Recommend me a rooster
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My inlaws have terrible wifi. It works in the room with the router, but as soon as you try to access it further away you get one bar and regular disconnects. Their last router was much better, so it's not that they have thick walls that block 802.11, I think their Virgin router must just be weaksauce. I want to get them a replacement for Christmas
So I'm looking for a consumer grade router, £50-100 price range, with a good, strong signal. They're currently using the one that came with their Virgin FTTH connection, don't know if that restricts the options or if the connection is a normal WAN, or even if the Virgin one will need to be kept as a modem with wifi disabled and the router used as the wireless AP. Give me your recommendations
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Well, my family had a similar issue with our router, and my dad finally got fed up and said "find us a router that will cover our whole house. I don't care how much it costs." So I went out and got a Netgear Nighthawk X6. It's considerably higher than your price range, but I have nearly zero issues with it anywhere inside or near our house. I can connect to it inside my car parked on the street through the brick face of our house, as well as the entire distance of our house and front yard, and i can even connect to it from across the street and three houses down. If you're willing to spend an extra... 70 pounds, I think it is?... the Nighthawk X6 would almost certainly solve your signal strength issues.
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Netgear R8000 Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band Gigabit Wireless Router review: Lots of price pain for only a little gain
Despite some impressive specs and an extremely high price, the new Netgear R8000 Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band Gigabit Wireless Router is only about as good as a router costing two-third of its price. Here's CNET's full review.
Even when it's working well, the Netgear R8000 Nighthawk X6 AC3200 Tri-Band Gigabit Wireless Router has nothing to justify its expensive price tag
CNet don't seem too keen, and I don't think I can stretch to almost twice my budget. Might be doable if I need to, though
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the connection is a normal WAN
This. You put your router downstream of theirs, and consider that to be just equipment that the ISP manages.
My inlaws have terrible wifi. It works in the room with the router, but as soon as you try to access it further away you get one bar and regular disconnects.
You might need to consider going to using powerline networking. That was how we solved our problems with the heavy internal walls in our house; despite having bought very powerful routers before, the iron-rich clay that the Edwardians used for their bricks was more than a match for it. A powerline device (once I'd managed to get it configured correctly to act as a wifi repeater at the far end) has been an absolutely wonderful improvement, and the price is around the sort for range you're talking about too IIRC. (You could also just run cabling, but that's way more of a PITA.)
In signal terms, you'd be going around and not through.
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powerline networking
Tried that, FIL unplugged it because he didn't know what it was Now he has no idea where the Belkin I bought them as a repeater is. Every time I go there I have to try and patch up the wireless extender that he's attempted to mess with, hence my desire for "I've replaced the box in the living room. Don't touch it".
In signal terms, you'd be going around and not through
Their last ISP (before I met my wife) provided one that you could reach at the end of the garden, so I know it is possible to pump out enough wattage to get through the walls. Thinking about it, this might have been 802.11G, or 2.4GHz only, which might have made the difference
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2.4GHz gives significantly more range than 5GHz, however the band is more cluttered.
I've had good experiences with my asus router (RT-N66U, if I remember correctly. It's at home). But I live in an appartment and I've never tried further than the bedroom, ~8 meters away. Signal strength there is significantly better than the cisco e2000 (IIRC again) I had before.
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this is the router i use myself: http://smile.amazon.com/RT-N16-Wireless-N-Maximum-Performance-single/dp/B00387G6R8/
works wonderfully now that i flashed DDWRT to it to get rid of that "consumer grade" web management interface.
i haven't had any connectivity issues with it at the default tx strength, and i can turn the tx up another 50dB if needed.
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Fecking price differences. $68 equates to... over £100. Isn't that exchange rate the wrong way round?
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. $68 equates to... over £100.
uhh... nooo it doesn't it's about 61 euro or 40 something pounds....
.... damn pricegouging
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uhh... nooo it doesn't
too subtle for you?
Looking at this one
Anyone have any experience? Seems like it would do the job and the top few reviews all talk about it being better than the Virgin router
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@Jaloopa: does the router need 5GHz, or is 2.4GHz sufficient? Do the inlaws need to be able to manage it to make changes, or is something fire and forget sufficient?
If the answer is 2.4GHz, fire and forget, I would recommend http://routerboard.com/RB951G-2HnD for a smaller house (assuming the router is fairly centrally located, coverage of 1000-1500 sq ft is typical for that model). Or http://routerboard.com/RB2011UiAS-2HnD-IN for an extra 4dBm of antenna gain which should cover more into the 2500-3000 sq ft range (4dB = a little more than double the signal strength).
Configuration wise, the "Quick Set" option it has works fairly well for normal "simple" residential networks. You can Belgium things up in a hurry if you're trying to use it for anything more complicated than that, but it's also pretty powerful from a standpoint of doing more complicated things (assuming the person doing the configuration understands networking and can make sense of MikroTik's documentation on how to configure things).
Overall, I'd summarize MikroTik's offerings as "business grade hardware, residential grade pricing, blakeyrant worthy configuration". But if you're doing simple stuff with it, or if you work with it all the time, it's really not that bad. And, again, to emphasize: they do not have 5GHz APs available at this time -- ETA: soon(tm)
Filed under: Stockholm syndrome
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Linksys EA6500.
http://www.linksys.com/us/P-EA6500-RM-Linksys/p/P-EA6500-RM/?gclid=CKLeyd6D1MkCFQEIaQod2SkGcQ
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We use a similar model to that ASUS at my current office (predates my hire, so I didn't get to pimp my usual options :'( )
Coverage is fine, configurability is the standard web page most of those types of routers use. To some extent it's too "dumbed down" for my preferences, but at least it's not as far toward "locking you out of changes unless you use their cloud service" as the Belkin Linksys stuff is.
Edited to clarify after I saw @rc4's recommendation: Any current Linksys router will be very limited in what you can configure unless you have a working Internet connection. Belkin has gone all-in on the "Cloud Configuration" since purchasing the Linksys brand. As a result, I can no longer recommend their routers (though the hardware quality is still pretty good, as far as I have seen).
Of course, none of that helps when the schmuck that set up your routers on each floor configured them as WDS repeaters off of the main floor, but that's a different rant
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@Jaloopa: does the router need 5GHz, or is 2.4GHz sufficient? Do the inlaws need to be able to manage it to make changes, or is something fire and forget sufficient?
I doubt they have any devices that only work on 5GHz, but I don't know how crowded the channels are around there. Configuration wise, I'd probably do whatever setup was needed and leave it. The only management after that would be using the SSID and password to connect any new devices to the network. Anything that claims to be using a "fully featured router OS" is probably far more than they need
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Looking at this one
hmm... well it's the ASUS brand and they do make good kit
ddwrt lists that router as supported so if the standard web interface annoys you with being dumberd sown (as it did for me) you can replace it. several otehr WRT firmwares list support for asus kit so you might be able to use them if DDWRT does not appeal.
good price too. looks like the current gen kit is cheaper than the next gen kit.
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Belkin
Shit, I didn't realize...I looked at the specs a while ago and it seemed like it would be pretty decent, especially with 802.11ac. Let me rethink my recommendation...
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if the standard web interface annoys you with being dumberd sown (as it did for me) you can replace it
As long as it lets me set the SSID and password to what they already use, and do whatever other basic things will prevent a drive by attack, I'm not too fussed about the software. I'll hopefully never touch it again once it's set up
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@accalia said:
if the standard web interface annoys you with being dumberd sown (as it did for me) you can replace it
As long as it lets me set the SSID and password to what they already use, and do whatever other basic things will prevent a drive by attack, I'm not too fussed about the software. I'll hopefully never touch it again once it's set up
then you should be good with stock. asus hasn't given into this whole "you must login to our webservice to configure this router" insanity.
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Yeah, the MT stuff all runs the same configuration firmware regardless of how powerful the hardware really is. I really like it for "hardcore user" deploys, because you can do simple bandwidth queueing so that @ben_lubar's dwarf fortress video uploads don't keep the other people in the house from playing their FPS games, etc.
But for a home user, all the settings are pretty much overkill. At least their QuickSet utility actually covers the basic case fairly well. From the home user standpoint, the biggest selling point is the very high power (1000mW - 30dBm) radios in the units. Borderline illegal in FCC jurisdiction, actually, but I've never heard of the FCC going after someone for their home router. And probably 2x (or better) the transmit power of other residential routers.
Plus, not that it's much of a selling point but, the hardware is more robust than the typical residential router. I'm going on 4 years with my RB911 at home; standard residential routers start going squirrely (requiring constant reboots and eventually dying) within 18 months of my usage patterns.
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...high power (1000mW - 30dBm) radios in the units. Borderline illegal in FCC jurisdiction
No. 30dBm (1W) is 100% A-OK, as long as you respect the 5GHz lower-power carve outs. http://www.afar.net/tutorials/fcc-rules or, https://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Engineering_Technology/Documents/bulletins/oet63/oet63rev.pdf for the Tx power limits and, for the recently-changed carve-outs: http://www.revolutionwifi.net/revolutionwifi/2014/04/impact-of-fcc-5-ghz-u-nii-report-order.html.
If the router uses Linux, it's trivial for a manufacturer to make it respect the Tx power reduction stuff.
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I sit corrected.
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I have ordered the ASUS. You may now proceed to derail this topic. Thank you for your patience
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Verified my asus is indeed the RT-N66U. One note: I remember when I first got mine it had the web firewall enabled; this significantly hurts your unencrypted web speeds. If you don't use URL or keyword filtering you'll want to turn it off.
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Well, since you've said you're satisfied with your solution, I think I'll go ahead and say it:
Virgin router
I think perhaps the solution involves
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I have one of these in my router table:
Then I have these for handheld use:
Wrong kind of router? Wrong forum? Shit. Never mind then. Most consumer grade network routers are
. Good luck.
Filed under: I made that joke almost entirely for my own benefit, because I used to be active over at www.routerforums.com and there were constantly people coming in there asking for recommendations for networking routers.
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What grouter would you recommend?
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A grout float is a grout float, and grouting sucks. If at all possible, get one of these to help:
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I've got one (or the Best Buy flavor of it which IIRC is exactly the same).
I've been pretty impressed - it doesn't quite stretch all the way from the basement to the second floor (it's a little iffy up there), but other than that the router has been outstanding. Way better than my last one.
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hmm... well it's the ASUS brand and they do make good kit
I had an Asus router once. It would randomly switch its language to Taiwanese. And truth be told, the "English" option wasn't even English to being with...
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Thermo Plastic Resin handles
Why is the handle in Thermo Plastic?
Because [spoiler]Resins[/spoiler]
Pushing the joke beyond breaking ...
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Depending on which model of router they had, why not get VM to try sending a newer one out?
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00387G6R8?pldnSite=1
Amazon.com
