I am about to buy a new wifi router for my mom's house and since I don't know much about the current routers available I thought that the Anandtech hive mind might be able to help.
This is what I expect from my new router:
* Security. I guess this is an non-issue. I think WPA2 + a good password should be enough.
* Reliability. (Not disconnect or be unreliable under any normal circumstances (including high load). My benchmark here is my old Apple Time Capsule that I have needed to restart perhaps three times during the last five years.)
* 802.11 b/g/n/ac. Good range on all of those would be nice, since devices of different ages and capabilities are used. Perhaps the most important would be 802.11n 2.4GHz since that might give the best performance through our concrete walls (?). Just guessing.
* Some possibility to extend in a wireless way (WDS?). This might be needed, see below.
* I don't care about usb ports, but some extra ethernet ports would be nice. We don't use any right now.
* Price up to $200. Would rather not spend more unless the improvement is large.
So, basically, I care mostly about reliability and range, and don't think I need any other fancy features.
My mom's house is like a big square box of concrete (walls and, I believe, floor is concrete). There are two floors most living area is on the top floor, but the router is in the corner of the bottom floor, since that is where the fiber comes in. In the first iteration, the router location will not be moved and there will be no repeaters or similar, but it might be needed later on if reception is not good enough.
Our current router is a Netgear WGR614 (802.11g I think). It reaches most of the house but drops off towards the farthest wall on the second floor, and at times you lose reception there. We just switched to fiber (100 down, 10 up) so I thought I'd upgrade the router as well.
Thank you for any help!
This is what I expect from my new router:
* Security. I guess this is an non-issue. I think WPA2 + a good password should be enough.
* Reliability. (Not disconnect or be unreliable under any normal circumstances (including high load). My benchmark here is my old Apple Time Capsule that I have needed to restart perhaps three times during the last five years.)
* 802.11 b/g/n/ac. Good range on all of those would be nice, since devices of different ages and capabilities are used. Perhaps the most important would be 802.11n 2.4GHz since that might give the best performance through our concrete walls (?). Just guessing.
* Some possibility to extend in a wireless way (WDS?). This might be needed, see below.
* I don't care about usb ports, but some extra ethernet ports would be nice. We don't use any right now.
* Price up to $200. Would rather not spend more unless the improvement is large.
So, basically, I care mostly about reliability and range, and don't think I need any other fancy features.
My mom's house is like a big square box of concrete (walls and, I believe, floor is concrete). There are two floors most living area is on the top floor, but the router is in the corner of the bottom floor, since that is where the fiber comes in. In the first iteration, the router location will not be moved and there will be no repeaters or similar, but it might be needed later on if reception is not good enough.
Our current router is a Netgear WGR614 (802.11g I think). It reaches most of the house but drops off towards the farthest wall on the second floor, and at times you lose reception there. We just switched to fiber (100 down, 10 up) so I thought I'd upgrade the router as well.
Thank you for any help!