The RB493G has nine Gigabit ethernet ports, three miniPCI slots, and a switch chip, so the ethernet ports 2-9 can be grouped together to make it act as a switch.

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.