Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

***UPDATED on 8/23/15****** I felt compelled to review this product based on several recent discussions with colleagues at work who also purchased the AC66U. Being engineers, we all pride ourselves on having the best technology, and so all of us read the same CNET reviews that led us to believe this was, hands-down, best in class. All of us had the exact same experience with this device, described as follows: - It will work just fine for a few weeks, if not a few months - You'll start to notice the range of this device degrading (many of us increased the transmit power as a result) - The 5G band will become especially hard to connect to - The 5G band will slow to a crawl and effectively become unusuable - The 2.4G band will follow-the same pattern as described for the 5G band - Shortly after your wireless becomes unusable, the entire network (referring to wired connections) will stop working Ultimately, you have to power cycle the unit to get internet working. When this became a pattern, we all tried the same thing: increased the tx power, upgraded the firmware, turned off 5G, and yet the cycle described above would eventually repeat. For me, it just got faster and faster - finally, the router would only operate for a day or two before dying. To make it more interesting, when my range got to be significantly worse,I convinced myself that it must be due to increased RF noise (new houses being built nearby and a lot of new SSIDs showing up) - so I went out and bought a second one (still convinced the router was the best-in-class) with the intention of using it as an access point that could extend my range. This new device was the same model but a slightly newer hardware revision. Same exact behavior. As an experiment, I switched the devices and used the new one as the router and the old one as the access-point. Same exact behavior. I'm back to my old Netgear N router, which works just fine in the same environment (can even cover the entire house without problem). I contacted ASUS, who agreed to RMA both devices, though I have to pay for shipping. When I complained about this at work, I was surprised to discover that a number of my coworkers had the exact same experience - many of them ended up throwing the things away. I'm always skeptical of bad reviews when something has this many 5-star ratings - I assume it's just a few grumpy people who like to complain. I can only assume that the large number of 5-star reviews are due to the fact that people evaluated it after a very short period of use. If you only need a router for a few days: this is just the device - for everyone else: DO NOT BUY THIS ROUTER. I'm going to try the new AC TimeCapsule from Apple next... ******** 8/23/15 UPDATE ******** Wow. It’s amazing to see how many people have responded to this review since I posted it several years ago. It’s also amusing to see how much controversy this has sparked over my credentials as an engineer! Not that it matters, but it was essentially my way of qualifying my post to clarify that my frustrations [probably] weren’t the result of incompetence with basic networking setup. I tend to be skeptical of the technical competence of some of the reviewers on amazon. Regardless, I do actually have an update: I have since switched to a combination of APs, including a TP-Link AP for low-bandwidth applications (Nest, Wink, Sprinkler, Garage Door, etc..), a weather-proof En-Genius AP for outdoors and the latest Apple TimeCapsule for high-bandwidth applications (streaming videos and laptop usage). I also now use a Cisco load-balancing router to combine the WANs of multiple ISPs (AT&T, TimeWarner and FreedomPop). This setup has worked flawlessly for the last year. I never have to power-cycle anything and I have most everything on a UPS, so my up-time has been extremely high. That being said, I actually do believe I now know the root cause of the recurring failure I experienced with the ASUS. I had an old Netgear router I used in-between the Asus and the setup I now have and it would also require periodic rebooks, though not nearly as often. This prompted me to inspect the network traffic. I used a packet sniffer and discovered that my U-Verse TV service was flooding the network with multicast packets whenever someone turned a TV on. Most people connect their STBs and DVRs over coax, but I chose to run everything over Cat6 for max flexibility (U-Verse can automatically route the TV data over the appropriate physical layer). The gateway itself will only send the multicast packets over the physical connections that have a TV somewhere downstream and I had run connections to every room where I had a gigabit switch connecting the TVs and a number of other devices - as a result, the gateway was sending the multicast packet to the ASUS router, since the TVs were connected to it. I suspect that this was just too much for the router's chipset to handle and it would quickly become overwhelmed and require a reboot. The degradation and acceleration of this behavior may have been attributed to the number of streams and/or damage caused by overheating (the thing would get crazy hot). A router of this price (at least two years ago) should have had the processing power to handle this much data, so I still don’t recommend it. However, most users won’t have this type of network topology and will probably be fine. That being said, enough other people experienced this issue that it clearly seems to be just too easy to overwhelm. Anyway, hope this helps.