The long awaited ASUS WL-700gE has appeared on the Official ASUS Web Page. Also released is a page about an upcoming ASUS WL-500g Premium.

The ASUS WL-700gE has been reported for sale in South East Asia for some time now, but with the appearence on the official web page, there might be hope for a soon-to-come European and US release as well.

For thoose who might not know, the ASUS WL-700gE is a linux based router with build-on 160GB 3.5" IDE harddrive, that can be used for a networked drive (or NAS) - and the firmware even includes a "Download Master" which can download files from web, ftp and even Bittorrent.

The WL-500g Premium seems to be a lower-range equivalent to the WL-700gE, without the featured harddrive, but with the possibility to add an external USB2.0 Storage device to obtain the same features as its Big Brother.

The WL-700gE is a Broadcom based platform running Linux, leaving hopes for future support of the device in OpenWrt. In order to get full OpenWrt support for the device, the OpenWrt developers need a specimen of the router for creating the binary image fitting the hardware. Check out the OpenWrt Donations page, if you would like to contribute. You can also feel free to donate some euros to the webmaster of this page using the donation button on the right hand side of the screen, so that I can start developing tutorials based on this new exiting hardware.

WL-500g Premium	WL-700gE