New Modem Recommendation

alpacino2368

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Jul 11, 2013
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Looking for a wireless router recommendation for my dorm room next year, mainly to run my laptop off of and my chromecast. Im looking for the best price to performance ratio that lets me run my chromecast at the highest settings without issue. Range obviously isn't much of an issue cause I mainly need it for my room only! Looking to buy it from microcenter. Thanks for the help!
 
Solution
I suspect you can pretty much use any mid point 802.11n router. Something in the $50 will likely be more than good enough. Most the difference are in feature you may not need.

In a dorm room you should be rather close so I would cable your laptop if at all possible. You want to avoid wireless if you can because likely everyone has a router and everyone is very close so you will get massive interference.

You chromecast only needs a very very basic 802.11n router. It can only run on 2.4g and it can only use a single channel and it does not support mimo. So this means it can't run at 150,300 or 450 and it especially can't run 802.11ac. So routers with those features will not help.

Still from a price prospective you might as...
I suspect you can pretty much use any mid point 802.11n router. Something in the $50 will likely be more than good enough. Most the difference are in feature you may not need.

In a dorm room you should be rather close so I would cable your laptop if at all possible. You want to avoid wireless if you can because likely everyone has a router and everyone is very close so you will get massive interference.

You chromecast only needs a very very basic 802.11n router. It can only run on 2.4g and it can only use a single channel and it does not support mimo. So this means it can't run at 150,300 or 450 and it especially can't run 802.11ac. So routers with those features will not help.

Still from a price prospective you might as well get a 802.11n dual band router..it would help if your laptop can use 5g which has a little less interference. Pretty much the ones that say 300+300 ie they run 300m on 2.4 and 5g are the best value. getting 450m is tricky in a high interference environment and your laptop would have to have that feature also. Do not get real carried away with the wireless numbers they are some magic lab numbers most only get about 80m which is why a ethernet cable is always faster.
 
Solution