then I had to read up on the various access choices (read/write right of the “admin”, “family”, or whatever,…). Just make the right choice and a few clicks later it’s all done.

  Finally, I connected my laser printer via USB cable and the router recognized it immediately after turning the printer on. The overview page gave me an address for that printer and it was easy to add this with the WINDOWS standard “Add Printer” procedure.

  After all that installation work was done (30 minutes max), I walked over to my wife’s Mac, just to find out it had already recognized the USB hard drive on the network. I haven’t tested the printer on her Mac yet.

  On my laptop, I made sure I now operate my modem at a higher speed setting than when I used my old 802.11b. Signal is stronger throughout my house and backyard and it runs much faster than with the old box (just as expected).

  Overall – great product, clear enough software interface, all at a great price.

  This thing has a hundred more features I’ll likely never try, but for the basic stuff with added HDD and printer – it’s excellent.
• 

  Steven E. Daly
  November 18th, 2010 on 12:32 pm

  Rating

  I needed to replace a flakey Linksys Wireless Access Point and Router combination, and this one works very well. I’m just using the stock configuration, with one computer on the switch side and another computer plus a home theatre unit on the wireless side. Both wireless units are using N cards, and are getting good throughput.

  This unit has features I haven’t used yet, like the 2 USB ports with NTFS support and built-in print server. DHCP is easily configurable and the web interface is quick. Encryption setup was simple. I don’t have any CONs in this review because I haven’t found any in the 2 weeks I’ve used it.
• 

  James Cho
  November 18th, 2010 on 6:25 pm

  Rating

  I had just bought a new computer (ASUS-G73JH) which by the way I am very, very happy with. Anyway, it comes with a wireless N adapter, so thought it would be a good time to upgrade from my 802.11 g router. I shopped around and then looked into ASUS since I was so happy with the laptop purchase. This router came with some features the others brands didn’t offer and had good reviews (although the other reviews were way too technical for me). I’m not flashing anything onto anything, especially if it can render the router unusable if not done properly (as stated in the owners manual).
  
  This n router sounded perfect because it came with a built in print server and attachable network storage both via usb 2.0. So for under $100 how could you go wrong. I can tell you it delivered on these 2 things perfectly and then some. It has 2 usb ports in the back that you can connect a printer and an external hard drive. I can print from any computer in the house now to one printer, I can access the external hard drive from any computer in the house or via ftp or from my Wii. Plus, now I get 150mbps instead of 54mbps on my internet connection. I didn’t know how big of a difference there was between using a g and n router was. Even on my computers with g adapters get much better performance. Web pages are coming up so much faster on all my computers.
  
  Another good thing about this router is the router access software that comes with/on it. I replaced my netgear router with this and I can tell you the netgear software is definitely not in the same league. You can just tell this ASUS router can do so much more than what I need it for.
  
  This router costs more than other 802.11 N’s but if you factor in the print server and network storage capabilities, this router is a good deal. I can say this router works as advertised, I am very pleased once again with an ASUS product.