ASUS Wireless Router RT-N56U

I got the router more than half an year ago, to replace my old D-Link DIR-655 which was really good router but had ridiculously weak signal (I had problems to connect my mobile devices in the other rooms. Later, I also found that the weak signal was the reason for my wireless printer to malfunction).
As usual, I am not going to write a complete review but only to add my personal opinion and experience that is not mentioned anywhere else on the net.

To begin with, the router is really good, fast and with plenty of features out of the box. I have to mention that the official web page was well behind the real specifications of the actual firmware at the time I bought it. I was very close to buy the better and more expensive router RT-N66U just because it said that it has VPN. For my surprise, when I upgraded the router to the latest firmware, right after I bought it, it had already VPN...

Just to mention my priority pros/cons features that are specific to this router (I assume that port-forwarding, virtual host, etc. as standard): Firmware version: 3.0.0.4.374_979 at the time of the review.

Pros:

• Fast dual-band 2.4GHz/5GHz wireless router
• Gigabit WAN/LAN
• Strong signal
• Support for 3G/4G modems (a bit limited but still quite functional)
• Multi-Function Twin USB 2.0 Port + samba share
• Advanced web interface
• telnet - this is really perfect!
• Traffic manager
• Network tools: ping, traceroute, nslookup, netstat, Wake On Lan
• System log

Less important for me, but still impressive:

• UPnP, 
• USB applications (this is really cool, but more on this later): AiCloud, Bittorent, FTP, MediaSevrer
• IPv6

Cons:

• Worthless firewall
• Because of the above - worthless remote administration
• no e-mail functions

Lets start with some specific annoyances:

Setup - every one says it is a breeze. I do as well... except that the only option is the setup wizard. I know what I am doing, I do not want to input everything, relevant and irrelevant. I know how my router is connected and I do not need it to guess - yes it might guess wrong if you connect it to you WAN provider and 3G modem. I know I want to use the WAN connection and fall back to 3G when the WAN does not work (as advertized). Well, so much for the breeze.

Firewall - essentially worthless. At the same time, if you login via telnet you can configure iptables as you want and then start wondering how to save your configuration... Also from the FAQ i found this:

• The ftp server stay before firewall, open the ftp service will not open the firewall
• Users do not have to setup a dedicate PC running 24 hours for ftp service, also do not have to enable their firewall for this

I thought that the function of a firewall is to be in front of whatever service you want to run...
Since I can not restrict (easily) the remote administration, the Wake On LAN feature also is rendered useless in this case.
My solution - Raspberry Pi running SSH and OpenVPN that I can configure as I want (once you are on the RPi you can safely administer your router...).

AiCloud - during the setup you are asked for the router's admin password!?! If you are a bit concerned with security this is mind blowing. Just wait to look on the open ports on the router after this - it blows what is left from your mind. Several related vulnerability fixes with the latest firmwares confirm my fears.
One more point. I prefer not to buy locked hardware, so I can have the freedom to use it without restrictions. To use the AiCloud you need to use/buy ASUS routers... Also - personal cloud does not mean "size limits defined by your disk" only... it also means (to me) no third parties involved in the service.
To be fair - you get what you have paid for. And honestly, it is a good deal.

Samba - looking on the open ports and in the log it suggests that the daemon listens on the WAN port as well??? Looking in the smbd.conf it confirms it: interfaces = lo br0 eth3. I can assume that this has something to do with the AiCloud and by default it is not exposed by some iptable rules but... really. (Update: It looks like that firmware version 3.0.0.4.374.4422 addresses this issue...)
Otherwise, it is great feature and works quite fine with my USB stick and the 2TB WD external HDD. It is really nice feature.
The USB 2.0 ports deliver the top of the standard 14MB/s. Some other NAS-like solutions also have USB 2.0 but with rather pointless 1-3MB/s transfer rates.

VPN - easy to setup and run. Limited to PPTP but hey, it is better than nothing. In fact it is great option for home use. For some reason, recently I discovered that is was partially functioning (on my Android phone) - I get inside my LAN but could not get outside - tried everything - failed (Here I found a solution). It is great feature if you want to connect home occasionally (to switch some remotely controlled appliance for instance). For real VPN - get real ;-) .

Signal - now we are talking! The old router was pathetic with this respect. My neighbors signals were stronger than my own router, sitting some 3 meters away from my laptop... With this one, and some lucky ceiling reflection perhaps, I get connection outside my apartment as well (several floors down). The 5GHz channel has shorter range but this is how it is. If you give the two channels the same name the wireless devices are supposed to connect to the stronger signal, which in 95% of the cases leads to the 2.4GHz channel. That is why I have different names for the channels, so I have a bit more control over the choice.
The wireless connection is stable and without any drop outs.

Speed - my network provider is throttling down my connection, so this is outside of the scope for comparison. Internal speed - as promised - plenty of bandwidth.

USB applications - great idea but need some more work. The first time I tried to install something - nothing worked - spent quite some time to manually make it work. Later firmware fixed this issues, upgrades were not exactly flawless.

Firmware - the original one provides enough features to say that I do not need anything else. It is nice to have SSH server though. I run my SSH and VPN servers on my Raspberry Pi (sure - port forwarded). The build-in firmware update does not always picks the newest releases but this is really minor (not at all) problem.

DHCP - it works as expected but does not allow you to name the assigned IP... as result my Android devices appear as MAC addresses only which is a bit inconvenient.

Overall - excellent router but do not expect too much.

ASUS RT-N56U official web page