The wireless situation in the house at the moment is a bit of a hodgepodge. We have cable internet with a dedicated modem. Connected to that we have a D-Link DIR-615, which our ISP gave us for free. Throughput is decent, when it works. The SSID likes to disappear randomly sometimes (annoying when you come home and are trying to get on wireless) and downloading a torrent of any kind will cause it to lock up unless the software is set to an obscenely low number of concurrent connections. I currently have it set to a "Global Max" of 50 connections and it still locks up the router sometimes.
Piggybacked off that modem is a Netgear WPN824v2 "RangeMax". It's my old apartment router. Rock solid, stable, better range than the D-Link, but limited by the fact that it's 802.11G even if it does support MIMO.
I'd like to cut down to one reliable modem without spending a ton of coin. The AC routers are sexy, but it seems that the good ones are quite expensive, and I'm not sure how the more modestly priced units perform, so it's tempting to get a better N router, but then I wonder why am I spending money just to sidegrade? The network needs to support two laptops, two phones, and one tablet. Large transfers do happen over the wireless network (transfers from TiVo to PC), so higher speeds would be nice.
Possible solutions as I see it:
Check for DD-WRT compatibility on the DIR-615. It's available for some hardware revisions but not others. Would this potentially solve the randomly missing SSID broadcast and torrent lockup issues?
Buy a good new N modem. Which one? Asus RT-N66U perhaps?
Buy a new AC modem. Again, which one? The Asus RT-AC66U reviews well. Watch for Thanksgiving deals maybe? Problem here is it would require a new adapter for the PC to enjoy the higher speeds, which is an added expense. The Monoprice AC router and adapter deal is tempting. http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=105&cp_id=10521&cs_id=1052102&p_id=11611&seq=1&format=2 It's not sexy, but the price is right if the performance is there.
Any thoughts from those with more experience with modern wireless gear?
Piggybacked off that modem is a Netgear WPN824v2 "RangeMax". It's my old apartment router. Rock solid, stable, better range than the D-Link, but limited by the fact that it's 802.11G even if it does support MIMO.
I'd like to cut down to one reliable modem without spending a ton of coin. The AC routers are sexy, but it seems that the good ones are quite expensive, and I'm not sure how the more modestly priced units perform, so it's tempting to get a better N router, but then I wonder why am I spending money just to sidegrade? The network needs to support two laptops, two phones, and one tablet. Large transfers do happen over the wireless network (transfers from TiVo to PC), so higher speeds would be nice.
Possible solutions as I see it:
Check for DD-WRT compatibility on the DIR-615. It's available for some hardware revisions but not others. Would this potentially solve the randomly missing SSID broadcast and torrent lockup issues?
Buy a good new N modem. Which one? Asus RT-N66U perhaps?
Buy a new AC modem. Again, which one? The Asus RT-AC66U reviews well. Watch for Thanksgiving deals maybe? Problem here is it would require a new adapter for the PC to enjoy the higher speeds, which is an added expense. The Monoprice AC router and adapter deal is tempting. http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=105&cp_id=10521&cs_id=1052102&p_id=11611&seq=1&format=2 It's not sexy, but the price is right if the performance is there.
Any thoughts from those with more experience with modern wireless gear?
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