You guys could get Eero so easily but I am surprised none of you considered it. Is it because of cost? I had to import it - shipping and taxes… and I didn’t regret it one bit.
I considered Eero, but Orbi had better speeds and more sophisticated router features than Eero when i was buying. Wirecutter covers some of the details. Plus for my own purposes (hanging a very speed-sensitive streaming device off the satellite’s wired connection), the fact that the Orbi uses a dedicated channel rather than sharing Wi-Fi bandwidth for communication between stations was key. Eero is certainly good, not negating that, but for my own situation Orbi’s feature set works better.
As of fairly recently, Asus routers work in mesh mode, and apparently do a pretty great job. So if you have an old but not ancient Asus router lying around you could buy a second one and save a bunch of money.
I made the decision to spend too much money on an Orbi for our small house so that I wouldn’t need ever need to worry about slowness or rebooting the thing.
It was like putting out a kitchen fire with a fire house. Totally overkill, but I don’t regret it one bit. I’ve never had to touch it, and I get full speeds from one end of the house to the other. 100% worth it.
There are times that living in a tiny condo really pays off. One standard wifi router, full coverage everywhere.
Was just at Fry’s and saw a monster router for $399. Admittedly, it was business-class, but my god.
Bah. Those are just fugly. The cornucopia of extra options exposed in router SOFTWARE is what speaks to me. Quite happy with my custom firmware on my Nighthawk.
For those with Orbi setups, I’m thinking of going this route. Had anyone tried it with wired backhaul and if so how stable is it?
I have not tried it with a wired backhaul because have no need. My 2000 square foot house is not too gigantic so wireless backhaul works very reliably.
The Orbi is not cheap but is really great.
Diego
Is it even an option now? It wasn’t before
Apparently yes
Yeah, they added it. But I have a Tivo Mini – a device that’s only supposed to work with wired Ethernet or powerline Ethernet and that was indeed unreliable connected to an 802.11ac bridge – working rock solid with the Orbi over wireless. Zero glitches. So I’ve had no need to even investigate that.
I just upgraded my n66u or whatevs to the ac86u and an ac68 adapter because my son’s bedroom isn’t wired… damn if it isn’t pretty freakin fast… I’ve been meaning to upgrade AC for awhile, but most of my house is wired with CAT6.
Seems the best spot to drop this alert:
Hi all. I need router advice. I have a rather old Cisco router that seems really hot lately, needs to be rebooted constantly, and seemingly gives me 2.2 max download speed despite a much better internet package.
I think it is time for an upgrade. I’ve read that Nighthawk is good, but there are a million models. The R7000 one seems to have got the attention of Wirecutter. Wifi matters, but I have wired connections to all but one place that counts (my PC with relying on a very long cable along the floor for now sadly). It is a 2k sq ft rectangular home with the internet coming in on one end. There are several phones and iPads connected usually. I’d like to have wifi for the Switch that doesn’t require standing over the router.
So all that said, any advice? Should I just get the Nighthawk R7000?
Others will have better knowledge regarding large area coverage, but I can tell you that I’ve had good results with a DLink AC1900. It’s in an office building, 3 large rooms and 4 smaller offices…not sure of the exact square footage. Only 4 wired connectors so you’ll need a hub if you have more devices on wires. No trouble with somewhere from six to a couple of dozen wireless devices connected, although we typically aren’t doing high-load stuff like streaming video.
I currently run the R7000P in a 2100 sq ft 2 floor house. It’s placed on 1st floor in the middle of the house, and my whole house gets great speed. I’m running at 75% power for 2.4 GHz and 100% for 5 GHz.
So @Chaplin, I think it’ll be fine for you. 100% 2.4GHz should reach from one end of your house to the other.
Hi, anyone recently researched mesh options vs higher-end routers? My ISP-provided router is not in an ideal location, but it’s too ugly to move into my family room where there’s an ethernet jack. Plus then it’ll have lower reception at the front of the house. Does buying a single mesh device like Google make sense? I recall the advantage of mesh vs a basic extender is that the extender runs at half speed. Thoughts welcome.
Wirecutter still recommends the Orbi. I bought it two years ago and find it VERY solid and a good balance of features vs ease. Does exactly what it’s supposed to without needing a cloud account etc.
Diego
Is Orbi actually a mesh though? I know they said they planned to make it into one, but at least last time I checked my parents’ setup, it was still a hub and spoke model. A very good one, especially for low-tech people, but not as extendable as a true mesh.