ASUS RT-N65U Dual-Band Wireless-N750 Gigabit Router

This is an excellent router that works very well for me. It is very easy to use and set up. I highly recommend it. It has every feature you could want. There are a couple of issues to watch out for however.I suspect that some (not all) the connection problems people are having in these reviews are actually due to their laptop wi-fi cards, if those cards are Intel brand. I discovered that there are a lot of complaints about Intel cards. The main problem seems to be that they won't connect after you come out of sleep or hibernate. UPDATE - as of early 2015 Intel seems to have fixed this in their latest drivers.Also, if you use the USB ports with a USB 3.0 device, pay attention to your 2.4 ghz channel and watch for strange behavior. A program like "inSSIDer" can help you see what your router signals are doing. The USB 3.0 devices work in the same frequency range as the 2.4 ghz wi-fi signal. This creates interference with the router signal and can cause all kinds of problems like dropouts, disconnections, etc. I have also observed that the interference forces the router to switch to 20mhz bandwidth, which cuts the data rate in half. There are many other reviewers here that report this issue.This is an issue that seems to be affecting many of the latest routers with USB 3.0 ports, not just this one. Much of the problem seems to be poor shielding in the routers and also in the cables and the devices that attach to them. If you Google "USB 3.0 + wi-fi interference" you will get plenty of hits. The 5 ghz band is not affected. But your guests may need the 2.4 ghz band. See update #2 below.Another thing I learned is, if you are using a USB external drive in a Samba share, format it in Linux based ext2 or ext3 format and not NTFS. With NTFS you will see weird problems like missing files that are actually there. Again, this is an issue with most routers, not just this one. This is because the router's operating system is Linux. NTFS is a foreign language to Linux and requires a driver. The driver seems to be a third party driver also used in other routers and is the culprit here. I have firmware version 3.0.0.4.374.1317 as of this writing.Windows does not support ext2/3 so you can't format your drive with Windows. This also means that you can only read from or write to the drive through the router. Look at "GParted" (free) software as your first stop for formatting. Since reformatting my drive to ext2 the weird problems with NTFS completely went away. Also see update #3 below.UPDATE #1: I have encountered another USB file issue using the ext2 format. I have run into an issue where after copying files to the drive, some random files are tagged as "read-only". There doesn't seem to be a pattern to this. So if you try to delete a large folder with lots of other files and sub-folders, chances are you will run into a "read-only" file and the directory tree remains down to that file. You have to manually go in and un-check the "read-only" property for each file before you can delete it. I have Googled and found this issue reported elsewhere. It doesn't appear that ASUS has done a very good job as a whole with the USB functionality in their firmware. No updates are available to fix these problems, as of January, 2014. I suspect this portion of the code is canned and used in all their routers, resulting in possible problems on all their other models too. I am just now switching to FAT32 format to see if it works better. See update #3 below.UPDATE #2 --- New USB 3.0 SETTING!!!: I just ran across a new setting I hadn't seen before. It must have slipped in on one of the firmware updates. It is called "Reducing USB 3.0 Interference". It is in the "wireless/professional tab/2.4 ghz" section, at the bottom of the list. According to the pop-up it either decreases 2.4ghz performance or decreases USB 3.0 performance, depending on which you care more about. It seems to be an attempt to address the USB 3.0 interference issue.UPDATE #3 --- I have discovered that it is a myth that you cannot format a FAT32 drive larger than 32 GB. You just can't do it from within Windows. If you use third party software such as "GPartEd" you can format a FAT32 drive of any size. I have done this to a 128 gB drive, so I know it can be done. Formatting in FAT32 seems to have solved all the problems listed above. It has worked flawlessly for me now for 6 months. FAT32 seems to be they format to go with.ASUS SUPPORT: Finally, let may give a broader remark about ASUS support, forget it! They are useless. If I were rating their support separately I would give them 0 stars. Over the past 15 years I have opened numerous support tickets with ASUS Support, including about the above issues. They have a perfect record. They have never responded to a single one of them, nothing, ever, zero, nada. I guess they go into a black hole somewhere. They also make it very difficult to report problems with their products.

I love this wireless router and would have given five stars except for the design. Sometimes manufacturers get carried away with the design and make things difficult. On this unit its the stand and on/off switch that are badly designed. The awkward shape of the stand makes it difficult to attach and comes off if you move it. The last generation of this router had a large push button power switch making it easy to reset if needed. In this model they changed it to a tiny slider switch that is difficult to find let alone operate. Should have stayed with a simple design and layout of switches and indicators. The performance makes up for it. Great signal and with an added external drive it makes a great file and media server. Easily recognized by my Samsung smart TVs and streams with no skips or lockups (TVs are hardwired to have reliable streaming, not a fault of the router but poor TV wireless adapter). I have not attempted to use it for printer sharing.

I've used a lot of Cisco products professionally and have used a lot of Linksys products at home, after reading a CNET Best Wireless Routers 2013 article that was posted in June '13 to find out what the latest trends were I started comparing the ASUS Routers (RT-N65U, RT-N66U, RT-AC66U) with many of the current Linksys routers (E2500, E2700, EA2700, EA3500). I found a lot of problems being reported with the current Linksys range, specifically about the cloud management of the routers and issues with speeds slowing down after being used for a short time requiring regular reboots to restore speed, or sometimes not at all. That didn't seem very appealing to me. The Asus Routers had reported problems as well, but they all seemed to be fixed by updating to the latest firmware. There are many Asus comments explaining that the issue reported is fixed in ver. xxx of the firmware listed on reviews at Newegg.com, while Cisco just wrote back "We'd like to work with you to find a solution". So that cut out Linksys for this round of wireless routers. I'll review them again some day in the future.While many of the Linksys routers were cheaper than the RT-N56U, I wanted to look at performance versus price and look for something with IPV6 compatibility to make sure my investment would scale and be reusable for quite some time. All of the RT's mentioned above support it along with many awesome features.This is the best router I've bought to date. I took the advice to update the firmware as soon as I got it online (it took a few minutes and I didn't have to do anything) and it's been a breeze since then. It has a very easy to use GUI that is loaded with features. My favorite part is the traffic monitor and easy to use Quality of Service (QoS) settings. You can dial in exactly how much bandwidth you're willing to allocate to each device or port. I looks like it's running a linux back end, it's very stable and very small and sleek. It's nice to look at and I'd say it only runs warm, not sure if other people are having it do much.I have around 11 devices connected to it at any time, a mix which is mainly wireless and my one connected PC. The 5Ghz WiFi is great as well, switching some of my mobile devices to that freq range has kept them connected all throughout the house and they're not affected by other devices running on the lower freq range.I used the WPS on my Samsung Blu-Ray player and it connected first time and hasn't lost sync.So far so good, if you're looking for the device that will do everything you need today with a lot of scalability for the future, then this is your device. It's a tad pricey, but you'll be happy when it just runs flawlessly for the next 5 years.

Works, sometimes. Too much trouble!!When it works, it works pretty well and I liked the UI and controls. The main problem I've had is not being able to log in to set things up or make changes. I get the equivalent of the 'blue screen of death' and all I can get is:"Settings have been updated. Web page will now refresh.Changes have been made to the IP address or port number. You will now be disconnected from RT-N65U.To access the settings of RT-N65U, reconnect to the wireless network and use the updated IP address and port number."And when it does this, its pretty much a done deal. I have to go through a big hassle of reloading firmware with their utility and then I may be able to get in for a while, but just out of nowhere it's back to this and I'm basically locked out again. Biggest hassle ever.