This last week I have been abusing my internet connection pretty badly and some cracks in my network started to show. I had a Gen 4 Apple Airport Extreme Base Station, which I’ve been using for 2 years now. It’s been a great bit of hardware but recently I started to notice that when I hammered the internet connection the wireless would start to choke/slow down.
The device has served me great for years, and was rock solid. But I always hated the need to use the apple tool to configure anything on it, and its serious limitations about network configuration (like you cant use some other DHCP host if you want the Airport Extreme to do NAT).
So it’s being given a computer hardware Viking funeral (being sold on Craigslist), and I replaced it this week with an ASUS RT-N66U “Dark Knight” dual band router. There was an issue from Amazon (they sent me a used one accidentally) and some issues breaking into the device and updating the firmware. But after that, the device has worked great.
I’ve noticed across the apartment signal levels are 25% higher everywhere, download wireless speeds are almost 50% better, and latency under high load is almost non existent.
Overall – very happy with this purchase, and it was actually $30 cheaper than a current gen Airport Extreme and has quite a bit more functionality under the hood. Like:
- Built in VPN server
- Supports DD-WRT or Tomato firmwares if you want more options.
- Native IPv6 stack support
- Static routing tables you can update and configure for custom routes.
- Guest networks that actually work (they NEVER worked on my Airport Extreme…)
- Ton of “Cloud” replica services if you want to hang a HD off the USB ports (2 of them)
- A much more advanced and configurable firewall
- QoS and built in traffic management/graphing.
- And the biggest thing – HTTP management of everything.
Those looking for a pretty robust 2.4/5Ghz dual band N router – this is a great option.
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