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Help my girlfriend's brother find a good wireless router
Squirminator2k
they/themNorth Hollywood, CARegistered User regular
they/themNorth Hollywood, CARegistered User regular
Hello! I'm stupid. Well, not stupid, but certainly I'm nowhere near as knowledgeable about routers as, say, a trough, or a pencil, or a pebble, or a pelican. Which is problematic, because my girlfriend's brother is planning on heading to Best Buy to find a new router, and he's asked us for advice.
He says he wants a "good" router. That's helpful.
Can anyone recommend a halfway decent router for us to recommend him?
He says he wants a "good" router. That's helpful.
Can anyone recommend a halfway decent router for us to recommend him?
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Squirminator2k on
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http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-WRT160N-RM-Refurbished-Wireless-N-Router/dp/B001VMAYAM/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1312308343&sr=8-5
The only reason I bought two is because my ex has the original.
1) Are your current wireless devices using n or g? The link might be somewhat confusing, but the take home message is that there are several different types of wireless signals, with 802.11n being the fastest right now. But if none of your devices use the n protocol, and you aren't planning on upgrading, then it would be useless to spend the money on this.
2) How many devices are you going to be using? If you have a mixture of g and n devices it might be worthwhile to look into dual band routers.
3) Will you be doing a lot of file sharing over the hardwired network? For example, if you are going to be setting up some sort of streaming system, or if you have automated backups over the network, than gigabit LAN ports will be worthwhile. Otherwise it's not so important.
4) Where will the router be located? Some devices are built to provide really strong signals over long distances, but they will cost more. If your router is in the same room as your devices, it wont be nearly as important as if you are trying to broadcast through 2 walls.
edit- I also forgot to mention. Router programs can be important too. If you want to set up a VPN, or use the router to share a printer, then certain software will be better than others. Also some routers have a usb port, for the previously mentioned printer sharing, or file sharing with an external hdd. This is not as common, but very handy in certain situations.
Questions to ask him:
Does he live in a house or an apartment? If house, how many stories? Is he only surfing the web and checking e-mail, or will he be streaming video and/or gaming? How many wireless devices is he hooking up?
For apartment with basic browsing, get this.
For streaming/gaming or a single-story house, get this.
For a multiple story house, or many wireless devices, get this.
Or if he just wants to blow a whole bunch of money, and get a kick-ass router he may not really need with gigabit ethernet ports, get this.
No, I don't actually work for Netgear. They're just the routers I know best that aren't crap.
Ohhhh yes. I swear to god, I cannot say this enough. When I went to buy a router after I moved, I was like "Oh, well, I don't want a cheap D-Link* because tons of people have problems with them, and hmm, Belkin makes some other good products, and this router's pretty cheap... what the heck, let's buy this." BIG MISTAKE. We often (in fact, more often recently) have to play a game of "which order do we replug the modem and router in?" when the router suddenly decides it either doesn't recognize that the modem's there, or that the modem's there but that the modem isn't providing internet. It has a good chance to do this if we ever try to change a setting on it and thereby reset the router, too. Huuuge headache for us!
I've personally had several years of fantastic experience with an Airport Extreme router from Apple (though we only have one Apple product in the house). It was relatively pricy when we picked it up (we're talking twice the price of the usual cheap routers) but it's been rock-solid for 4+ years now, and has no problems swapping settings around, with all the usual features included and with a very straightforward interface (unlike many other routers I've played around with). The Airport Express is their cheaper model, so it is probably less great, but would still be a good option.
What is probably a cheaper and more common option, one many more people would recommend (EggyToast just linked one), is getting a Linksys WRT router and throwing either DD-WRT or Tomato (google these; open-source firmware that's way better than the default) on it. I don't have experience with this just yet, but if I can manage to replace this terrible Belkin router this is what I plan to try next. I've heard fantastic things about doing this, and these routers are common and fairly cheap.
*Note that I say 'cheap' D-Link; I don't know anything about their pricier routers.
Y'know, I had one of these and it was superb. I think I'll recommend this one.