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Time for a New Wireless Router


Flitterkill

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My router is starting to play the "Gonna Drop Your Connection Randomly For 30 Seconds to a Minute" song.

 

I'd prefer to get a new router before the followup hit "Dropping Your Connection All The Time for Minutes At A Time" starts playing.

 

Five minutes skimming the interwebs and I see some of the same routers from 6-7 years ago still being sold new; which is a little puzzling...

 

Help a dude out. What's my next wireless router?

 

N of course. Indifferent to gigabit physical ports (100 is still fine). Like it to be $80-ish or less.

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I recently upgraded to the Asus RT-16 and I lurves it. It's probably a bit overkill and a bit expensive but it handles everything perfectly and I haven't even loaded Tomato or DD-WRT yet.

 

I've got my PC with a wireless card running 300mbs over N, the PS3, 360, two laptops, another desktop, iphone/bb and my playbook...all playing nice with no significant issues

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  • 2 weeks later...

Seconding Bigg's Netgear. I work two jobs, one as a computer repair/tech expert, another as an IT support for a movie studio, so I've played around with a lot of routers. Never played with the asus one, but I love asus as a company. So if you think you'll need those extra features, then go for that one. Otherwise, the N300 is fine (don't go for 450/600/750/900 unless you have dualband supported devices to receive the signal).

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  • 4 months later...

Well, after mostly stable performance throughout the last 100 days or so, but still with an occasional dropping of all network connections, yesterday was.... weird.

 

For two hours or so, every thirty seconds, the router would drop all connections. Wired. Wireless. Every 30 seconds. Not the cable modem - this was all network connections.

 

Since I never went ahead and grabbed the Asus mentioned above, it was off to Staples to grab a Netgear N750.

 

Naturally, when I got home, all connections were stable, and remained that way all day, and night, and this morning, and afternoon.

 

Then this evening again. Every 30 seconds.

 

So much for returning the router and grabbing the Asus.

 

30 minutes in, I like it. Setup is great. Plenty of controls. If I want to flash it out to something else it shouldn't be a problem.

 

Reviews for this unit are skitzo. Initial reviews are fantastic but it seems there are some bad units out there. Really bad. That said, lifetime warranty so... I'll let it roll and see what shakes.

 

http://www.pcmag.com...,2386682,00.asp

 

260711-netgear-n750-wirless-dual-band-gigabit-router-wndr4000-angle.jpg

 

http://www.newegg.co...N82E16833122413

 

Staples in-store with tax was $119 for me, matching NewEgg. Staples has a "throw crappy gear at us" promotion right now - threw a very old b/g Dlink router at them (that may or may not actually work) which knocked $10 off.

 

EDIT: It's dual band and IPv6 ready - given our current loadout it's a forward looking purchase. Even my 1 year old laptop doesn't have a dual band card.

 

Oh, but our two HP Touchpads? Yes, those rock the 5ghz. Very nice.

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You do know that the 802.11ac stuff is out right? The replacement for 802.11n, that is. Most of the 802.11ac routers start at $130 or so now, offering 1300Mbit/s+ connection speeds for a 2x2 MIMO unit, if you're gonna buy you might want to spend the little extra and get the newest(still to be ratified, however) standards.

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