Difference between £70 and £130 routers

drakioned · 9 May 2013 at 17:52

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone can explain to me why some routers £50 more than others.

I understand that there's some differences between 2.4ghz / 5ghz support, single antenna vs 3 antenna, but there's plenty of products that support 5ghz and 3 antenna and there's still a big gap between them.

i.e.
Netgear WNDR4000 Wireless-N N750 Wireless Dual Band Cable Router (£129.98)

TP-Link 450Mbps N750 Dual Band Wireless Gigabit Router (TL-WDR4300) (£89.99)

Edimax BR-6675ND N750 Concurrent Dual Band Gigabit Cable Router (£76.99)

What exactly are you paying for between the £77 and the £130 one?

KIA · 9 May 2013 at 20:36

Some might route traffic faster than others. Have a look for reviews at smallnetbuilder.

Cycrow · 10 May 2013 at 16:41

theres also more to a router than the wireless it has on it

drakioned · 10 May 2013 at 16:45

well, I get that they have a different amount of RAM and different speed of CPU and such, but what is the practical effect of this?

i.e. would I see 50mbps with one and 51mbps with another? or 130ms ping with one and 140ms ping with another?

Cycrow · 10 May 2013 at 17:06

they might have different features on them, like QoS, VPN's, Different firmware upgrades, Firewall settings, etc

plus some might be able to handle more connections, or route traffic more efficiently

Werewolf · 10 May 2013 at 17:36

Less ram = can't necessarily cope with a large number of connections as well - same with CPU speed.
Lower CPU speed can impact LAN>WAN/WAN/LAN throughput.
Cheaper routers might only have one radio chip doing both frequencies.
Cheaper routers might not have things like print/file server capabilities (for example the Asus N66U can act as a print/file server, have a modem dongle attatched to give backup internet in the event of the normal modem going offline).

Smallnetbuilder has some very useful reviews of routers, including things like how many connections they can cope with, the maximum throughput from the WAN to LAN, and how it's affected under different conditions (IE is it slowed by using wireless at the same time, or by heavy LAN traffic).