Best one for me?

[Jawn]

I currently live in the Philippines, so the reason I only have limited choices of what router I am able to get. They are:

-Buffalo Airstation N600 (cheapest)

-Netgear WNDR3700 N600

-Belkin N750 Db (Most expensive)

-ASUS RT-N15U (found some more not sure if this on is dual band?)

I currently have a Belkin N router, the reason for upgrading is because I'm told I'll have better connectiviy with a dual band router? We have about 8 devices connected including one wired, but normally only 5 being used at once.

Is it worth upgrading and which of the 3 is best? We live in a 300sq/m house.

If you have anyother suggestion I'll try have a better look around for it. I would like to avoid Linksys by cisco I've heard they recently had some changes with the small print ^_^

Thanks

 

[Computer Abuse]

If you've had good luck with belkin stick with their products to support the company. I personally like netgear i'm not sure how they fare in todays market but they do make good switches and routers.

 

[Pinky]

Buffalo is on-par with generic branded items.

Belkin's networking gear is sub standard IMO, and I've seen more issues with them than any other manufacturer.

Asus makes okay gear (I use the N16 with DDWRT on it -- works great, and is dual band). There's minor gripes here and there, but overall they appear to be selling quality routers. Just hope you don't need to RMA it, Asus has notoriously poor RMA service.

I've had a lot of experience with Netgear and I feel they are one of the better home solutions available for the price. Not without issues and occassional bad units, but everyone has those and the internet seems to amplify the problems. Plus, netgear sells a lot of routers...

 

[c00l3st]

if you do live in philippines i could help you out. im a pinoy living here in abu dhabi.

which isp are you using btw ? pldt ? technotel/bayantel/tnt/sun/globe/Zap if your under any of them the best one to pair with them is the cisco 9500 300n router price is arround 2500pesos-3000. if you get buffalo/netgear/asus or any high end routers your just wasting money. "you know what i mean" 1mb on them is like 700kbps,

 

[Jawn]

if you do live in philippines i could help you out. im a pinoy living here in abu dhabi.

which isp are you using btw ? pldt ? technotel/bayantel/tnt/sun/globe/Zap if your under any of them the best one to pair with them is the cisco 9500 300n router price is arround 2500pesos-3000. if you get buffalo/netgear/asus or any high end routers your just wasting money. "you know what i mean" 1mb on them is like 700kbps,

Im with PLDT at the moment, we have found some higher packages and will be using 5mbps. I live In Makati at the moment. I guess then if it will not really make much diffrence. I just thought it might speed up streaming on the ipad.
Im not really fond of Linksys by cisco

 

[Audioaficionado]

I've had the best luck with Linksys/Cisco products.

 

[c00l3st]

if you live by makati area near by bangkal or guadalupe you should probably use atnt or bayantell + a 300n router of any brand. pldt is good with bandwith's but not with latency's specially in your area. too many offices and establishments. you'll get luck on peak times. though id highly recommend going for Sun cellular's package or bayantell not much of load and gives better latency than bandwith.

 

[Merlin7777]

Indeed, a router upgrade may not fix your issues. First things first, check and see if there is a firmware update for your router, as that often fixes wireless issues with common devices.

You talk about connectivity. What connectivity issues are you having? Are devices getting kicked off because your router can't handle the load? Or are you just having too many devices using the net at the same time?

Either of those can be fixed by possibly installing a 3rd party firmware such as DDWRT or TomatoUSB. You can bump up the wireless transmit power to increase range, or use the QOS services to prevent any one device from hogging the net to itself.

I personally have the N600 (WZR-AG300H) from Buffalo and it works like a champ. I have it running rev. 18024 like a champ and it runs with 4 or 5 laptops, 3+ cellphones, a wireless printer, and an Xbox on it without even breaking a sweat (this is with DDWRT Community, not the default Buffalo version).

I have QOS services enabled so that I can simultaneously torrent and watch HD videos on YouTube without buffering. It really does work wonderfully.

I too have heard of the recent Cisco/Linksys debacle (thank you SecurityNow) and will never buy there routers again. Even if I did, I'd throw DDWRT or TomatoUSB on there anyways.

Asus' recent routers (N66U especially) have been the talk of the interwebs, especially running TomatoUSB Shibby version. The darn things even have 1GB of RAM on 'em... And that's just for routing. With TomatoUSB installed, you can have it act as a router, network share, bittorrent client, dlna server, and QOS service, all on IPV6, at the same time. It's a sick router, if expensive.

 

[Audioaficionado]

I too have heard of the recent Cisco/Linksys debacle (thank you SecurityNow) and will never buy there routers again. Even if I did, I'd throw DDWRT or TomatoUSB on there anyways.

Could you elaborate some on this? My Linksys WRT54GS is a few years old and could be rooted with DDWRT if I needed to. Don't know about Tomato.

Edit: is this the one? "Cisco's all-your-bits-are-belong-to-us privacy/surveillance debacle"

 

[Merlin7777]

The Cisco/Linksys debacle is really only an issue on their newer routers, specifically the 4000+ routers (not dollars, version), as they have customized, "pretty" firmware that has a backdoor to Cisco. This is the "Connect Cloud" feature that they advertise.

The older routers (such as yours) are not affected, as they do not have the Connect Cloud functionality builtin. The nice thing about the older, WRT54G/GL/GS, etc, is that they were very sturdy routers and have a very broad support by DDWRT and TomatoUSB together. The only negative is that they are G only (instead of N) and don't have dual band (2.4GHz and 5GHz) support.

So to answer your question, yes, that's the debacle. It's not an issue for you with your older firmware, but you will have no issue switching to DDWRT or TomatoUSB if you are curious or want more features (plus they are open source, which is always a bonus).

 

[Audioaficionado]

My Linksys isn't even my gateway router. It only serves as a wireless link to a few portable devices in the home so it can't really call home if the gateway says no. All my families desktops are hard wired to the Motorola gateway.

 

[grumperfish]

^^^
It may not affect you (or me for that matter), but for anyone with a standard bridged DSL modem, the Cisco/Cloud thing is a massive security breach.

Personally I don't really like Linksys/Cisco products, as their earlier offerings required 3rd-party firmwares to be useful, and their recent products have overheating problems due to poor enclosures and anemic heatsinks. Also the stock firmware still sucks compared to Netgear. I don't see this changing anytime soon.

I wouldn't use a Belkin product if I got it for free, though ASUS/Buffalo are OK if you can flash DD-WRT or TomatoUSB.


I'd go for the 3700 out of those choices, as Netgear is the only consumer router manufacturer right now that makes stable devices that actually work fine with the stock firmware. I like my 3700v2 as it hasn't given me any issues on the default firmware (using it as an AP as I have a smoothwall router/firewall), it's simultaneous dual-band, and the specs are sufficient to handle multiple streaming clients simultaneously. 5ghz range isn't perfect (it's 5ghz so that's to be expected), but the 2.4ghz range is fine for a medium-sized house. I've been using mine lately with an online game, and latency is 10-13ms to the gateway so I don't really have any complaints about it.

 

[Audioaficionado]

It's funny how we all have different experiences. My last Netgear fried it's processor in less than a year. My room was only 30°C that summer LOL. Maybe it was just a bum model or a lemon amongst the otherwise bowl of cherries.

 

[grumperfish]

It's funny how we all have different experiences. My last Netgear fried it's processor in less than a year. My room was only 30°C that summer LOL. Maybe it was just a bum model or a lemon amongst the otherwise bowl of cherries.

Older Netgear white-box routers were honestly pretty terrible, but they've improved drastically recently.

 

[Merlin7777]

Indeed, I prefer to stick with Buffalo, Asus, or Netgear for routers. I have an old Linksys WRT54GL that has been a champ though, except it only does G (just an old model, nobodys fault).

I don't really trust other manufacturers anymore, and Cisco/Linksys just got added to that list. It's a shame though, as the Linksys routers are what started the open source firmware projects in the first place...