ATP: Best wireless router for $65 or less

[DCDeac]

Lmao!

Has anyone else had issues with too many wifi connections to your router? Our house has 5 computers, a printer, the bluray player, a nook, an iPad, 2 iPhones and 2 iPod touches hitting the network all at once. We were having problems about a year ago and upgraded to a dual band router and it cleared up most o the problems.

A lot of times it's the firmware of the router screwing things up.

Most of the hardware is fine - even stuff from a few years ago - as long as it's a decent company like Linksys, DLink, or Belkin for example. Usually when I'm visiting somewhere and I get asked what kind of router to buy because their current one is "slow and and loses connections all the time" I just grab dd-wrt for their router, change the standard radio frequency and boost the signal a bit.

You'd be amazed at how much it can improve things. My parents house went from a 20-30 second sign-on and 5-7Mbps speeds to under 5 second sign-ons and 18Mbps speeds.

You probably only need a new router if you care about features like attached storage, have high demands on your internal wireless network that could use 5ghz, or you have a ton of competing wireless devices or bandwidth hogs that you want to control very tightly. Maybe worth it if you're going from G to N, but even then it depends on your setup. You could easily find a good, older G router that will outperform a bargain N router today.

 

[Ball State Deac]

What about this one: http://www.asus.com/Networking/RTN12_D1/

 

[doubledeac]

I am not a fan of range extenders. Without the benefit of the wired connection, the range extenders are already only half as good as your router, because they have to use the radio to receive and send back to your router. Much better, if you can, to wire to a farther point in the house, buy a new router and use the old router as an access point.

Range extender is "ok" if you don't mind that anything running through the extender is going to run at about half the speed of connecting directly to your wireless router.

I am working through some similar issues in the new house. We have a shitty residential gateway from TWC. It is causing major issues with my VOIP phone system and all I can figure is that the combo router/modem is a terrible router. I am having intermittent packet loss with it too.

I think I might have to buy a cable modem and a separate router and connect the VOIP phone between the two, then run cable upstairs and use another access point upstairs to get good coverage and a properly working phone.

Agree with this 100%. Not worth the money IMO.

 

[wfudeke]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A3YN0Z0/ref=oh_details_o05_s00_i00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

i bought that last month and so far has worked great.

Agree. Have had this one for two months.

 

[BacktoBack]

I feel like I've done Speed Test on my regular network and extender and they were similar. Maybe I'm wrong. Will have to try later.