WLAN Router (and maybe adapter) replacement

[gokkel]

Hello,

I am considering to buy a new router to replace my Netgear WNDR3700, which I bought ~2 years ago and with which I was never really convinced. When I bought it I wanted to see first if it is enough or if I needed a better router, but due to unfortunate circumstances I couldn't send it back anymore and had to settle with it.

While I managed to get reasonable speed (40-45 Mbit down as measured with speedtest.net, my connection provides 50/2.5 down/up) out of the WLAN connection to my Desktop which is in a room one floor higher in the house after a LOT of fiddling and putting it on a more elevated position, I am still not totally happy. There are sometimes stability issues, and while they were relatively rare and not too annoying in the last months, lately they start to become worse again and I even lost connection to my WLAN router completely a few times in the last days, which I could only regain by switching to a different WLAN channel (had to access router menu with the Notebook which I have in the same room as the router). It slowly starts to get annoying.

The signal strength is not ideal. In fact even my old router (Linksys WRT54G) had a better one according to Windows (probably not ideal measurement, but I didn't look at anything else back then), and according to inSSIDer 3 etc. I actually have a better signal to the neighbour house network...

Now a new situation also arrives since I will probably upgrade my connection to 100/2.5 for same price, maybe even 150/5. I don't think my Netgear will be able to give me anything near that bandwith. So I consider to buy a new router. I also might have to replace my somewhat old WLAN PCI adapter (Asus WL-130N), but I need your advice to decide on that.

Because of the distance and the walls inbetween I assume that 2,4 GHz will be the way to go rather than 5 GHz, but you may correct me. I cannot test 5 GHz with my current network since my adapter doesn't support 5 GHz.

I looked at the Router charts on the website and the Asus N66U seems to have the best 2,4 GHz Uplink (or do I have to look at Downlink?). The price of ~110 Euro here is quite a lot in my eyes for a router, but if it is worth it I am well considering it, if it means better stability and less annoyance with reasonable bandwith. According to the charts the difference to my WNDR3700 should be quite big? Or should I consider also other routers? Ideally I would want to avoid Netgear and D-Link though based on my previous experiences, unless you have some compelling arguments for those brands...

The WLAN serves primarily the Desktop PC I mentioned in the floor above. It also serves a Notebook which is in the same room as the router, so it should be no issue anyway, and another Desktop two floors above the router, but that one has very low priority as it is rarely used and doesn't need a very good connection.

 

[sinshiva]

hey,

before i begin, i want you to know that i actually prefer asus over netgear, but the main reason i chose asus was mostly cosmetic. (and i like some of asus' other products) i've also grown to thoroughly enjoy the asuswrt firmware, particularly merlin's fork. that said, asus has recently done themselves no favors by messing with the wireless drivers, temporarily, while they've been consolidating their firmwares. if you choose the asus router, you'll pretty much be required to use the most recent sdk5 variant of asuswrt-merlin to get the best performance.

so essentially, at this point in time, the asus routers may take a little more work to get running optimally, where you may find yourself getting much better performance from a recent netgear router, out of the box.

 

[gokkel]

hey,

before i begin, i want you to know that i actually prefer asus over netgear, but the main reason i chose asus was mostly cosmetic. (and i like some of asus' other products) i've also grown to thoroughly enjoy the asuswrt firmware, particularly merlin's fork. that said, asus has recently done themselves no favors by messing with the wireless drivers, temporarily, while they've been consolidating their firmwares. if you choose the asus router, you'll pretty much be required to use the most recent sdk5 variant of asuswrt-merlin to get the best performance.

so essentially, at this point in time, the asus routers may take a little more work to get running optimally, where you may find yourself getting much better performance from a recent netgear router, out of the box.

Hello,

a bit fiddling at the beginning is ok to me. When I used the Linksys WRT54G I have tried out several different third party firmwares. Actually this is something I planned to try on the Netgear WNDR3700 as well, however I had to notice quickly that this model doesn't work very well with DD-WRT (because of some issue I forgot) and provides actually much lower bandwith than the original firmware, so I had to revert to that.

I just want it to run decently after I have set it up

 

[sinshiva]

Hello,

a bit fiddling at the beginning is ok to me. When I used the Linksys WRT54G I have tried out several different third party firmwares. Actually this is something I planned to try on the Netgear WNDR3700 as well, however I had to notice quickly that this model doesn't work very well with DD-WRT (because of some issue I forgot) and provides actually much lower bandwith than the original firmware, so I had to revert to that.

I just want it to run decently after I have set it up

hey,

i don't think dd-wrt is particularly efficient for either netgear or the asus routers due to using more generic drivers. that all said, sounds like there's nothing holding you back from choosing your router. so i say get the asus router of your choice because they are prettier xD and also for asuswrt-merlin firmware, which is just awesome.

 

[jlake]

What is your internet connection type? PPPoE?

I wouldn't get the RT-N66U if I was going to get 150 Mbps PPPoE connection. Take a look at TP-Link if you have PPPoE. Plus they're much cheaper.

Asus/Broadcom is trying to improve their High Speed PPPoE ability, but TP-Link will handle it effortlessly.

 

[gokkel]

What is your internet connection type? PPPoE?

I wouldn't get the RT-N66U if I was going to get 150 Mbps PPPoE connection. Take a look at TP-Link if you have PPPoE. Plus they're much cheaper.

Asus/Broadcom is trying to improve their High Speed PPPoE ability, but TP-Link will handle it effortlessly.

Hello,

I have a cable connection, using DHCP instead of PPPoE. What TP-Link model do we talk about, the Archer C7? It costs the same here as the N66U, however it would have the ac standard of course.

 

[gokkel]

Ok, I read around in the forums and other stuff and my tendency still goes towards the Asus N66U. However I don't have to decide already now, as I will only change my connection maybe in the next month or so and I wouldn't have time for setting it up this month probably anyway.

What I forgot again was my WLAN PCI card (Asus WL-130N). Do you guys think it will be still fine or should I find a replacement for it? Or should I just try out first?

I also already looked in the charts for WLAN adapters on this website, however I had to notice the selection is rather limited, to say the least. If I should need a WLAN adapter, what can you recommend?

 

[sinshiva]

Ok, I read around in the forums and other stuff and my tendency still goes towards the Asus N66U. However I don't have to decide already now, as I will only change my connection maybe in the next month or so and I wouldn't have time for setting it up this month probably anyway.

What I forgot again was my WLAN PCI card (Asus WL-130N). Do you guys think it will be still fine or should I find a replacement for it? Or should I just try out first?

I also already looked in the charts for WLAN adapters on this website, however I had to notice the selection is rather limited, to say the least. If I should need a WLAN adapter, what can you recommend?

correct me if i'm wrong, but it looks like that thing runs 300mbit Draft N, might be wise to upgrade, but is probably something you should just test with the new router first. wait and see.

 

[gokkel]

correct me if i'm wrong, but it looks like that thing runs 300mbit Draft N, might be wise to upgrade, but is probably something you should just test with the new router first. wait and see.

This is correct, it is quite old already, which is why I was concerned

 

[gokkel]

Ok, I finally got some more time again. I also decided now that I will change my internet connection in the coming days / weeks to the bigger 150/5 connection.

I still plan on getting the Asus RT-N66U, since I didn't hear anything new lately anymore which would draw me towards a different model.

I am still not sure if I will replace my adapter. Now I will probably still try out my old card first to see if it works alright as suggested here, but I would kind of like to know what recommendations you have for a new adapter beforehand anyway, simply so I get an idea of what costs I have to calculate with if I decide to buy a new adapter.

There don't seem to be too many >= N900 adapters. Most seem to be around 30 Euro, which seems fine to me. There are also some ridiculously expensive PCIe cards from Asus for 80 Euro though, which would be quite hefty.

So if you could help me with this question once more, it would be very well appreciated, otherwise I still give my thanks to the answers made already.

 

[gokkel]

They switched my connection very quickly (half hour after asking my ISP), so I went ahead and ordered new stuff already on saturday, the Asus RT-N66U and a TP-Link WDN4800 PCIe adapter.

Today it arrived and I set it up now. The antennas on the WDN4800 are junk, I tested it shortly on my old router first and the signal and performance were a lot worse than on my old card. I feared such a thing might happen, since the old card had an external antenna that I could position a bit away from my computer instead of having it against a wall, but even when I put the PC in the middle of the room with antennas towards the Router, it was not very good.

But luckily I could just replace the antenna with my old one of the old Asus WL-130N card and that improved signal and performance strongly. Together with the Asus Router I got now a good performance increase. Signal strength is a bit better than on my old setup, and WLAN throughput seems a lot higher than before on my stability settings.

I didn't try all the settings yet on the Asus Router and wanted to try different drivers on the card as well in the next days, but so far I reach around 80-90 Mbps on Speedtest (before on stability settings around 30-35 Mbps). Obviously still a fair amount below my full connection speed (150 down), but I didn't expect to reach that in this room anyway. Was measured with 20 MHz 2,4 GHz.

5 GHz performance and signal strength is notably worse than 2,4 GHz as I predicted, but theoretically it would work.

I also tried different firmwares, the newest official from Asus, the newest Merlin build and the latest SDK5 build of Merlin. Performance on SDK5 seemed clearly better than the other. Sadly I read that SDK5 builds will be discontinued now? Well, will see what the future brings. So far I am quite happy with the Asus RT-N66U, but I will be only able to say definitely after some days of experience and some further experimenting.

So if someone else is interested into a WLAN adapter I would only consider the TP-Link WDN4800 if you calculate already in an antenna replacement.


PS: A notebook in the room of the router has also gotten a significant WLAN throughput boost, even though that one has only 1 stream in the integrated wlan adapter, so that speaks for the Asus router in comparison to the Netgear WNDR3700v2.

 

[L&LD]

Yes, I saw the same when I upgraded my Netgear WNDR3700v1 with the RT-N66U.

Depending on the antenna/streams and the drivers your clients are using; you should be able to get the full ISP speed from your RT-N66U with HW acceleration enabled.

You may want to see the following link for some suggestions on getting the best throughput on your new network. Upgrading to the new RMerlin firmware is also recommended as the RT-N66U will no longer be supported with the sdk5 builds.


http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showpost.php?p=103569&postcount=13

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
Sounds like you already made up your mind for a new router but what to lose for the last time. Have you tried Trondha's OpenWrt f/w specifically compiled for WNDR3700? When I
had WNDR3700V1 and V2 I depended on that f/w.

 

[L&LD]

Hi,
Sounds like you already made up your mind for a new router but what to lose for the last time. Have you tried Trondha's OpenWrt f/w specifically compiled for WNDR3700? When I
had WNDR3700V1 and V2 I depended on that f/w.

Tried searching for that, but google only returned this same post (that I'm quoting).

Can we have a link?

 

[gokkel]

@L&LD: I tried out now different drivers (don't think it changed a lot) and also adjusted the antennas in a W shape as suggested, which seems to have improved things a bit. I already had set the router to 100mW, short preamble and Wireless N only mode as well as 20 MHz only on 2.4GHz. I got the following results now on speedtest:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3286931696

I still can try a few of your additional suggestions in your link, I also will surely try out the newer firmware again at some point. I also am not sure if the speedtest server is even able to give me the full speed, the servers all give different results so I will have to do some further testing as well in the coming days. But the result in the latest speedtest seems already pretty nice to me, and I already think the investment into the router especially was worth it.

@TonyH: I could have used that advice before I got the new router I guess No, I didn't know about that firmware when I was still experimenting with DD-WRT etc. on the Netgear WNDR3700v2. Is the WLAN performance better on this than on the original firmware?


edit: There you go, some other speedtest server gave me this:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3286955521

This is already very close to the full speed. I guess I should just have tried the servers out with LAN connection first to find the right testing servers, oh well.

 

[L&LD]

gokkel,

Things are looking pretty good?

I would suggest trying different channels (rebooting both router and computer in between) in each band and seeing which is the overall best one for wireless use for both 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands (don't test 'all' the in between channels; only 1, 6 or 11 for 2.4GHz and the equivalent non-overlapping 5GHz channels).

I would also suggest setting your router to Auto instead of N Only mode.

 

[gokkel]

Today results didn't seem as high anymore and I felt performance was not completely stable.

I actually switched firmware now again, this time to the latest 374.39em build (before I tried the standard build) and that one seems better than SDK5 actually. Performance seems a lot more stable and I seem to get usually around 120-125 Mbps on speedtests now. Signal strength has dropped actually a bit, but doesn't seem to be a problem, and signal is still not bad anyway. I have not played around a lot yet with different channels, currently using channel 11 (before it was set on auto, which meant it was always using channel 6 though).

Since SDK5 is discontinued now anyway, I guess it will be best to stick to that build.

I am using the settings just like the ones you have suggested, although I will probably turn off 5 GHz radio completely since currently it won't be used. May change in the future though.

I will keep observing things


Last result with new firmware and settings:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3289270895

As I said, if the results stay at that level I am completely happy though.