Do you live in a condo/apartment with competing wifi? Do you plan to upgrade some/any devices like phone/tablet at some point? If so, 5.8 GHz AC will help greatly. Might as well make the jump to AC now.
Ok this is driving me crazy. When my wife opens her work laptop, it shuts down my entire home network. Every. Time. It works again after a manual reset. I’m serious, and I know it sounds ridiculous.
For awhile she had a working strategy to turn off wi-fi before she left work (e.g. use airplane mode). Then when she opened her laptop at home, she could start wifi, and it wouldn’t destroy the network. This no longer works. She starts wi-fi, and the network dies.
I’ve tried having her the only device on the 2.4 network. Her IT department says something along the lines of “yes, our Dell laptops have crappy network wi-fi. Sorry”.
I use the ISP router-modem and a wi-fi extender. It’s not the extender as it stays connected but the internet drops. The issue happens if connecting through the extender or directly to the modem’s wifi.
Clearly I could bypass the modem and use a seperate router, but I’d rather save the cost and complexity. Any other suggestions on the laptop-end or network administration side?
Weird. And no, no suggestions other than putting the ISP router in bridge mode and blowing some cash on a real router.
What if she turns off wi-fi on her laptop and connects directly to router via an ethernet cable? That might help isolate the problem.
Is her laptop looking for a VPN connection? My ASUS would die entirely if my work Mac tried to connect to the VPN with an expired token. Good times.
Have you tried taking it to a voodoo priestess? It may have been cursed by the spirits.
It probably is something like that, since she works at a hospital and presumably IT has some security requirements or check-in happening. As a non-admin of the laptop it seems there isn’t much we/I can do.
Could try wired I suppose, but it’s not very practical since she works at our table in the evenings.
Helium?
Note, though, that Wirecutter separates their single-router and mesh comparisons, which is a shame because if you’re in a decent-sized home I think they’re competing for the same usage. FWIW, I replaced a Netgear Nighthawk with an Orbi and in a 2,800 sq foot home the difference is dramatic. Full, fast coverage throughout, and I have a Tivo mini wired to the extender that doesn’t even support wireless transmission – you’re supposed to use it with Ethernet or powerline networking – that’s rock solid on the extender. (Wirecutter does recommend the Orbi for mesh, at least, but they should at least link it off the regular router page.)
And I’ve been running the Orbi for 25 months and have NEVER had to reset it. I can’t say that about any other router I’ve ever owned.
(Not related to @Scott123’s bizarre problem, just to being surprised by Wirecutter’s recommendation.)
I have the same kind of joy with the Orbi. Two level house that for various reason is tough for wireless and I use to chase the latest greatest router and access point/extender at least once a year. Got an Orbi and just works with a house filled with wireless devices. Even get full speeds in a sunroom off the back of the house on a different level.
Ditto on the Orbi. Main unit is in basement corner. One satellite in middle of main floor. I don’t even know if I’m using the third. I don’t need it for inside the house at all. I have a 1+ acre lot and get a good connection in my yard.
I think at some point people decided that having a whole load of big external antennas was a really good way to advertise how powerful your WiFi was. Most higher end enterprise grade WiFi points use internal antennas to blend into building decor, but the average home user paying more than bare minimum for a router is probably getting lumped in as an ‘enthusiast’ user, so - big crazy antennas.
Also, WiFi 4, 5, and 6 all started using spatial streams to dramatically improve speed with more antennas per frequency - 3, 4, and 8 as their respective maxima. Theoretically you could get a WiFi 6 router with 16 antennas, 8 per frequency.
Yeah some of the new routers are crazy looking. I mean I have an Asus with 4 antennas and usually one or two collapse over time. Look at this thing with 8, they’d always be falling down.
Whelp I am not up on a Synology router. I really, really like the interface on this thing. It has a lot of stuff that I am not using just yet, but so far my only challenging is slowly discovering the which devices I had on my old netgear band 2.4, since Synology manages them both under the same name which seems… nice so far aside from my other devices needing to get the joined name.
I got back a router I gave my sister, all the antenna covers were gone. Stupid cats…
RT2600AC
There are a lot of options, capabilities here but so far, Iv’e got it up and running just like every other router I’ve had without any huge amounts of study. I am sure when I spend more time looking at options I will discover more cool settings, but for now, my stuff is on the net and password protected within an hour and only that long because I optioned for 2.4 and 5.0 to have the same SSID and let the router pick.
I recommend one of these
@robc04 @JeffL @Editer - are you guys using the AC2200 or the AC3000 Orbi? I’m trying to decide if I should get the AC3000 2 pack, or the AC2200 3 pack. I don’t know if there is much difference between them beyond the speed being a little better on the AC3000, which I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of anyways.
I’ve been trying the ASUS AImesh stuff with 2 RT-AC68U routers and it is always suffering minor drops, which is extremely annoying. I’d already had one router so it was worth a shot, but since I work from home I think I will go insane if I keep using it.