I bet you have a router. I bet yours, like mine, is hidden behind a shelf or a TV or something that looks more interesting so your internet can flow wirelessly about the house without a nasty eyesore. Ours is actually so boring that it could put you to sleep just by looking at it.
So when ASUS launched the RT-N56U and told me that it was stylish and sexy, I was unconvinced. These qualities are, I think, something that a laptop always gets, or a tablet PC, not a router. Routers have long since been relegated to the Design Bin, ignored by the creative and artistic as a simple tool and nothing more.
Well, take a look at this pic and tell me that it doesn’t look like it has completely and utterly revised your ideas of router looks? It is verrrry pretty indeed. If this were a woman, she’d be a supermodel with her own talk show and TV series, complete with adoring fans and style icon status. This is a router you can put on display.
The thing is, unlike many good looking things, this isn’t just about the surface, there is quite a hefty raft of features seething under the surface too. You get five Gigabit Ethernet ports, two USB ports, plsu dual-band 802.11a,b,g and n. Enough connectivity to make an octopus happy.
The RT-56U can run two wi-fi networks simultaneously – a very handy feature for working parents – and it has two antenna for 2.4GHz, three for 5GHz and Ai Radar to assist with signal boosting and range magnification.
You can also configure the RT-56U quite extensively, making it very customisable and adaptable to your unique working or living situations. In fact, I would hazard that this particular router would be ideal for a smaller business as it offers the right features for excellent connectivity and manageability.
You can find quite a few in-depth reviews of the RT-N56U online and it has received some excellent results. Trusted Reviews gave it 9/10 in every single category – an achievement worth noting if you’re on the prowl for a decent router.
Oh, and parents of teens will really appreciate the feature that allows you to set time-restricted URL filtering so that they can’t access the internet, tweet excessively or live on Facebook instead of doing their homework. It’s pure genius. In fact, I happen to know of one home where this very feature has been used to great effect.
Let’s just say that the teen in question is actually washing the dishes now…
Rolling in at around £99, depending on where you happen to be looking for it, this is not the cheapest router in the world, but it certainly does sit up there as one feature-rich and styling slice of tech.