Hello, I am going to be upgrading to a 150/25 internet speed soon here, and I am wondering which router I should purchase for this speed? In my home there is my personal computer which will be connected, everything else will be via wifi. By everything else I mean about 3 phones, 2 tablets, 2 laptops, and 1 smart tv, yeah I got a big family of wifi users haha which most will be either watching Neflix, Hulu, or surfing the net. I was wondering if anyone could point me in the right direction as far as what I should be looking at? I really don’t have a limit on the router, but I do not want to overkill it either.
Thank you for any replies, I appreciate it very much.
TacoLegs
Alright well, let's start with the basics. Since you mentioned that you have a large family and appear to have a good number of potential wireless devices that will be concurrently connected to your network and eating up bandwidth, I would make sure to get a dual-band access point. This has pretty much been a no-brainier for a while now since it allows you to space the bandwidth load across the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies. If you have any lower priority devices such as printers or wireless clients that won't be using much bandwidth, have those devices connected to the 2.4GHz network, while keeping the devices streaming video, etc on 5GHz.
There's no need to invest in an access point that supports the 802.11ac standard unless you have devices that support it. However, I'm guessing that you have some supported devices since most middle-to-high-end/flagship smartphones and decent tablets support it now, but if you don't have any 802.11ac devices then there's no need to pay the extra money. I might suggest to invest in one of the first-generation ac access points such as the following: ASUS RT-AC66U Netgear R6300v2
If you are looking for something cheaper, let me know and we can go through some more choices.
I'd also recommend downloading a copy on inSSIDer (a simple network analyzer for Windows). It allows you to see what your wireless environment looks like by listing all broadcasting wifi networks in your area. This data helps you choose what is the "cleanest" frequency (channel) to use for 2.4 ad 5GHz. Keep in mind that to see the 5GHz data you will need to run it on a dual-band device. InSSIDer also gives you the RSSI (signal strength) of your network from the point-of-view of the wireless client that you run the application on, so it is helpful when determining if distance from the access point is causing performance issues, etc. There's also a similar app for android - I believe it is called wifi analyzer or something similar. Shoot me a PM if you have any questions about this.
First off I want to thank you VERY much for such a response, I was not expecting that much detail or effort to be put into the reply, I was expecting more of just "buy this its good etc etc". I did have my eye on that ASUS router though, it's been sitting in my cart on amazon for a little while now, but I was hesitant because I felt it may be a little too much, but I'm glad I was on point with it more than likely that will be the one I purchase.
I'm not so much computer illiterate, I more router illiterate since I don't know much about what's good and what's too much purchase wise. One thing I do have to ask is about the 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, so before I set up my devices to the network, should I run inSSIDer to see what's the best signal channels I can get?
Yeah. If you have a laptop with a dual-band wifi card in it, install inSSIDer on that and run it before you configure the access point. If you dont have a dual band laptop, I'd recommend installing that wifi analyzer app on a phone or something.
The interface looks something like this (varies with different versions of the application):
The top portion gives you a list of the networks that inSSIDer found (SSID = the name of the network), along with their broadcast channel, signal strength (RSSI), and max data rate. You can sort by channel by clicking on the channel column heading. This will let you see how many of each network exists on each channel. At the bottom, you get a visual representation of the data. The vertical axis is signal strength and the horizontal axis is the channel frequency. In the screenshot above, this looking at the 2.4GHz spectrum.
As a rule of thumb, you want your RSSI for both your 2.4GHz and 5GHz networks to be above -70 dBm. Anything lower than that in my opinion is not the best scenario. You can move the laptop/phone around your house and see the RSSI fluctuate as you get further from the access point or as more obstacles (walls, ceiling, floor, etc) get between the device and the access point.
Edit: by the way I just realized that I jumped right into manually configuring the access point. Pretty much all modern access points are able to be set up without having to manually configure any settings. By default most APs are set to auto channel mode, meaning that they will change their broadcast channel dynamically (sometimes based on the congestion on the channel). I just prefer to manually set the channel and use a network analyzer like I've mentioned here, but you can probably get away with just running the default configuration unless you notice any performance/connectivity issues.
I believe my laptop does, not too sure but I will be sure to look, if not I'll just use my phone. I've never really fiddled with 2.4GHz and 5GHz frequencies, I've mostly just set the router up and let its default configuration do it for me, I will look more into this once I do move and get set up.
I really do appreciate your help, also if you wouldn't mind, if I happen to run into issues or have a question would you mind if I PM you for help? I just really wouldn't want to screw up with something I do not know much about.
Sure. Shoot me a PM if you encounter any issues or have questions. If you end up not wanting to mess with anything, the default config should work just fine.
