Suggestions on Gigabit Wireless Router

[Rvdran]

hi guys

i'll be moving to my new home soon which is CAT 6 wired.
I'll be subscribing to a 1GBPS fibre connection and I need advise on the best router to get for my setup.

I'll be running a wired ethernet connection for my devices such as my android PC, Xbox, BluRay player. These only support 100MBPS connections.

The wireless function will only be used by my smart devices such as my LG G3, Xperia Z Ultra and Ipad mini or Ipad 3.

As of now, I do not have any laptops yet. Even if i did, I would only require them for standard internet access. No bit torrenting or fast wifi needed for downloads.

As such, what router would you recommend?
I would prefer to get something that doesnt degrade my wired connection's speed. thats the priority. Wifi speed is secondary.
At the same time, i wouldnt want to get something that is too old. Perhaps a AC router.

 

[stevech]

House is cat5 or cat6 wired... I'd start with one or more gigE switches (low cost) to connect to all ethernet runs.
Then, each switch has one cable to your selected router's LAN ports.

If your ISP provides well under 100Mbps for you, a good $50-75 WiFi 802.11n router will do. Using more costly 11ac becomes an option valuable only if some/all of your client devices use 11ac and if they NEED that.

If two stories or basement or over 2000 sq. ft., one or more of those cat6 runs needs to have a WiFi access point to improve coverage.

 

[Rvdran]

living in a flat actually.
abt 130sq feet.
what router would you recommend?

 

[stevech]

130sq ft! Wow.
TV show "Tiny House"?

I have and use an ASUS RT-N12/D1. $30 or so. Just runs, no reboots.


Single 2.4GHz band.
A dual band is a nice to have, but probably not needed even though you're in a dense urban area. These are over $100.

ASUS is good - if you don't buy a product younger than a year. But that applies to most consumer WiFi.

 

[azazel1024]

He mentioned that a number of his devices are 100Mbps, but that he was getting a 1Gbps fiber internet connection.

For that, look at SNB's router charters to pick one of the ones with the best WAN to LAN and LAN to WAN throughput. EVERY single one is going to degrade performance by some degree if the connection is truely capable of 1000Mbps. There is no consumer router that is capable of true 1Gbps wire speed when routing and especially not concurrent full duplex 1Gbps. There are a few that'll get you up in the 900Mbps range though (half duplex, and some in the 1500Mbps range full duplex), supposing its straight DHCP WAN, and not something like PPPoE (if so, look for QCA based routers, as those tend to have real and effective PPPoE hardware acceleration).

Other thing to keep in mind is ANYTHING you do other than straight NAT is going to degrade performance in routing as it is additional overhead (and in a lot of cases will disable any hardware accelerated routing/NAT that is available).

Personally if there was a choice of different speed packages I'd look for something in the couple of hundred Mbps range (assuming it was cheaper than 1Gbps). Its less that I'd probably rarely find anything that could keep up with a 1Gbps internect connection, on the internet, today and more that any resonable gear I'd want to invest in as a router just wouldn't be able to keep up. That and, within reason, I personally don't have any applications where I'd care about the difference between 20MB/sec and 100MB/sec from the internet (LAN->LAN, that is a different story).

On top of that, from what it sounds like you are describing with your devices and use case, a 50Mbps connection would probably be way more than you'd really want/need. I can personally attest that with a 75/75 connection and 4 internet users (daughter is still too young), I have no issues playing an online game or two in my family, streaming a couple of Netflix HD streams (when Verizon isn't effectively throttling Netflix), streaming a couple of internet radio stations, uploading a bunch of stuff to One Drive/Dropbox and also a couple of heavy file downloads at the same time. I wouldn't mind if my connection was faster, but my family is just about the deffinition of a heavy use family and I generally don't notice issues with speed (other than when that is all going on, those downloads might only see 3-4MB/sec each, instead of 4-5MB/sec if two were going at once otherwise). I wouldn't mind a 120-200Mbps connection, but I really don't need it.

 

[Trip]

This largely hinges on how serious you are about your routing speed, stability and feature set (VLAN, NAT, etc) ...

On the simpler side of things, I'm sure an R7000, RT-AC68U, etc. would suffice, assuming very little firewalling/SPI is needed. My main concern would be stability and longevity while routing that much throughput day in and day out (if you'll actually be using most of the bandwidth, most of the time...).

Perhaps a better alternative, if you're skilled or ambitious enough, would be a higher-end wired unit like an EdgeRouter Lite or MikroTik, then wiring in whatever switch(es) and/or AP(s) you prefer. More user-friendly wired units would perhaps be GigE Cisco RV models.

If the piecemeal approach seems too complex, then I'd probably just fall back to the first suggestion and roll the dice on a Netgear, Linksys or Asus all-in-one.