Time for a new wireless router: share your suggestions and experience here

[rec head]

Speaking of AT&T gigabit, a tech came out to install it for my first floor neighbor and mine went out. Freaky coincidence right? He kept telling me there was no way it could have been him. It was obviously my eero that was causing the problem. Then after telling him my modem says no service he said to call customer support to generate a ticket because there he can't work on it without one and he'll come back after his next job. Still waiting.

Luckily the new neighbor is nice and gave us her WiFi password to use until our connection gets fixed. It wouldn't be too bad if I missed out on a day at the V-salon but everyone else is still working from home. Very cool of her.

edit to add: Last night we watched content that was ripped to the NAS.

[Too Tall]

Speaking of AT&T gigabit, a tech came out to install it for my first floor neighbor and mine went out. Freaky coincidence right? He kept telling me there was no way it could have been him. It was obviously my eero that was causing the problem. Then after telling him my modem says no service he said to call customer support to generate a ticket because there he can't work on it without one and he'll come back after his next job. Still waiting.

Luckily the new neighbor is nice and gave us her WiFi password to use until our connection gets fixed. It wouldn't be too bad if I missed out on a day at the V-salon but everyone else is still working from home. Very cool of her.

edit to add: Last night we watched content that was ripped to the NAS.

Loving all that. I have not settled on a NAS yet. Looking like the WD red drive setups are pretty darn reliable and easy to own.

[sine]

Speaking of AT&T gigabit, a tech came out to install it for my first floor neighbor and mine went out. Freaky coincidence right? He kept telling me there was no way it could have been him. It was obviously my eero that was causing the problem. Then after telling him my modem says no service he said to call customer support to generate a ticket because there he can't work on it without one and he'll come back after his next job. Still waiting.

AT&T is the worst. Service is a massive F, their equipment is often faulty and majority of techs are incompetent.

Alas, we have no choice (here in NC) between bad and bad so the devil you know.......but we did cancel AT&T TV last year so have gig internet service only. We have a Amplifi mesh router (with 2 mesh points) and it has preformed well the last 3 years.

[rec head]

I've honestly been happy with AT&T fiber. Fastest internet by far around here.

So here'e what seems to have happened. Last week the electric company came and installed a new electric pole in the alley behind our house. They only move their stuff and cut down the old pole and leave all the telecom. Or try to anyway. Our neighbor's internet went our right after the pole got swapped but ours seemed OK. Then the AT&T guy comes out yesterday hooks up the new service to the first floor and in the process continues Com-Ed's work of effing up ours. Today's tech said the routing at the pole was crazy.

[rydesteel]

Bringing up an old Thread. Deb and I are buying a home after renting for the last 9 years. She works from home, MediaCom Xtream is installing 1 Gig internet, pretty sure I'll need to upgrade the modem and router. Currently using an ancient Airport Extreme and a 5 year old modem. Basically a 1000sq foot Ranch with a basement, I'll have the cable run to her home office where the modem and router will be and WiFi everything else. Anything new in mesh technology? The House is small enough I shouldn't need much to cover it but we'll set up a home gym in the basement and it would be nice to make sure we have coverage there as well. Thanks all I have just enough tech savvy to know I'm fairly clueless on the new stuff.

[j44ke]

I have an Amplifi Alien mesh router plus one mesh point. There was one month or so where we were having difficulty negotiating network collisions between devices but either an Apple update or an Amplifi update (or both) solved it. And except for that month, everything has been solid. My wife does everything for work virtually - computer, video, phone system all go through the router - and we’ve had no problems. The router is GB compatible at least and whatever the future protocol is - WiFi6 I think - so should be good for a while. Our connection is less than a GB connection - 400mb/s or something. I thought it was expensive but now it seems like a good buy due to the stability.

[dashDustin]

I thought it was expensive but now it seems like a good buy due to the stability.

I feel the same about our Eero setup. Has been rock solid.

Went all through covid with wifey working from home, boys schooling from home, and all of the above doing workouts on the Mirror without any issues. We're setup with ATT Fiber. The one wired connection sees 900gb down, but all of the wireless devices are in the 500 range, which is still plenty good enough*. 2400 sq ft house with 1 main router and now 3 beacons instead of just 2. I haven't found any dead zones in my house, but we don't have basements here.

*I'm told ATT has a new router available that would help, but I don't really see a need to go that route just yet.

[9tubes]

I've been greatly influenced by Michael Horowitz, the longtime columnist for ComputerWorld and InfoWorld. He started writing about the sorry state of router and wi-fi security a decade ago and things haven't improved since. The atrocious security/privacy of home routers was even the subject of a conference session called SOHOpelessly Broken at DEFCON 25. To cut to the chase here, you might read his website called RouterSecurity.org. The failures of common routers should alarm everyone.

I just replaced my Apple Airport Extreme also. I bought a Motorola 8600 for the cable gateway and took the recommendations of Horowitz and got a Peplink Balance 20X for the router + AP. After a decade of research Peplink is the only brand he recommends for security and privacy. (He has no financial connection to the company.)

He recommends the lower-priced Peplink Surf Soho. Why did I go with the more expensive Balance 20X? More power, more bandwidth, and it's possible to use as many wi-fi access points as you want in order to cover a larger house. It's actually designed for smallish offices (<60 users) or a coffeehouse. The challenge I've learned with all these units is that they may test at high data rates with no real load, but once you put a load on the processor they slow down a great deal. Examples are using a remote access VPN connection to the office, or setting up filtering rules to avoid connecting to bad-actor domains, or doing packet inspection to give priority to your work video call over the kids' playing games, or a dozen kids at a birthday party all using the internet simultaneously, etc. These all take CPU + ram, and everything we can buy from BestBuy or WalMart is woeful in power as well as woeful in security.

Peplink has a setup wizard, plus Horowitz has a more advanced step-by-step guide on how to set it up for the best security. Saves loads of time. Some might say I have overkill, but I like overkill. No breakdowns, no worries.

[davids]

Bringing up an old Thread. Deb and I are buying a home after renting for the last 9 years. She works from home, MediaCom Xtream is installing 1 Gig internet, pretty sure I'll need to upgrade the modem and router. Currently using an ancient Airport Extreme and a 5 year old modem. Basically a 1000sq foot Ranch with a basement, I'll have the cable run to her home office where the modem and router will be and WiFi everything else. Anything new in mesh technology? The House is small enough I shouldn't need much to cover it but we'll set up a home gym in the basement and it would be nice to make sure we have coverage there as well. Thanks all I have just enough tech savvy to know I'm fairly clueless on the new stuff.

I replaced my home stuff after around five years, just because it was time. I've got a 4 story (including the basement) small house, and the Comcast internet is delivered to the third floor. My original setup used powerline ethernet to deliver a signal to the 2nd and 1st floors. The attenuation was pretty high, but still left (generally) acceptable bandwidth. The real pain in the ass was the need for each of the floors to be set up as a logically separate network. So devices had to hop from one to another as they moved around the house. It generally worked, but not always.

This year I moved to a mesh network, using the Asus ZenWiFi AX. That is the more expensive of the Asus systems recommended by Wirecutter and, honestly, I got it because the cheaper one was out of stock. Setup was fast and straightforward, and I got everything (about a dozen devices) meshed and connected in under an hour. I've got two units, one on the 3rd floor and one on the 1st. It's a single logical network, and there's no bandwidth loss anywhere inside or, for that matter, out in the yard. The management app is helpful but not essential, and I even set up a guest network to keep company on-line and off my devices.

[Too Tall]

Thumbs up for eero mesh which has been flawless. FWIIW I just installed a motorola mb8611 two weeks ago. The Motorola is doing the job...Comcast OTOH hmmm.

[rydesteel]

We move in tomorrow and I picked up the mb8611 modem as well. Probably going with an eero as well just trying to justify that it's owned by Amazon. I try hard not to shop on there.

[bigbill]

Slightly OT, the wireless router that comes with Starlink is kickass. My house is centered on a half acre and I have a good signal everywhere.

[PaMtbRider]

I installed a Linksys MR8300 mesh router today. I didn't realize how much my old router was slowing things down. It was 11 years old so it was past due for an upgrade. I am streaming 4k video on couple devices simultaneously with no buffering. Couldn't do that before. The other annoying thing was my macbook was constantly dropping the wifi and had to reconnect. Hopefully that problem goes away as well.

[Too Tall]

Slightly OT, the wireless router that comes with Starlink is kickass. My house is centered on a half acre and I have a good signal everywhere.

Envious. I'm hoping to get Starlink.