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(More customer reviews)I have been in the market for an 802.11n router, and after having done some extensive research (as of April 1, 2011), I decided to go with Asus RT-N56U.
I can attest to the Asus RT-N56U being an excellent consumer-grade router even though it obviously falls short when it comes to more advanced enterprise-level features (where Cisco shines), which 99.9% of all users will never need or even know about. One of the excellent features of the Asus RT-N56U router (not often mentioned) is the fact that you can switch it to the AP (Access Point) mode. When Asus RT-N56U is switched to the AP mode, its WAN port becomes a switch port just like the other 4 LAN ports. You can utilize the WAN port to connect Asus RT-N56U to an external router, and thus not lose one LAN port for this. Therefore, when switching the Asus RT-N56U router to the AP mode, you retain all four LAN ports for the wired connectivity to other non-Wi-Fi devices at 1 Gbps each.
Asus RT-N56U supports concurrent 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz radios and the combined throughput via the back plane close to 800 Mbps (per the review by smallnetbuilder.com). In my personal test comparing Asus RT-N56U (in the AP mode) with the Cisco 1131 a/g Access Point, Asus provides nearly the same range in the 5 GHz band that the Cisco 1131 provides in the 2.4 GHz band. Asus RT-N56U 2.4GHz-band range extends beyond the Cisco 1131's range in the 2.4 GHz band. The Asus RT-N56U 5GHz-band range extends far beyond the Cisco 1131's 5GHz-band range.
As for the connection download speed, I was able to get almost twice the download speed when connecting wirelessly via the Asus RT-N56U (in the AP mode) vs connecting wirelessly via the Cisco 1131a/g AP. The numbers were as follows: 11.8 Mbps via Cisco 1131 vs 19.6 Mbps via Asus RT-N56U. In both tests, I used the same Internet router (Cisco 871) and the same Time Warner internet connection. I never knew that my Time Warner internet connection supported 20 Mbps until I tried using Asus RT-N56U. Now I know that my Cisco 1131 - and not my Internet connection - was the bottleneck to the Internet.
Asus RT-N56U can also be used as a NAS by utilizing one or two of its USB ports to connect an external USB drive. I tried USB flash sticks on both ports, and was able to transfer files to and from those USB drives. Additionally, you can create local users on the Asus RT-N56U and provide different levels of access (r/w, r, none) to different shares for different users. This is normally called user-based access, but Asus calls this "user with account" access. Otherwise, you can enable access to the entire drive for everyone if you do not want to deal with user-based access permissions; Asus calls this "user without account" access. I am sure most home users will choose the latter access method to avoid complexities that come with having to provision local users on the Asus RT-N56U router. I confirmed both methods of access to work when a share is mounted in Mac OS X as well as in Apple iOS (iPad2). I have run into a problem accessing a 32GB flash drive that had about 16GB of space taken by various files and directories via the the "user with account" access method from both Mac OS X and iOS, but had no such problem accessing a 1GB flash drive with almost all space taken by various files and directories; neither did I have any problem using the "user with account" access method when I tried a blank 16GB drive after moving a few files to it and then creating a few directories(see below on creating directories in the root of a USB drive). I believe that if I were to reformat the 32GB flash drive and then move all of the current files it has on it back to it, the "user with account" access method would start working properly on it. As for the file system on the USB drive, so far I have only tried FAT32, which works fine, but imposes a limitation on the size of each file to be a maximum of 4GB. If you need to go above this limitation, you will have to go with NTFS, HFS (for Mac), or ext3. I know for a fact that the Asus RT-N56U is compatible with ext3, but I am not sure if it can work with NTFS or HFS. If you have found one of these three file systems to be compatible with the Asus RT-N56U, please add a comment to this review. However, even if they are, the only file system that is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux is FAT32. So, if you are planning on running the Asus RT-N56U in a mixed environment and are planning to be able to read from and write to your USB drive directly from your computers as well as across the network, your common-denominator file system for the USB drive should be FAT32. If you are only planning on working with your files over the network, any file system that the Asus RT-N56U is compatible with would work for you as long as you can format your USB drive in that file system. As of this writing, the Asus RT-N56U cannot format a USB drive attached to it, so you would have to perform the formatting on one of your computers or use the default file system that your USB flash drive is formatted in, which is most likely FAT32.
It appears that even though you can manually mount USB devices connected to the Asus RT-N56U in Mac OS X (via Cmd+K in Finder), you cannot mount those drives by double-clicking the RT-N56U entry that pops up in Finder under Shared. I used the app called "Files Connect" on my iPad2 in order to enable Finder-like (or Windows-Explorer-like) file browsing capability. I was able to mount the USB drives by tapping on the Asus RT-N56U entry that Files Connect auto-discovers. I am not sure if Windows Network Neighborhood can auto-mount the USB drives connected to Asus RT-N56U because the manual says that you should enter the network path manually. If this is in fact the only way to mount an Asus RT-N56U share in Windows, you can always map a drive to the network path for the Asus RT-N56U in Windows.
Please note that you cannot create or delete any directory in the root directory of a USB drive connected to a USB port on the Asus RT-N56U while accessing the USB drive over the network. This is because the Asus RT-N56U considers the directories in the root of a USB drive to be network shares, and hence, it disallows the addition and removal of a share via the network. You will have to plug the USB drive directly in to a USB port on your computer (Mac, PC, or Linux) in order to create a directory in the root of the USB drive. Once you have done so, you can plug the USB drive back in to the Asus RT-N56U's port and assign the access permissions to this directory/share. You can, however, create and delete sub-directories of an existing share while the USB drive is plugged in to a port of the Asus RT-N56U, and the share is mounted via the network in Windows, Mac, or Linux. All sub-directories of an existing share inherit the access permissions specified on the share via the Asus RT-N56U's web GUI. The fact that you cannot specify a more granular access permissions to the sub-directories of a share is definitely a limitation for the enterprise, but should be no problem for a home or even a small-business user.
When you insert a blank USB flash drive in one of Asus RT-N56U's two USB ports, the Asus RT-N56U automatically creates a share (named "share") in the root of the drive and creates three sub-directories in that share (music, pictures, video). This is done in order to prepare the flash drive for the UPnP server that can be enabled in this router. I have tested the UPnP server, using Xbox 360 as the streaming client, and can confirm that the UPnP server works just fine in the Asus RT-N56U router. If, on the other hand, you insert a non-blank USB flash drive in to a port on Asus RT-N56U, no additional shares are created, and the access to all directories/shares in the root of the USB drive is provided as read/write. You can, however, modify the access permissions on a share-to-share basis and assign different types of access (r/w, r, or none) for different local users specified in the Asus RT-N56U.
Asus RT-N56U can be a print server, but this feature is of no use to me because for this feature to work, a Windows based program supplied by Asus is required. Because I use mostly Macs and Apple iOS devices, I cannot utilize the print-server feature of this router.
Last but not least, Asus RT-N56U can utilize one of its two USB ports to connect to a 3G or 3.5G cellular USB modem and share that connection among the Wi-Fi (and probably wired) LAN clients. I have not tested this feature, so I cannot comment on its usability and stability.
Overall, I don't think you can find a better consumer-grade 802.11n Gigabit Ethernet router as of this writing. Judging by the frequency of firmware releases for the Asus RT-N56U router, the bugs remaining in the firmware will soon be worked out, and hopefully, Asus will add additional features to this router, such as direct IP-based (or even Bonjour-based) print server so that Mac users can utilize the print-server feature of this router. Also, it appears that the "dd-wrt" team is working on porting their firmware on this router, so in the future, you may have a choice of replacing the stock firmware with "dd-wrt".
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