Asus RT N56U

[FoolishBose]

Hello all,

I was looking to purchase a wireless router to hopefully cover a three story house without the need for a repeater. Fortunately the router can sit in the atrium of the staircase so it has line of sight to the rooms on all the floors. I don't think it matters, but this will be for a 200/100 Mbps fibre line.

I had decided on the Netgear 3700 when this new router by Asus, the RT-N56U, caught my eye. Where I'm from, the Asus router is significantly cheaper than the Netgear one.

However, I know the Asus routers have gotten mixed reviews on the site. The N13 was fairly good, while the performance of the N16 was quite dismal. At first I dismissed the router as more of a display piece than functional equipment, but a couple of reviews have shown this to not be the case.

Anyway, I was hoping someone here either had direct experience or could magically predict whether the performance would be better than that of the N13 or the Netgear 3700 based on the antennas or chipset used. I'm leaning towards the Asus I will let you guys know how it goes if I don't get any advice that steers me away.

Thanks!

 

[thiggins]

Trying to cover three floors with any single router is a stretch, even with an open atrium. You may have "line of sight" to all rooms. But the rooms furthest away from the router are going to have a lot of floors for the radio waves to travel through.

 

[FoolishBose]

Tim,

Thanks for taking the time to reply! I will attempt to use the N56, if it fails I'll add the N13 as a repeater somewhere in between. I may drop down to a lower speed fibre package if the max throughput is hit too hard.

 

[thiggins]

Keep in mind that any wireless clients that connect through the repeater will suffer a 50% throughput reduction.

 

[Dr_ARCHer]

Hello all,

I was looking to purchase a wireless router to hopefully cover a three story house without the need for a repeater. Fortunately the router can sit in the atrium of the staircase so it has line of sight to the rooms on all the floors. I don't think it matters, but this will be for a 200/100 Mbps fibre line.

I had decided on the Netgear 3700 when this new router by Asus, the RT-N56U, caught my eye. Where I'm from, the Asus router is significantly cheaper than the Netgear one.

However, I know the Asus routers have gotten mixed reviews on the site. The N13 was fairly good, while the performance of the N16 was quite dismal. At first I dismissed the router as more of a display piece than functional equipment, but a couple of reviews have shown this to not be the case.

Anyway, I was hoping someone here either had direct experience or could magically predict whether the performance would be better than that of the N13 or the Netgear 3700 based on the antennas or chipset used. I'm leaning towards the Asus I will let you guys know how it goes if I don't get any advice that steers me away.

Thanks!

You sounds like from Singapore . I am on the same 200/100 fibre plan.

I have the WNDR3700, but I got the RT-N56U because the WNDR3700 would not work with my two wireless IP cameras (Dlink and LevelOne) when encryption is turned on. Like you, I stay in a 3-storey house. Previously, I was on ADSL and using the DIR-655. The DIR-655 was located in my study, and I have problems getting wireless signals on different floors.

With fibre, I relocated the termination point to the central living hall and moved my router there. Both the DIR-655 and RT-N56U could serve my previously inaccessible rooms. I've decided to use the RT-56U because for my own laptops, I could use the 5GHz band (inSSIDer reports that it is 450Mbps), while my other devices (e.g. PS3) could use the 2.4GHz band.

 

[FoolishBose]

You sounds like from Singapore .

Excellent guess!

Ended up getting the N56 and I'm very happy with it. They have a promotion going on here where turning in your old router gets you $25 off the Asus, so I turned in a 6 year old Wireless-G DLink I had sitting in the closet for a pretty good deal at Sim Lim. Apparently shouldn't have been in a rush though - StarHub said the fibre activation failed because of a problem with Nucleus Connect *sigh*.

Currently it's sitting on a table on the ground floor and I still get a very useable signal on the third floor. According to Internet SpeedTest (not the best measure I know) I'm getting around 12/2 Mbps within Singapore on my old 30 Mbps cable plan.

Now I have to figure out whether or not getting a repeater will be worth it. I know that I will suffer a 50% throughput loss, but will that be better than working with a 28-30% signal? I guess we shall see once Starhub is back and I run some tests with the fibre line.

 

[stevech]

With the 30% of full scale signal from the router, the question is what WiFi bit rate is in use, according to your client? Take that bit rate times 0.6 and compare to your ISP's promised speed. No sense greatly exceeding.

Also, don't forget that the signal strength received by the router is likely lower than the strength received by the client. This is because many client devices have lower transmitter power. This can be a speed constraint. Some routers display the received signal strength for each client - a valuable feature.

I have a problem with the percent scale.. it implies linear. The RF propagation world, from the inverse square law in RF, needs a log scale. In such, halving the power is 3dB change whereas on a percent scale, which has no math basis, that might be 50%. But 3dB is negligible, in an 80dB path as typical in WiFi. I know the users need simple. Apple got burned recently by having the wrong math in displaying AT&T's signal strength bars.