I was away over the weekend spending some time in Langkawi with the Integricity family and when I returned home on Sunday I noticed that my ASUS RT-N16 router was completely dead. First thing that came to my mind was to head over to 1Utama (which I was heading to anyway for some lunch) and pick up a router.
A quick search on Google as well as remembering that I read a post on Gareth’s blog about a fancy router which he had gotten, I decided to zoom in on the ASUS RT-AC68U. Of course his blog did mention that his firmware was causing him to get disconnected and he opted for a third party firmware instead. I preferred the standard OEM way and went on Lowyat to check out if there were any reviews about this router. Came across the post and decided to leave a comment there.
As the response was favourable, I decided to go ahead with that. The first shop I stopped at 1Utama was located at the lower ground floor at the pathway between the old wing and the new wing. They didn’t have it in stock at the moment so I decided to head upstairs to the old wing where there is an IT store which did have it in stock. Price listed was RM999 which was exorbitant. Decided against purchasing it then.
Yesterday I headed to Digital Mall in section 14 and bought it from Compu-Zone (1st floor in Digital Mall), my usual PC shop where I normally get my PC parts from. Total cost was RM745 after a discount and even got my credit card charges waived.
Brought the router back home and quickly set it up and setting it up was very easy. What wasn’t easy was trying to detect back my old Western Digital Live Book which I had previously set it on a fixed IP but now with the router change, it wasn’t detecting it anymore. A quick reset (reseting it doesn’t erase the data) and it was back on my network and my Mac machines can easily run time machine back on it.
At the moment, it is still at it’s early stages, but running my PLEX server and having media played on my iPad is as seamless as ever. No jerking issues detected at all as well. One of the reasons why I decided to go with this router is that I didn’t set up a wired network connection around my house so I am very much reliant on wireless technology to stream my movies and tv series via PLEX. Although the new wireless protocol AC is pretty much new, Apple should be releasing their newer devices with AC wifi available (fingers crossed for the iPhone 6).
I noticed that there are a lot of settings now available with the new router so I will probably spend the week Googling up what those networking terms mean and see how I can better secure my home network.
