Best wireless router for heavy home usage.

[tomblits]

I live in a home with a lot of devices and my current router (Buffalo DIR-655) is starting to show its age by freezing up often. We have 6 mobile phones, 5 laptops, 1 desktop, 3 PS3, 1 xbox360, 2 wifi tv's, and sometimes there is company over that connects with additional laptops and phones. We often stream Netflix to multiple devices at the same time, use the desktop as a media server and do a lot of online gaming. Our internet connection is 50/10 mbps. None of our wireless devices have ac, they are mostly n and a few g. The desktop has a 1gbps port. We positioned the router in the center of our home and it has to have decent signal as we have thick walls and we like to use it in our back yard, it shouldn't be asking too much to have the same or better signal strength as a DIR-655.

I have done some studying and thought a ASUS RT-N66U might be the best bet for us. However it is a bit old. I was also looking at the ASUS RT-AC68U and it looked like the best router on the market that would be sure to be able to handle heavy usages. I also saw the ASUS RT-AC68U had a lot of negative reviews regarding the firmware and customer support.

What do you guys suggest I buy? I don't have a budget cap but I don't want to waste money on too cheap of a router or one with too much power I could never use.

 

[bill001g]

You are likely running out of radio bandwidth rather than router CPU. Hanging is more a bug than some limitation. First you need to run wired on anything that can run wired to offload the radio. I would then add more radios by adding AP and hanging them off the main router. You would put these on different radio channels and try to find a way to split your users between them. Different SSID and manual setting each device to one work best but if they are in different area of the house it should always connect to the closest one so you could use the same SSID. I would also use a older router to support the G devices to get it away from the N, it forces the router to run in a compatibility mode which reduces the ability of N to efficiently use the bandwidth.

Normally you only get into router overload issues when you are trying to do things like firewall filtering or VPN or something else that requires the router to do lots of packet manipulation. 802.11 wireless protocol is pretty stupid there is no central control of who can use bandwidth and when so everyone just fights it out to grab as much as they can. This is why it degrades so quickly.

802.11ac will not give you any huge advantage especially if you do not have 802.11ac cards. Most the routers have faster cpu just because the are newer. I would spend my money on multiple cheap routers/ap to try to decrease the competition for radio bandwidth.

 

[smitbret]

bill001g is dead on with this one.

A new router may HELP solve the problem, unless you are bottle-necking your internet connection.

Since you are getting complete coverage (albeit poor it woudl seem) I would suggest a new router and then set up the old router as an Access Point off of the new router at different ends of the house. That way you spread the wireless load between the two.

Forget about 802.11ac for your situation. 802.11ac does give about 3x the bandwidth of 802.11n, but it only runs on 5GHz so the range is about half of what you are probably getting with 2.4GHz. So unless all of your wireless devices are within about 15-20 feet of the router, bandwidth drop off is gonna occur fast and you'll be better served with several wired access points.

If I were to buy a router now, the Asus RT-N66U that you mentioned would probably be my first choice and if money were no object I would grab the NetGear Nighthawk. Like I said, though, 802.11ac will probably not solve your problem nearly as well as multiple wireless points.