Home Network Upgrade

[Iceman]

Hi folks, I hope you are all doing well. While I haven't posted in a while I always remember where the best place on the internet is for good tech advice ... right here on this forum. So ...

In 2008 I bought 2 D-Link DIR-655 routers. I set one up with WIFI at the cable inlet to the house as the main router. I set the other up with WIFI on the other side of the house as an access point. So, my current home configuration is several Cat-6 lines with two WIFI hot spots. It has worked well because using a WIFI port on the other side of the house yields a very poor connection. I can just pick the WIFI I'm closest too and get good reception.

Fast forward 8 years. Both of the routers are starting to flake out. I'm sure they are getting close to their useful life. I am ready to replace them ...

So, I want a new solution with these requirements:
1) Good WIFI access regardless of where in the house I'm at
2) At least 3 ports for CAT-6 cable connections ...
3) Setup/configuration must be fairly simple. I'm well past the point of interest in being a home network guru ...

Suggestions? Advice? Routers? Access points? Range Extenders?


Thanks!
Ice out ...

[Herculosis]

Hi Ice,

Long time...

I'm certainly not the most qualified techie here, but I'll throw in my 2 cents. In the last 2 years or so, I went thru 3 Netgear dual-band routers at about $100ish a piece. All worked pretty well and then just died. I always loved Netgear, but now won't be buying 'em anymore. During each one's tenure, they still also needed to be reset maybe once a week or so.

A couple months ago, I bought this one:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/linksys-802 ... Id=2074009

Kinda pricey, but it works awesome. Hasn't needed to even be reset yet. Not sure what your complete setup looks like, but for me I put the cable modem and this router by the main family TV. I can then plug the TV (smart) directly into the box for Netflix and don't starve the bandwidth. Still, my two daughters regularly will have Netflix going simultaneously on separate TVs via wifi, and we don't seem to ever notice any kind of slowdown. Router is fairly centrally located in the house, but we get excellent reception throughout, and even outside in the yard. I think the 3 antennas really helps that. Even if you get weak signal somewhere, just moving those around can really help.

Setup and configuration is really trivial on pretty much all brands these days. They generally come already secured with reasonable passwords written on the router itself. And, speed is dramatically faster over wifi than it was back in '08. If it was me, I'd certainly try something like this by itself first. Then add another access point if absolutely needed or at least try to locate it more centrally if the signal doesn't reach everywhere.

[Krom]

Before I built my current router I was using an Asus RT-AC66U and I was perfectly satisfied with it, but now I'm only using it in wifi access point mode. I used it for a solid year and a half and only rebooted it for the occasional firmware update, so I never had any lockups or issues that required a reboot. Since it has been running in access point mode, I haven't rebooted it at all in the last 6 months and it is still working perfectly fine. There are newer routers now out in its family, but generally I say stick to the ones with 3 external antennas for the best balance of price/performance/range.

The router I'm using now is an actual desktop class Intel i7-2700k computer with 16 GB of RAM, an old 80 GB SSD, and two Intel gigabit LAN cards running a FreeBSD based router OS. But I have an excuse for using something so absurdly powerful, because my internet is faster than your internet:

[Iceman]

Dayum, yes it is

[sdfgeoff]

Aww. You're something like 50 times faster.

My experience has been: cheap routers are cheap routers. I've tried various ones picked up from various places, and invariably they've had to be reset every couple of weeks.

[fliptw]

still using my wrt54gl.