Read more.Is 802.11ac ready for the mainstream?
Read more.Is 802.11ac ready for the mainstream?
No usb 3 is a big let down
Being beaten by the Homehub3 on 2.4GHz at distance is also a big no no...
AC just needs more time to develop IMO. I am still fine on my 5 year linksys router that is only up to wireless G. Been more than enough for my family.
Sky Router (new white one) has actually been better for us than a HH3, better throughput and better signal....we can't saturate that so I'm pretty sure that we'll be fine. However I do have a managed Gigabit Switch and CAT6 for important ahem "stuff"
Old puter - still good enuff till I save some pennies!
Why would you spend £170 on this when most broadband supplier give you a router for free...
Because the router that most broadband suppliers "give" you is of poor quality? Certainly that's a complaint that most Virgin Media customers will be all to aware of.
That said, I couldn't even begin to justify the cost of this router when there doesn't seem to be much in the way of concrete advantages for the typical home user.
To be honest I think one of the ways AC is most helpful is it requires a minimum of 2 antennas iirc, most of the bad N-grade configurations of the world are caused by either not supporting 5GHz or by using a single antenna, which respectively limit you to the very busy 2.4GHz band (takes a huge chunk out of speed in my experience) and to the lower speed variants (like my N-grade nexus 4 only pairs at 72mbit maximum, whereas my N-grade laptops will link at 300 and 450mbit because I chose 2 and 3 antenna cards).
I also find it a bit odd that the quoted speed for AC is 1.3gbit/s when for instance Intel only sell 2 antenna cards, so the most you'll get is 867mbit.
Apart from the issues I've raised above, more wifi speed is always good, though it'll be another generation at least before our routers can max out the potential speed of AC.
As for expensive routers for home use, yeah most people will only have to spend £30-50 to cover all their needs, there are those that go above and beyond though. I bought an Asus RT-N66U and I don't come close to maxing out its abilities, I just needed something with the rock solid reliability of Linux (now running Tomato) and the speed of a modern device (wrt54gl couldn't stream high bit rate 1080p content over wifi, not enough bandwidth). If I used it as a NAS as well, ran the torrent client (transmission) , used it as a vpn, ran multiple subnets and virtual wifi networks for guests, used heavy QoS and everything else though it'd be worthwhile spending as much as I did.
If you can't install DD-WRT/Tomato/etc on it, then it's almost worthless. The stock firmwares on almost every router is fairly poor in terms of stability and features, you're at the mercy of a commodity manufacturer if a security flaw ever appears, and if there's an auto-update function then features you purchased may suddenly disappear (e.g. the Cisco Linksys 'connect cloud' fiasco).
The Asus rt ac66u is still better as it provides antennas, though for the price I wish they added usb 3 it would be great to convert an old SSD into a nas drive.
usb 3 is on the ac68u thats due out anytime.
Capitalization is the difference between helping your Uncle Jack
off a horse and helping your uncle jack off a horse.
crossy (14-08-2013)
Laptop - Macbook Pro Retina 13" (Early 2015) i5/8GB/256GB
Desktop 1 - iMac 27" (late 2012) i7/32GB/1TB Fusion Drive
Desktop 2 - i7 2600K/32GB/1TB/GTX 760
Server - HP DL160 G6 2 x Hex Core Xenon x5650/64GB/8TB
NAS - ASUSTOR 604T ATOM Dual Core/3GB/16TB
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)