Router for high congestion apt complex

[Steiner]

My Netgear R7000 died on me about a month ago. Whenever a laptop tries to connect, there is about a 50% chance that the router goes down and all connected devices lose connection and a reboot is required. It happens daily.

I live a large condo complex. Approximately 200 2-floor units crammed into an old renovated mill from the 1800s. There is a lot of congestion. I see around 40 connections available at any given time. I did use a sniffer to identify less-used channels.

When I first got my R7000, it was amazing because not many people around here were using the 5 GHz band and it helped a lot.
The introduction of 5 GHz was huge for me, I even swapped out the WiFi card in my laptop when I first got the R7000 to take advantage of a congestion-free band as an early adopter. Now that most people have ac routers, I am experiencing lots of congestion again.

I typically have about 15-20 devices connected at any given time. My primary desktop is a wired connection. I am looking for some router recommendations specifically aimed first and foremost at dealing with the congestion issue. Will the newly emerging AX routers help in this area? Most of my devices are 5 GHz capable but there are a couple legacy devices which aren’t.

Thanks for any feedback. I am happy to provide more specific details too. I am planning to purchase a router this week because the daily reboots are unbearable.

 

[coxhaus]

Sounds like you have a bad situation. I am not sure you will solve it by changing routers. You will need to move some of your 15 to 20 devices over to wire to get some relief. You need to be looking for ways to move off 2.4 GHz. The 5 GHz penetration signal is very limited vs 2.4 GHz. Another thing might be to change over to a separate router and wireless APs. Use more APs and try locating the APs closer to your devices. By using more APs and locating them closer will improve your signal for your wireless APs. This will all work better if you use 5GHz only.

 

[EmeraldDeer]

On the one hand, there have been many complaints in this forum concerning DFS channels. Merlin recommends avoiding them if having trouble.

On the other hand, manually selected DFS channel 52 80 MHz wide has been rock solid in my congested apartment building. Mine is the only router/AP using DFS. All of my devices support DFS. Granted I did not have DFS problems with my previous router, a Netgear R7800. Not an issue, but it takes an extra minute after a reboot for the weather/military radar interference algorithm to complete and for the DFS to come online.

Although my router RT-AX88U is AX, I am not interested yet in AX. I see it as a top shelf 802.11ac AP. SmallNetBuilder's preliminary testing suggests this.

The tests also suggest superb 2.4 GHz performance. I have IoT devices which only support 2.4 and do not need LAN access. I isolate them from my LAN with YazFi guest WiFi. However, now we are getting into another area, add-on customization for which command line Linux experience really helps. Asus has a much more rich alternative firmware/add-on software environment. But this is not necessary for your needs.