Router for a place saturated with other Wi-Fi networks

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krneki

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Dec 3, 2011
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I'm looking for a wireless router with a stable, highly reliable connection in a place heavily saturated with other Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth connections. One client will be connected through 2,4 GHz 802.11g connection and another one through LAN, while the data rate will be low (max 200 KB/s). There has to be no packet loss and uptime has to be 100 %. I have already tested Linksys WRT54GL in such environment and it crashed within few minutes with occasional packet loss beforehand. On the other hand, Cisco Meraki MX64W worked without a single problem.

Cisco is out of my budget, I am looking more towards ~200 $. Currently I aim for Asus RT-AC68U, Asus RT-AC87U, Linksys WRT3200ACM and Netgear AC1900 (R7000), but I don't really know what is the crucial thing to look for. Which router would you recommend? Thanks for any suggestions.
 
Solution
JoeMomma

Get a Wi-Fi analysis app for your phone.
1TwljBB.jpg

I moved my VIRUS router to Channel 9 so it fell into the less used frequency between everybody else on the default channels. Then I was able to reduce my Wi-Fi power to 50%, so I wasn't blasting my data all over the neighborhood to get hacked and I still get good reception in every room of the house.

The hardware isn't as important as knowing how to tune it.

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JoeMomma

JoeMomma

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Nov 17, 2010
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Get a Wi-Fi analysis app for your phone.
1TwljBB.jpg

I moved my VIRUS router to Channel 9 so it fell into the less used frequency between everybody else on the default channels. Then I was able to reduce my Wi-Fi power to 50%, so I wasn't blasting my data all over the neighborhood to get hacked and I still get good reception in every room of the house.

The hardware isn't as important as knowing how to tune it.

 
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Solution
B

bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
28,358
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Purely anecdotal and if you tested scientifically it likely is not your best channel choice. Wifi channels are not really represent properly by the router and these tools. On the 2.4g band the "channels" the router shows are 5mhz wide. Actual wfi usage is either 20mhz or 40mhz. Most people run 40mhz to get the faster speeds. So it is not just 1 channel being used it is blocks of 4 or 8 of these so called "channels" that are displayed.

So what you did by choosing channel 9 is actually increase the number of signals interfering. The top part of all the people using channel 6 and the bottom part of all the people using channel 11.

In addition any one that is running 40mhz channels (and that is most people) is using all the channels between about 4 and 11.

Even worse these tools do not actually represent usage. These only show the number of routers sending out their small beacon messages. You could have a single router on say channel 1 doing lots of files transfers and 100 routers on channel 11 sitting idle and channel 1 would be the incorrect choice.

I used to have a router that could put out multiple SSID and I rigged it to put out 25 just to scare people who use tools like this away from the channels I wanted to use.
 
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