Just got Comcast Xfinity and while the cable modem speed is fine, the wireless range sucks. Just moved into a new house with 2 floors, over 4k sq ft and an acre of land. I need a strong router in the $100-$150 range. Thinking about the Netgear N900 dual band gigabit, but I don’t really know much about wireless router tech.
asus rt-n66u (good custom firmware support if you are into that)
or
asus rt-ac66u (if you care about 802.11ac)
The rt-ac66u comes with a free copy of Win8 at Newegg, if you care about that sort of thing.
I ordered the n66u. Wasn’t sure about the difference between the n66u and ac66u except a huge gap in price.
One supports the new AC wireless standard and one doesn’t. I’ll leave which is which as an exercise for the reader.
Googled AC wireless. Never heard of it before. I’ll probably regret not getting it now since this is for all my home networking/streaming, but I’ve bought and returned too many things this holiday season.
Honestly, you don’t really need it unless your area has a load of wireless networks and your speed is suffering. And yes, it has a high price premium…
I can’t say enough good things about Linksys WRT routers running Tomato third-party firmware.
YES! They seem to be tissue with factory firmware but afterwards they’re bulletproof. I moved into my current place and found out that the current router needs to be reset daily. Frack that. I passed everything through to my tomato Linksys and now we reset twice yearly. Granted only going on a little over a year. Household with 4 people and lots of guests that torrent, and this is an older N router, second gen N before everything became official.
Asus n66u was delivered today (Sunday!) and looks good. Getting 16mbps wifi (using Speedtest.net iphone app) on a 25mbps cable modem at the farthest point from the router, which is where the home theater is.
Edit: Did another test upstairs where the kids are. Pretty crappy 2.76mbps. Was hoping for more, but I guess that limits their ipad usage.
Sounds like a positioning issue to me. Try moving it slightly…
From what I’ve read, AC isn’t finalized yet, and there’s no guarantee that current hardware will support the final spec. Remember how when N was being developed, there were all these pre-draft N, draft N, etc. products? Same situation now.
Wife woke me up this AM with the “You spend thousands of dollars and hours tinkering, yet the internet is down” face.
So apparently it dropped the wifi signal during the night and a reboot fixed it. Hopefully this won’t be a regular thing.
A lot of times this can be solved with a better antenna. You can buy one for 10-15$ and replaces stock.
I believe this model has an internal antenna.
I’m surprised you needed to reboot the Asus. I never need to reboot my n56-u.
Should I just get the 66 instead of the 56 because someday the extra range might come in handy?
Nah. In a year or two you’ll want the AC version anyway.
As a counterpoint, I occasionally have to reboot my 56, but that’s because I tried out its built-in torrent downloader. DO NOT USE IT! Also, the built-in DLNA server will, over a few weeks, cause the router to crawl.
I’m on an older official firmware, too.
I should probably report back that after that initial reboot, it has been rock solid and not rebooted since.
It wasn’t until seeing this thread bumped that I even remembered that I upgraded to the Asus RT-N66U a couple months ago, and put the TomatoUSB firmware on it. It’s been stable enough that I hadn’t even thought about it since first setting it up, whereas my old Linksys would seize up and require a hard reset once every week or two. Performance has been great too, with a consistent 20-24 MB/s on the 5 GHz radio, so I’m very happy with it so far.