ASUS RT-AC51U Dual-Band AC750 Wireless Router - 733 Mbps High Speed WiFi, USB Port for File Sharing & Printer - Perfect for Home Office & Online Gaming

When you spend $90 for a router (instead of $20 for the typical one these days), you expect more, and indeed this one gives more. I bought it as a VPN router since ASUS is one of the few brands that supports both VPN Client and Server modes out of the box (OpenVPN as well as older protocols such as PPTP and L2TP that are not much used these days).Other differences from the cheaper routers:1. Faster dual CPU. It really does make a difference especially when you're using VPN or have more than a couple of connections going. (A cheap router I downloaded Tomato firmware onto for VPN was CPU-limited to only about 1/4 of the top speed I could get out of this ASUS router, which is definitely noticeable.)2. Dual band 2.4 and 5.8 GHz and the ability to have multiple guest networks on each of those bands (I think you can get as many as 8 different SSIDs out of this one router if you really wanted to (though why you would is another question).3. Dual WAN support (if you really can't be down or need higher bandwidth, you can subscribe to 2 different ISPs and have the router automatically load share between the two).4. USB 3.0 AND USB 2.0 interfaces for hard drive and printer respectively, though also supports Mobile 3G/4G dongles, with built-in software to share the above via the network.5. A very complete user interface.6. For nerd types, a nice Android or iOS App that lets you do some basic configuration and monitoring of the router from your smartphone.There are a couple of negatives:- Documentation is very sparse. I was looking for a VPN router and even though ASUS has a very good selection, you'd never guess that from browsing their website, where it's hardly even mentioned as a feature except incidentally (you certainly can't search for routers that support it).- The so-called "full manual" that comes on the CD is very barebones, covering perhaps 20% of the functionality of the modem (the QuickStart Guide is even sparser). So the only way to know about and use the advanced features is to (a) guess that they exist before you buy the modem (b) check out all the options on the web interface once you have the modem and (c) already know what all the features mean and what they do.- The web interface is buggy. The "live" performance screen does not update and even worse if you click on it, it will log you off and you will have to log on again to the router. The VPN Client tab is similarly buggy and will often cause the web interface to hang completely requiring the router to be rebooted. And this was after I updated the firmware to the latest version. Once you set it up, though, it seems to be stable.- Minor quibble but who on earth decided to put tiny dark grey lettering against a black background with indecipherable icons to indicate what the indicate lights mean?! You need a flashlight and a magnifying glass (and some imagination to translate the icons into text). Why not just "Internet" "LAN" "WAN" "WiFi" etc., in nice white lettering against the dark background??