Getting a new wireless router.

[Sare_a_pale_en]

Lately my wifi will randomly crash, making using the internet hell. I bought a new modem and all the ethernet connected devices are running even faster. My wi-fi is pretty old 5-8 years, and I was thinking of buying a new one. I have spending cap about $150 give or take 20 bucks. There seems to be all these compatibility issues that I have to look out for so I am looking for pro advice. Thanks guys. What should I buy?

 

[jerry6]

ASUS RT 66N OR RT AC66U

 

[john-b691]

Does not pay to spend a lot on a new router if you also do not plan to upgrade all your nic cards. If you have G or even worse B cards it will degrade the performance a lot. You really need to replace everything with N before you waste a lot of money on a new router. If you are going to stay with you current wireless cards any router in the $50 range will work about the same. The fancy dual band, 450m..bla bla bla does no good if your nic cards don't also have that feature.

Stay away from from routers that are AC for the same reasons. You would need to replace everything with AC to get the benefit and the standard is still a year away from release. This means there are still compatibility issues between vendors so you would have to buy all the nics and the router from the same manufacture.

Many times you will need a cheap second wireless router to run old things you cannot replace the nic in like some apple products. So you may be best buying a cheap router now, wait a year and upgrade everything to AC rather than spend money now on older technology or nonstandard stuff.

 

[Sare_a_pale_en]

Thanks for your help. So if I have the macbook pro configured to not register in the wifi can I still use ethernet that is plugged into a modem? So what router do you recommend for the N devices?

 

[john-b691]

I have no idea what apple products use sorry.

You would not have to turn it off you would just have to set the router to ignore it.

Most routers have a option to run only N. This prevents it from running in mixed mode and allows you to use some of the high speed options. This also mean non of your older stuff will work.

The problem with just trying to avoid this issue by turning your equipment off is the router may hear transmission from other devices that are not even your are even connect to your network. This is not as bad as actually using a old device on your router but it does have a impact so it works best to have one router that ignores all the old stuff and another router that accepts it.