Thinking about upgrading

[kazooki117]

Hello everyone,

I'm thinking about upgrading my router and ISP speed, or at least adding a new one. Here's my current situation:

Current Router: Belkin N450
2.4ghz band - 150Mbps
5.0ghz band - 300Mbps

Current ISP speed:
1.5MBps download

I've already purchased the router I would upgrade to (I have 15 days to return it if I no longer want it).

Router Upgrade: Asus RT-N66U N900
2.4ghz band - 450Mbps
5.0ghz band - 450Mbps

What is the fastest ISP speed (In general) that I could upgrade to and not get bottlenecked by the Belkin N450 with 300Mbps? Is this just 18.75(300/8)?

Now, my options for ISP speeds are 3.0MBps and 6.0MBps. I've done some tests on speedtest.net to measure connection speeds. With both routers I get around the same (around 190KBps, which is 1.5MBps and would make sense with my current ISP speed). Also, when downloading from Steam I get around the same amount. However, I need to access my computer at work from home through remote desktop every now and again, and the latency is only barely manageable. It's about the same with both routers.

It seems that what I should do is return the ASUS router and upgrade my ISP speed, as that seems to be the bottleneck, but I only want to do that if I will be able to see the difference with the Belkin N450. Doing the calculations, it seems as if I should be fine, but I'm really unsure about the numbers.

Any advice on what I should do?

 

[sinshiva]

the belkin will have zero trouble with 6mbit. i'd say it should be sufficient to do 20-30 mbit, flawlessly

 

[L&LD]

At this time, the ISP speeds you're paying for are what is limiting your online experience.

While the Belkin spec's suggest (at least for wired and the 5GHz band) that you should be fine for even the 6Mbps ISP option, that doesn't mean that it will be possible at anything other than wired or very close (same smaller room) distances.

What client distances are your tests from now with both routers? Is this the same expected usage when other than testing? And with same obstructions, etc.

While it should not be an issue for an effective class N150 router, real life sometimes has a habit of throwing a wrench at what we expect.

I would upgrade to the fastest internet speeds you can afford with the slight possibility of needing to upgrade the router too to true N450 class speeds per band, and only if some or most of your devices support that N300 or higher speeds, of course.