No, I haven't been tricked by this garbage.
No, I haven't been tricked by this garbage.
I was checking out a fresh router for my new home recently. For about five years now, my Asus RT-N66U has performed really well (or so I thought). I opted for something more budget-friendly, thinking about the costs of moving and buying furniture. Eventually, I chose the Asus RT-AC1200 because AC is becoming the norm, and it seemed like a smart upgrade. My plan was to use the AC1200 as my main router and repurpose the N66U as a 5GHz repeater for streaming. I didn’t realize that Asus still made networking gear with ports supporting both 10/100Mbps and gigabit speeds, both for local and wide area networks. It only became clear when I dug deeper into their specs online—those ports were clearly limited to gigabit speeds. I was surprised to find that in 2016, Asus was still promoting routers with 100Mbps capabilities, not just for LAN but also for WAN. I get the idea that companies tailor tech to fit different budgets, but at that time, gigabit ports on consumer devices hadn’t really arrived yet. This hardware won’t match the advertised speeds on the box, except maybe for wireless devices talking directly to each other through it. You’d hope your WAN could handle enough for your AC wireless traffic, especially compared to LAN. A valuable lesson learned! Always read the fine print—don’t let a duck’s voice fool you.
Many budget audio systems featured 100 Mbit ports. The negative feedback likely damaged the brand more than the minor material savings, though most users probably don’t even notice it.
Need to understand the details, there are quite a few AC routers that only have 100Mbit WAN and LAN ports. Most folks don’t really mind—they just want quicker Wi-Fi speeds, which makes it easy for manufacturers to overlook other factors. I checked out several wireless routers from Netgear and TP-Link that made the same poor choice.
Very few regular users can consistently reach 100mbps. This release dates from 2012, and I can't confirm they haven’t improved further. I don’t perceive a major issue here.
I also love my extra Wi-Fi setup on the Nighthawk X4S for my small one-bedroom space. I get internet from my car’s parking area, which works well since LTE isn’t very stable there lol