****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
I'm yet another victim of the notorious Virgin Media Superhub, which is mentioned a few times in the reviews of this product. Like the other victims, I too struggled with inconsistent download and browsing speeds and poor WiFi coverage from the Superhub and also struggled with Virgin Media themselves over the phone; "Yes, I've rebooted it and yes, I've checked the cables and no - it's definitely not a problem with two laptops, two smartphones, a tablet and a Chromecast in my house", but they refused to accept that it was down to a problem with the Superhub.I recently received a Synology DS216J NAS box as a birthday present and received a further kick in the teeth from the Superhub when I discovered that the transfer speeds between my laptop over WiFi to the NAS were trickling along at a pathetically slow 1.7Mb/s; this wasn't a great prospect when I was looking to transfer several gigabytes worth of files to it, so turned my efforts towards finding ways to resolve my networking woes. After a bit of googling, I discovered to my surprise that the Superhub can be wing-clipped and turned into a lowly modem through its configuration page (Something Virgin Media never thought of mentioning to me) and can subsequently have another router connected to it to take on the duties of pumping WiFi throughout the house, so it was with that thought that I decided to look for a sufficiently zippy router to connect to it.The problem when searching for things like routers is that there are simply thousands of ones available to buy and it can feel like wading through treacle trying to find a good one. Having gone through several of the things in my lifetime, I looked at reviews and settled on getting this Asus one after finding to my delight that it was nearly half-price on Amazon Prime. One of the buying factors was its dual 2.4 and 5GHz SSID's as I'd been having problems with only being able to choose one or the other with the (not so) Superhub, which was a problem as my wireless printer only supports 2.4GHz and was therefore causing everything else in the house to be dragged down to the lower throughput rate because of this, which wasn't much fun as it really seemed to adversely affect my laptop's AC-7260 WiFi card which is much happier when running on the 5GHz band.When the router arrived I relished the challenge of connecting it to the Superhub, the Synology NAS box and my various other bits of kit. I've often found routers in the past to be unhelpful, vague things which used acronyms for everything and be just about as clear as mud when it came to setting them up, but this is thankfully not the case with the Asus RT-AC51U. Once I'd stripped the superhub of its WiFi abilities and set it into it's modem-only mode, I connected everything up and fired my Asus router up. From there it was a simple case of opening the WiFi manager in Windows 10 on my laptop and opening a web browser, which promply brought me straight to the configuration page for the router and was displaying a set up wizard. Nice!Setting the Asus RT-AC51U up couldn't be any easier. Once you've set the admin username and password up it takes you straight to a page where you can set the names and passwords for the 2.5GHz and 5GHz SSID's. I decided to name them in a method which makes it clear which one is which and once I'd done that it took me straight to the main config page for the router - so no faffing around with IP addresses, which made for a pleasant change. When it comes to the configuration page for this router, this makes other routers ones look positively pathetic; it's well laid out, easy to read and absolutely packed with all sorts of features - many of which I wasn't expecting to find. I didn't even have to look at any instructions on how to change the default gateway IP or set a static IP for my Synology NAS as the user interface is wonderfully intuitive and simple to use.The only bit that caused me to scratch my head was when it came to setting up my wireless printer as I couldn't get my laptop to see it because it was connected to the 5GHz SSID. Having noticed that the router can act as a print server however, I connected the printer to the USB port on the router and checked the 'USB devices' section on the config page where lo and behold it had detected the printer make and model! Impressive. It still didn't explain how I was going to get my laptop to talk to the printer however, so it was with a squeak of delight that I discovered that the router has links to applications where I found a printer driver app that downloaded and correctly set up the printer on my laptop! By this point I was already singing the router's praises - never before have a seen such a well-featured, smart and intelligently designed bit of networking kit.Even more impressive is that fact that the transfer speeds to my NAS are now reaching 12mb/s (that's a 100% increase over the Superhub!) over WiFi and after conducting a broadband speed test I'm now getting the maximum download and upload speeds via my 75-meg connection. The signal is stronger throughout the house too and there's not been a single drop-out or problem with the connection speeds.This is without doubt the best router I've ever used and would absolutely recommend it without a second thought. Well done, Asus!>>> Update 13/03/2017I've been using the router for nearly a month now and have not experienced any problems with it whatsoever. The WiFi connection from it has been steady, fast and 100% reliable for the whole time. I would have had to reset the Virgin Superhub at least twice by this point in order to keep it running properly.I remain really impressed with this router and would give it six stars if I could!
