what router to buy for minimum fidgeting?

[Darren Dirt]

I just feel a bit overwhelmed by all of you techies with your TLAs and ETLAs while I have the simplest setup possible at home with just the basic modem/router that Shaw placed in my apartment about 23 months ago.

[Melbosa]

I just feel a bit overwhelmed by all of you techies with your TLAs and ETLAs while I have the simplest setup possible at home with just the basic modem/router that Shaw placed in my apartment about 23 months ago.

OK, so you do know what a router is then

[Mr. Analog]

I just feel a bit overwhelmed by all of you techies with your TLAs and ETLAs while I have the simplest setup possible at home with just the basic modem/router that Shaw placed in my apartment about 23 months ago.

OK, so you do know what a router is then [emoji14]

Duh it's a woodworking tool! [emoji1787]

Sent from my SM-T810 using Tapatalk

[Tom]

Ive been using pfsense on a pcengines apu2c4 for a while now, since my older soekris net6501 died from that famous intel atom cpu problem that they dumped on their customers. I believe it led to soekris essentially going out of the network appliance business.

Im mostly happy with it but pfsense is sometimes not as flexible as if like and i have to get into the advanced configs of some packages and add raw config for certian things. The apu2c4 is also not quite as grunty as id like sometimes. But for the most part its good.

For wifi i have a ubiquity unifi ap ac pro. Works great. So few problems crop up. The amount of times i had to reboot and fiddle with consumer routers was infuriating compared to this setup. Of course i also dont drive it as hard as i used to. I havent downloaded a torrent in many moons.

[Thorin]

Okay, I've had the new router hooked up for two days now and not a single spontaneous reboot.  That's a good thing.  I'm also now able to stay on the 5GHz network even on the other side of the house, while maintaining 3 out of 4 bars.  So this router definitely has better range and a stronger signal.

One of my teammates had a problem with the Shaw modem/router combo not reaching the far side of his house.  He bought the same AC86U router yesterday and set it up today, he now has full 5GHz on the far side of his house, too, when he used to have to use a wifi extender just to connect to the 2.4GHz network.

Oh, and I definitely drive my routers hard.  It's not unusual to be maxing out the download with torrents, sending out three streams to remote Plex users, watching two or three more Plex streams locally, and have a video call going all at the same time.

[Lazybones]

Glad it is such an improvement.

5GHz coverage is always smaller than 2.4Ghz.  The size / layout of your house and what it is made  of  limits coverage.

In my house I could not get 5GHz to cover my bedroom at all until I put an AP on the same floor. So I currently run an AP in the basement and one in the upstairs. 

I generally liked my Asus router with Merlin quite a lot but it wasn?t enough for my current homes layout.

I am also sold on having a separate router and AP configuration now but that is probably because my professional specialty is in networking and maintaining and configuring it isn?t a big deal to me.

[Tom]

Glad you got things sorted.

Newer APs will have fancy features like MMIO, MU-MIMO, and beam forming. They all help with signal strength and whatnot.

So if you have issues with signal with newer wireless devices and have an older router, deffinitely think about an AP upgrade.

I still have that asus router i got and it worked rather well but i still prefer the unifi i can mount on my ceiling and power via ethernet.

Ive been thinking about just switching to ubuiquity's ecosystem. That way i have a single interface to manage all network devices. Im already familiar with it, so its been a serious consideration. I think the only reason i didnt get the ubnt firewall device was the similar price option to the pcengines i got was just a little anemic. Next time i look into it i may go all in. We shall see.