My new Asus AC66U Router (802.11ac)

[Pri]

So my old trusty Airport Extreme base unit which has served me well for the past 4 and a half years finally decided to kick the bucket. It started a few days ago when its WiFi kept cutting out and I had to reboot the unit a few times to get the WiFi to function again.

So I looked for a router to replace it and knowing the extreme usage scenarios it will go through I decided to go high end and not cheap out. So I purchased the Asus AC66U this is the first 802.11ac router from Asus. Now if you're not familiar with these standards lets just quickly go through it.

802.11a - 54Mb/ps - 5GHz
802.11b - 11Mb/ps - 2.4GHz
802.11g - 54Mb/ps - 2.4Ghz
802.11n - 130-450Mb/ps - 2.4 & 5Ghz
802.11ac - 1.3Gb/ps+ - 5GHz

The latest version pushes speeds to a mind boggling 1.3Gb/ps over 802.11ac. But this router is capable of 1.75Gb/ps of wireless traffic simultaneously by utilising both the 802.11n and 802.11ac capability at the same time.

Now obviously this standard being super new I don't actually have any notebooks, phones, tablets or other computers equipped with ac chipsets. But those devices will come in time. I'm future proofing myself.

But beyond the ac capability I bought this router because of its high end specifications. It has 256MB of internal memory. This is roughly 8x larger than the average router, even high end ones. It has two USB ports which you can use for either a printer or External Hard Disks. It has built in Bittorrent, HTTP, FTP, eDonkey, iTunes & SMB/AFS file servers.

In short this is the best router on the market. To pair with this router I also bought a TP-Link 802.11n 5GHz (450Mb/ps) PCIe 1x card to go in to our HTPC as the card in there currently is only a 2.4GHz 130Mb card.

So on with the pictures:









And finally just a picture of the TP-Link card box:



The admin control interface on this router is .. amazing. It's extremely responsive, changing settings happens instantly and without a reboot. Everything is reactive and updates in real time including graphs, speeds, link activity etc

The traffic activity monitor updates in real time whilst you have the page open:



So yeah, that is the new router powering our servers.

[Ricksterm]

*drools* That's a very nice router, I see it has parental control too, that will be good for poppy when she gets her first computer this christmas!

It's amazing they can pack all that into something so small, there's more antenna than there is router!

The UI is amazing too!

[skoch26]

Great choice vod. I set my buddy up with one of these not too long ago and after setting it up for him i had to buy one myself haha. My motorola surfboard bit the dust a week ago anyway

[freakboy31]

That's a good-looking router. It feels like wearing a suit.

[Pri]

Yeah it's quite a meaty router. It has a huge heatsink for heat dissipation. This is a picture of the routers motherboard from the DD-WRT forums:



One thing I didn't mention in my original post is that this router feels very heavy and it's obvious why when you look at the above image.

[Pri]

Had my first set of problems with the router today. Psico asked me today why the Dynamic Maps weren't working. And I was confused why they werne't working aswell because the port numbers for the maps were entered correctly in to the router on day 1 and I even checked that they worked back then and they did.

So I logged in to the router and yes the ports were forwarded correctly. So I removed them, saved it. Then put them back. Still didn't work. I thought wtf? So I tried accessing the web maps from my internal network bypassing the internet domains. Worked fine. So I checked the domains, working fine.

So I really was scratching my head, it had to be the router. I checked some other ports I had entered in to the router but was not using yet and they worked fine. Strange right? So I put the dynmap for Creative on a port I just tested that worked and it still didn't work!

So I thought hmm maybe it's the firewall or the QoS of the router? the QoS specifically detects HTTP traffic and puts it at the top of the packet frame queue so I thought ok lets turn QoS off and see what happens.

Now the router reboots to turn QoS Off for some reason and when it comes back online I have no internet and nothing I can do can get the internet to come back on. Now I'm really pissed off. I try restarting it physically by unplugging the power cord and plugging it back in, no dice So I upload a known good config that I saved of the router from the other day after I set it up, still no internet.

So I think argh I'm gonna have to reset this fucking thing and set it up again. So I did that and now everything is working fine except whenever I enter a new port to be opened the whole router reboots! - Before it just did it without rebooting.

I really think the software on this thing needs some work as I am seriously pissed off with it today it was working fine up until this and I am not happy about it needing to reboot to change ports now. This did not happen when I first set it up and I have no idea why it is doing it now as the first thing I did after I turned it on last time was update the firmware to the latest (which it still is on) so I have no idea how one day it can change ports without a reboot and now today it reboots every time I change any forwarded ports.

[Pri]

Just to update this post. I managed to fix all of my problems I posted above by upgrading to the AsusWRT-Merlin firmware. http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=9184

Basically this guy has taken the firmware source code that Asus provide for their own routers and modified them. So you still get an identical look and feel with all the same features but he has added some new stuff and also fixed lots and lots of problems that Asus have left in the firmware.

[GabrielWright]

So my old trusty Airport Extreme base unit which has served me well for the past 4 and a half years finally decided to kick the bucket. It started a few days ago when its WiFi kept cutting out and I had to reboot the unit a few times to get the WiFi to function again.

So I looked for a router to replace it and knowing the extreme usage scenarios it will go through I decided to go high end and not cheap out. So I purchased the Asus AC66U this is the first 802.11ac router from Asus. Now if you're not familiar with these standards lets just quickly go through it.

802.11a - 54Mb/ps - 5GHz
802.11b - 11Mb/ps - 2.4GHz
802.11g - 54Mb/ps - 2.4Ghz
802.11n - 130-450Mb/ps - 2.4 & 5Ghz
802.11ac - 1.3Gb/ps+ - 5GHz

The latest version pushes speeds to a mind boggling 1.3Gb/ps over 802.11ac. But this router is capable of 1.75Gb/ps of wireless traffic simultaneously by utilising both the 802.11n and 802.11ac capability at the same time.

Now obviously this standard being super new I don't actually have any notebooks, phones, tablets or other computers equipped with ac chipsets. But those devices will come in time. I'm future proofing myself.

But beyond the ac capability I bought this router because of its high end specifications. It has 256MB of internal memory. This is roughly 8x larger than the average router, even high end ones. It has two USB ports which you can use for either a printer or External Hard Disks. It has built in Bittorrent, HTTP, FTP, eDonkey, iTunes & SMB/AFS file servers.

In short this is the best router on the market. To pair with this router I also bought a TP-Link 802.11n 5GHz (450Mb/ps) PCIe 1x card to go in to our HTPC as the card in there currently is only a 2.4GHz 130Mb card.

So on with the pictures:









And finally just a picture of the TP-Link card box:



The admin control interface on this router is .. amazing. It's extremely responsive, changing settings happens instantly and without a reboot. Everything is reactive and updates in real time including graphs, speeds, link activity etc

The traffic activity monitor updates in real time whilst you have the page open:



So yeah, that is the new router powering our servers.

Now obviously this standard being super new I don't actually have any notebooks, phones, tablets or other computers equipped with ac chipsets. But those devices will come in time.

[Pri]

What's with that reply? haha