Asus RT-N15 review

A router doesn’t need all the features under the sun to be worthy of your cash. Indeed, the winner of our last wireless router Labs was the sensible, single-band Draytek Vigor 2110n which combined solid performance with a truckload of features. It’s precisely this niche the Asus RT-N15 attempts to fit into.

Its approach is certainly similar to the no-nonsense Vigor. It’s single band only and instead of pure speed focuses on packing in the features. In some respects it bests our favourite, by including four Gigabit Ethernet ports, where the Vigor only has 10/100 Ethernet.

The admin pages are sensibly laid out and very easy to understand – unusual in the drab world of wireless routers – and better still hide a number of useful settings. There’s simple bandwidth management, allowing you to quickly prioritise generic gaming, VOIP, FTP and “internet application” traffic. You can also use the router as a wireless bridge, and switching between access point, router and gateway modes is a very straightforward process.

Alas, the RT-N15 lacks a USB port for sharing storage across the network, which is disappointing. The aforementioned Vigor’s has one and supports not only storage sharing, but also printer and broadband dongle sharing.

Performance is below par too, although at close quarters its shortcomings weren’t particularly obvious. We hooked up our source PC to one of the router’s Gigabit ports and transferred a series of small and large files back and forth over wireless to a laptop equipped with Intel’s WiFi Link 5300 802.11n chip.

The RT-N15 peaked at 102Mbits/sec when downloading files, and averaged 73Mbits/sec; uploading the same files saw it peaking at 186Mbits/sec and averaging 75Mbits/sec. That puts it up there with the best single-band routers we’ve seen – faster than the Draytek, in fact.

Alas, when you start to move any distance away from it, things take turn for the worse. In our long-range test, 30m away from the router, those promising speeds fell dramatically, returning an average download speed of 25Mbits/sec (peaking at 33Mbits/sec) and an average upload speed of 13Mbits/sec (peaking at 17Mbits/sec).

This would be disappointing, but acceptable, in a bargain-basement router, but the fact that the cheapest price for the RT-N15 is £70 exc VAT should put most potential purchasers off.

Notwithstanding the useful features and the excellent ease of use, this router costs too much and isn’t fast enough at range. We’d advise you consider spending a touch more and purchase a Draytek Vigor 2110n instead.