It's time to move to Netgear?

[TNCS]

I've used tones of equipment from different vendor over decades, for the Wifi counterparts, there is no such thing as perfect/flawless product. You choose the product with the weakness/problems you can accept or live with. Got a few Asus product in the early days, vowed never use them again, but came back for a bit and piecer here and there, I can tell you Asus has really good R&D team in terms of hardware design, and they sometimes do find good niche to their products. Their problem is not really the design or built quality, but their software implementation. Whether it motherboards, graphics card, mobile phone -- even routers. I choose the selected Asus router because it has (what it seems) a good featured stock firmware, modified enhanced stock firmware (hat of to RMerlin), DD-WRT and Tomato. So if I dislike something, which is easy for any wireless product, I have the choice of choosing. While I think Netgear is a good product on its own, I'm sure it has it fair share of issues, but like many I no longer consider DD-WRT is a good alternative, and face it OpenWRT is not the greatest either if it can't fully support the hardware due to the FLOSS nature. So I find the RMerlin supported router has a good striking balance if I shall decide to jump the firmware between devices. That just my two cents.

If I really want overkill routing for home with the minimum hassle, I would opt for an x86/64 NUC (preferably under 10W) with BSD/Linux based routing... Provide you want to go down that complex setup root.

As for Ubiquiti... Not really in the same product segment as Asus routers...

 

[microchip]

Three things I dislike in ASUS routers (and please, don't argue with me)

1) Most of them are Broadcom-based and I prefer Qualcomm for various reasons which I don't feel explaining
2) ASUS routers run hot. In summer, most need active cooling or they'll melt
3) ASUS routers tend to consume more power than others. I saw on multiple sites such a comparison and was a bit surprised

Two things I do like

1) Pretty decent stock firmware
2) RMerlin's enhancements firmware

About NETGEAR, I think they put out better hardware (including various Qualcomm models) than ASUS and they also runs cooler too. The only thing I'm no fan of is their firmware and unwillingness to do something about it

 

[htismaqe]

I definitely agree on point number 1. I tend to feel like Broadcom is the budget line and Qualcomm is just better quality. It might just be bias but I've always just had slightly better performance with QC, especially on DD-WRT.

Not sure about the heat - my new Asus doesn't run that much hotter than the R7800 - the radios about 3 degrees F and the CPU about 7. So I can't really comment there. Power consumption doesn't bother me either - I spend so much money on internet and networking that a few bucks per kWh just isn't something I can bring myself to worry about.

Finally, for me, it's definitely Netgear's seeming unwillingness to change anything that irks me. Yes, the FW is bare bones and often includes horribly insecure/outdated modules. But their support has gone from great to "the worst" in just a few years. I will never use their stock firmware or their support again after what I went through with the R7000. Some of the things they asked me to do in troubleshooting were amateurish, some completely lacked common sense, and some were downright shady.

 

[RMerlin]

Some of the things they asked me to do in troubleshooting were amateurish, some completely lacked common sense, and some were downright shady.

3Com's tech support once asked me to defragment my hard disk while troubleshooting an issue with one of their USB modems. Let's just say I stopped dealing with them on that ticket after that...

 

[htismaqe]

3Com's tech support once asked me to defragment my hard disk while troubleshooting an issue with one of their USB modems. Let's just say I stopped dealing with them on that ticket after that...

Netgear at one point suggested I should send them pcaps to see if they could pinpoint the issue. No problem, except that the pcaps were 600-800MB each. I explained to them that I needed somewhere to upload them and they told me to email them. I explained to them that there's not likely an email provider in the world that would allow nearly a GB of attachments and they told me to attach them to my case. Of course the Netgear service portal says right in bold in every ticket "attachments must be 10MB or less in size". And that's just one of the issues. I went back and forth with them for over a month.

 

[Natey2]

Don't buy into the marketing hype. You don't need a special router for gaming.

e.g. Asus ROG routers?

Sometimes they paint their antennas red and have sleek angles on their chassis, and they fit well into (i.e. look like) the other gaming hardware components, if that matters.

They might even have WTFast (aka Gamers Private Network) support in their firmware, and have special options for Xbox, etc. gaming consoles.

And some say it's a marketing thing by the companies to upsell these more expensive routers to the gaming community.

Sent using Tapatalk

 

[Gregh]

ASUS makes good routers. They run a bit too hot to my liking but I cool them with a USB fan. ASUS' firmware is one of the best stock firmware you can find, and RMerlin does it even better. I've had very few issues with my old AC66U which is no longer in commission

how do you cool your router? I was thinking about doing the same for my gt-ac5300 model.

 

[Natey2]

how do you cool your router? I was thinking about doing the same for my gt-ac5300 model.

Depending on where the vents are, you could put the router on top of a laptop cooler.

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[microchip]

how do you cool your router? I was thinking about doing the same for my gt-ac5300 model.

The vents of my old AC66U are on the back, so I let it stand up and place the fan at the back. I now use an R7800 which has side and bottom vents. I use a cheap notebook cooler placed underneath the router. I only switch the cooler on when it gets too hot inside (read: mid-summer heat waves)