Asus Dual-Band Wireless-N600 Gigabit Router (RT-N56U)

I want to focus this review on the file / media serving capabilities of this router. I work in IT and have extensive knowledge of networking, etc. so I don't feel it is fair to comment on setup ease (as it is second nature to me). The interface is nicely laid out and unique from other routers I have used. It seems to me like it would be more intuitive for novice users. From a wireless standpoint I have no problems and am getting strong signals and performance to my wireless devices. Your wireless mileage will very depending on the size of your house, your internet reliability, and how crowded the airwaves are at your location. If you can see many other wireless access points when connecting your device, you will likely have wireless issues with any router (at least on the 2.4Ghz band).A little history, I have a good sized music / photo collection that I like to stream to my home theater system via a PS3. Traditionally I used Windows Media Player via Windows to stream media. Not wanting to have a PC on all the time, I upgraded to a WD MyBook World home NAS network harddrive to accomplish the same task. This device was less than stellar in most aspects, but it (kind of) worked...that is until it died recently (after only a year or so). That is when I embarked on my quest to replace my NAS / router with one of the new breed of routers that supports USB storage and media serving. I went through several routers, all of which supposedly supported DNLA media serving, but all failing to serve all my media files (most devices ran out of memory once they indexed so many files and would either freeze or simply just server up a small fraction of my file). Not only that, their read/write performance on my external, NTFS formatted, portable HD were terrible.Flash forward to today when I received my Asus router. After getting everything setup and upgrading to the latest firmware (1.04m) I crossed my fingers and plugged in the HD. After about 30 minutes or so it had finished indexing the media on the HD. I fired up my PS3 and there was all my media! Not only that, but it serves up the files very quickly! I can browse through 12 megapixel photos instantly. All my music and videos were there and played flawlessly. One nice feature is that you can browse by "folder" when accessing any media type (at least on the PS3). All media servers need to have this method of browsing, but sadly many do not. Performing the same functions on the MyBook were agonizingly slow. It also took my MyBook several hours just to index my collection. To say I am impressed is an understatement!You can also access your connected drive via a standard SMB share (\\router ip address), making it easy to copy and manage your files. Write performance was about 5MB/sec on the NTFS drive, which was about 4x the performance of other routers.This is a great router for file / media sharing and I highly recommend it for that purpose!The only cons I have so far is that the stats pages don't show the signal strength of attached wireless clients (at least as far as I can tell) and it does not support IPv6 (although that is not needed today). I have only had it setup for a few hours, but so far it is the best home router and media serving device I have used. I will update the review if I have any issues / problems in the future.UPDATE 7/7/2011:After having this router for 24 hours, I have run in to some issues...First off, like others have mentioned, with the default settings various VPNs will not work. I use a Cisco IPSec VPN for work. To resolve this, simply go to the DMZ tab and enable the various VPN pass-through options. Also, if you are using a wired connection with a VPN then you will have problems with the hardware NAT function on the device. Simply enable the QOS feature and this will automagically disable the hardware NAT. My VPN works fine once I made these setting changes (firmware 1.0.1.4m)I also use a D-Link DAP 1522 wireless bridge to connect my upstairs PC and VOIP phone to the router. The ASUS doesn't seem to link the bridge. While my phone works fine, my PC has some issues with local networking. I can access the internet fine on the PC (good), but cannot access some local resources such as the router itself or clients connected to the router. What is weird is that if I reboot to bridge, I can access local resources for a few minutes (at most) and then they disappear. ASUS tech support, if you are listening, do you have any ideas? (This bridge has worked flawlessly with the last two routers it was paired with).

I am not a techy...but I have a houseful of equipment that streams off of my router, so I need something that is reliable, fast, provides coverage over a large area and can link up external hard drives and printers. It has to be able to work with Apple products and regular PC laptops as well as stream to two large LED TVs. As I said, I'm no techy and I knew nothing at all about routers - which ones are good, which ones are not. So, of course, I always tried to get the best deal, pricewise, figuring that there couldn't be that much difference. So I bought a Belkin dual band N router at Costco, for half the price of the other routers that they offered. Can't be that much difference.I was wrong.Even after more than two hours (twice) on the phone to India to try to get the Belkin router to stop dropping off and telling me every 30 seconds that my password had changed and I wasn't connected, the thing simply couldn't handle the load and provided no range at all. My wife and daughter were very unhappy...my household had descended into Belkin hell and I have to tell you, I wasn't looking so good in the eyes of my family.So one day my wife is over at the in-laws apartment getting their cable hooked up and when the cable guy was done with his work he asked if she had any questions..."well, I do have one question," she says, "about my home." She tells him the story and when she's done, he asks: "What kind of router do you have?" When she tells him he just laughs. He rattles off a few suggestions for a new router and a few moments later I get a call at work.So, using the cable guy's suggestions I start researching. It was a bit of a scarey proposition because I found out that there wasn't a router anywhere that was universally acclaimed by all users...someone had had a problem with every router out there, they all seemed to have demerits or missing features or problems living up to their claims of speed and coverage. But after plenty of research from tech sites as well as customers here on Amazon, I decided to try this Asus.Wow! This thing was set up in minutes, no hassles and the change was immediate. No drop offs, strong coverage everywhere on my property, blazing...simply blazing...speed. Everyone can be surfing the net and all the TVs can be going at the same time. The Ipads can stream video seamlessly, the TVs load movies instantaneously, never a blip. I am totally sold on this little Asus. It took another two minutes, maybe, to load the utility that allowed me to network my printer through the USB port. It worked perfectly. So, I got one for the in-laws apartment. I'm a hero again. No more Belkin hell.