The RB493G has nine Gigabit ethernet ports, three miniPCI slots, and two switch chips, so the ethernet ports can be connected together in two switch groups for wire speed throughput.

The RB493G also has a USB 2.0 port and a microSD card slot for adding more storage or a 3G USB modem for backup connectivity.

The heart of this device is a high performance Atheros AR7161 CPU and it features 256MB of built in RAM. RB493G includes RouterOS – the operating system, which will turn this powerful system into a highly sophisticated router, firewall or bandwidth manager.