Thinking about buying the Netgear AC1900 but would like some advice before pulling trigger.

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veness.m.shane

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Dec 29, 2017
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Hey everyone.
As the title states, I am thinking about buying the AC1900. I currently have an Arris NVG589 gateway that my household got from Frontier. Problem is we have around 10+ devices connected at any given time, 3 Laptops, a desktop, Galaxy s8, Galaxy s7, Raspberry Pi, Xbox one, 1 tablet, and 2 printers. So I was thinking about buying a new AC router to help with this as I have heard AC is best for that many devices connected. I was also going to buy a linksys 5 port switch to connect to the new router to hardline my xbox and RPi3b as well as the desktop and a printer, to offset some of the wifi usage. I guess my question I'm getting at is, will this work to help out relieve some of the network congestion and increase speed? Im supposed to have 50mpbs download speeds and get maybe half of that on a good day. Also with the Arris being a gateway, would I have to/ be able to to turn the wifi off on it?
Thanks in advance for any help/advice. If I missed any needed info please let me know.
 
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Deleted member 1771594

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Go with the newer Netgear R7800 X4S instead (few dollars more). It's faster & way better than the older Netgear AC1900. But if you're thinking of getting VPN in your network then don't get Netgear routers at all. Get the similarly priced Asus RT-AC86U instead. Netgear routers gets bottlenecked in VPN speed.
 
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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It depends where you think the bottleneck really is. You could use both the wifi on both devices to spread your devices over more wifi radios. I guess it depends if you can get the 50mbps on a wired connection.

802.11ac only runs on the 5g band. Although 802.11ac tends to run faster but because 5g signal does not go through walls as easy so it may or may not actually be faster than 802.11n on 2.4g. No way to know since it greatly depends on your house.

Be careful about chasing big numbers. The router is only 1/2 the equation. If for example your end device does not run 802.11ac then your router will run 802.11n to talk to it so you get no benefit. This is the same as router that use 4 antenna/feeds. Most end device only have 2 so this feature will not be used. Even in the router you list if uses a 200mhz encoding to get the so called 600m on 2.4. This is a non standard encoding that is not part of the office standard. Many devices...apple in particular...refuse to add support.

Just read the fine print and compare it to your end device. Buy a fancy router with big numbers will only run as fast as you end device allows it to.
 
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Deleted member 1771594

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I've own a Netgear Nighthawk R7800 X4S router but eventually change it to Asus RT-AC86U. My problem X4S (like any other Netgear router) is the lack of VPN client feature out of the box. Yes, you can install an OpenVPN client (using Voxel firmware) but the OpenVPN functionality is far from perfect. You have intermittent internet disconnection that the router cannot recover. The only way to restart the router is to issue a stop/start command on telnet. Selective IP/port tunnelling off OpenVPN network is a real pain for most novice users as you need to get SSH access to the router (getting the key via dropbear is already hard). I get only 45/20 Mbps (OpenVPN) on X4S compared with 173/22 Mbps (OpenVPN) on RT-AC86U on a 150/20 Mbps Comcast Tier 150 internet (178/22 Mbps on speedtest without VPN). The RT-AC86U is not even using the so called "Crypto Engine" yet according to Merlin. All Netgear routers are severely bottlenecked if connected to a VPN network.

https://www.snbforums.com/threads/openvpn-performance-of-the-rt-ac86u.41217/page-5


 
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