Virgin & router advice

Soldato
Joined
25 Jan 2003
Posts
9,497
Hi All,

Having had virgin a good few years ago now, the speeds were good, but wifi coverage in the house was rubbish. So i got rid! Then i read that the superhub was terrible! We had since moved to BT and their mesh system since the kids kept moaning about the wifi in the house (i'm sure i'm not the only one who has this problem!) but the mesh discs haven't been the solution i had hoped for, and infact has been worse than virgin (and double the price!) so i have cancelled BT and decieded to move back to virgin but get my own router.

I know there is some fairly advanced solutions on the market and for all budgets, but in my house (3 bed semi - which my IT department said i shouldn't need mesh discs to get a decent wifi signal, but a decent router!), i have running:

Old PC as a plex media server
PS4 and Xbox
Another PC for the kids
Personal laptop and work laptop
TV with various streaming services
mobile phones etc

so we need a decent wifi signal, but nothing super weapons grade. Ive been looking at the Netgear Nighthawk R7000 and this seems to tick all the boxes:

Easy parental control access
Has its own app
can connect a USB drive for cloud storage
Decent round the house wifi signal (hopefully and judging by some reviews, transforms the virgin signal in comparison to what you get with the superhub)
and can be picked up for around £50 second hand.

My question to those with much more knowledge than me is, is there anything better out there for roughly the same price or a little more?

Thank you :)
 
Soldato
Joined
13 Jul 2005
Posts
19,205
Location
Norfolk, South Scotland
I don;t understand enough about this sort of stuff really. I just want a decent router that will get a good signal round the house :)

There isn’t such a thing really. They are all built on one of 5 or 6 chipsets, they all have the same antennae and they all have the same legal maximum output power. So while you do get the odd really great device and the odd stinker, in reality they’re all constrained by physics and they’re all pretty much of a muchness.

So, if you want better coverage you need more radios which is why you were (correctly) recommended to add an access point to what you have. It’s also probably the cheapest upgrade you could make.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
20 Sep 2006
Posts
33,887
I don;t understand enough about this sort of stuff really. I just want a decent router that will get a good signal round the house :)
As @WJA96 points out, they are all pretty much the same. However in a typical home the internet coming in from the outside tends to terminate in the corner of the house or at the edge, hence the ISP supplied wireless router goes here. To get much better results, place the router in a central position, however this isn't usually possible. The solution is to run a cable to an access point which if positioned centrally and on the top floor ceiling as an example will make one hell of a difference to wireless coverage.
 
Soldato
Joined
29 Dec 2002
Posts
7,176
As above, run a cable to the loft, drop it down on the landing or similar central location and put an AP on it. This will make a massive difference compared to anything else in the same price bracket.
 
Soldato
OP
Joined
25 Jan 2003
Posts
9,497
Sorry for the late reply. So is the best option to stick with the super hub and get one of those access points? I’m not sure how I’d get the cable from the router upstairs to the access point though!
 
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