New router - £200

[ShivP]

Hi,

I'm looking at purchasing a tip top router for home at around £200. I've been looking at Netgear's Nighthawks and the Linksys WRT 1900AC which I've heard are supposed to be quite good. The issue is currently we have 4 poor routers around the house, and the house is quite long but not tall, so we don't have a router that can provide signal all the way around. We'd prefer Gigabit obviously and good signal is a must.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Evil Shubunkin]

Didn't like the interface on the Netgear R7000 I tried, too dumbed down.

ASUS RT-AC68U would be my suggestion, followed by the RT-AC87U although you won't benefit much from that over the AC68U as you'd need a 4x4 MIMO card to get the fastest speeds from it, whereas most devices have 2x2 or 3x3 at best which the 68U supports.

Also with ASUS devices, there's Merlin firmware which fixes some issues in the default firmware but there's also another fork that someone is still actively developing which has older wifi drivers that have, apparently, better range than the newer drivers ASUS are using in their firmwares.

However, every building is different so what works well in one instance may be poor in another depending on construction, layout etc.

 

[philip2009]

Does everything have to hinge on wireless coverage? My own home network varies between wired/wireless/Homeplug depending on where the devices are located.

 

[ShivP]

No, it's just for mobile devices. All the PCs are wired

Thanks for the ideas Evil Shubunkin

 

[Nismo]

I have the R7000 and get pretty much 100+Mbps 5GHz coverage everywhere in the house. Most spots I can max out my 152MB VM connection. No issues with any "dumbed down" interface either, but then I've no real need for advanced features and just leave it alone once setup.

This is going from an RT-N56U, itself a great router, that struggled with 5GHz unless you were in the same or next room.