Router recommendations

[mycarsavw]

The router (Netgear WNR2000v5) supplied with my recent telephone installation is dire. I can live with the odd restart but it's now started to decide to drop all WiFi connections weekly causing untold misery while I reboot it during office hours. I've had enough and it needs to go.

The replacement doesn't need to be balls out business grade, it just needs to not be cheap consumer grade.

What I have;

TalkTalk Business 70/20 FTTC using the BTOR modem.
Basic port forwarding is required as everything else is managed on a Smoothwall.
It's going into a Victorian office building spread over 5 floors so a strong WiFi signal is essential. When it's working, the Netgear covers all floors.
It needs to comfortably support 15 or more WiFi devices connected at any one time as well as wired general office traffic without falling over.

Over to you please.

[Vowo]

Saw this and thought of you, found it on Hotukdeals:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/.../?tag=ho01f-21

for around £104, perhaps not good enough for what you're after though?

[mycarsavw]

Slightly reluctant to replace a Netgear with a Netgear, but I'll give it a look - thank you.

[spacein_vader]

The router (Netgear WNR2000v5) supplied with my recent telephone installation is dire. I can live with the odd restart but it's now started to decide to drop all WiFi connections weekly causing untold misery while I reboot it during office hours. I've had enough and it needs to go.

The replacement doesn't need to be balls out business grade, it just needs to not be cheap consumer grade.

What I have;

TalkTalk Business 70/20 FTTC using the BTOR modem.
Basic port forwarding is required as everything else is managed on a Smoothwall.
It's going into a Victorian office building spread over 5 floors so a strong WiFi signal is essential. When it's working, the Netgear covers all floors.
It needs to comfortably support 15 or more WiFi devices connected at any one time as well as wired general office traffic without falling over.

Over to you please.

If it's the WiFi causing the problem have you considered leaving the router in place but disabling the WiFi & buying one or more Wireless APs?

Ubiquiti do some entry grade enterprise PoE models that can be ceiling mounted for around £70 each. They have been reviewed well (considering one for my house,) and they mesh if you need more than 1.

I'm looking at the AC Lite model.

[MrJim]

I have an Asus N66U wireless router, which has been pretty much bomb-proof. It's currently on 280 days up-time, & the last restart was the fault of my ISP, not the router.

[ik9000]

My netgear nighthawk has been fine, really stable. You've not just been given the virgin hub3 have you? They are dire and were the cause of my drop outs etc. Once that was replaced with the old hub2.5 all the problems went away.

[Smudger]

My Asus RT-AC87U has been pretty bombproof as well. It's AC2400, but they do an AC3200 version which is actually less money...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Wireless-...sus%2B88u&th=1

The newer AC88U has a few more bells and whistles, and is a bit faster, but it's £240!

[mycarsavw]

If it's the WiFi causing the problem have you considered leaving the router in place but disabling the WiFi & buying one or more Wireless APs?

Ubiquiti do some entry grade enterprise PoE models that can be ceiling mounted for around £70 each. They have been reviewed well (considering one for my house,) and they mesh if you need more than 1.

I'm looking at the AC Lite model.

I had considered adding APs - I've used a TP-Link N300 in a previous installation - but am I not just sticking a plaster over the problem? Happy to be convinced otherwise.

I could probably get away with one PoE AP on the central floor/landing too.

My netgear nighthawk has been fine, really stable. You've not just been given the virgin hub3 have you? They are dire and were the cause of my drop outs etc. Once that was replaced with the old hub2.5 all the problems went away.

The router is a Netgear WNR2000v5, I'm not sure if that's what Virgin use or not.

I have an Asus N66U wireless router, which has been pretty much bomb-proof. It's currently on 280 days up-time, & the last restart was the fault of my ISP, not the router.

My Asus RT-AC87U has been pretty bombproof as well. It's AC2400, but they do an AC3200 version which is actually less money...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/Wireless-...sus%2B88u&th=1

The newer AC88U has a few more bells and whistles, and is a bit faster, but it's £240!

My personal router is an Asus N66U running Tomato Shibby and while I agree it's bomb proof, do we think it's capable of doing what I want to do with it?

I'm not too up to speed (heh!) on ACxxx either. I presume it succeeds a/b/g/n and is backwards compatible? Wiki suggests it's not as far reaching as N though. Any realworld feedback would be very much appreciated.

Ta!

[peterb]

I'd back up the recommendation for Ubiquiti APs, certainly in the enterprise grade sector. As for routers, I still user Draytek as my first go-to mfr - not the cheapest, but I found them to be rock solid. The latest Draytek APs are also pretty good and me.sh will with the routers with a common administration interface (via the router) which makes set up and administration a lot simpler.

[ik9000]

The router is a Netgear WNR2000v5, I'm not sure if that's what Virgin use or not.

Quick google suggests that is a qualcomm chip, the VMhub3 is based on the intel puma 6 chipset so doubt it's the same issue.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/0..._puma_6_arris/
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/0...vial_to_crash/

[Saracen]

I'd back up the recommendation for Ubiquiti APs, certainly in the enterprise grade sector. As for routers, I still user Draytek as my first go-to mfr - not the cheapest, but I found them to be rock solid. The latest Draytek APs are also pretty good and me.sh will with the routers with a common administration interface (via the router) which makes set up and administration a lot simpler.

I was just about to say I was surprised nobody had suggested Draytek, when I found you had. So I won't say that. But I concur. Very good ... at a price.

[mycarsavw]

Thanks chaps.

I actually have two Drayteks (Vigor 2830) in my box of tech that I'd completely forgotten about. They were part of the aforementioned telephone installation and were supposed to be used to link two sites but we ended up putting everyone in one site instead.

I could potentially bin the Netgear, replace it with the Vigor 2830 and then add an Ubiquiti AP (I quite like the look of this one).

[buttersideup]

I have a client with ~30 wifi clients (including many heavy users) in one open plan office, which is in the middle of town on the 9th floor - a site scan showed over 100 SSIDs in a couple of minutes.

Various access points were unreliable (including Netgear enterprise ones, and Cisco/Linksys). In the end I settled on a couple of TP-Link tl-wdr4900 running OpenWRT, and they've been really excellent. I strongly recommend them (or their replacements - the Archer C7 v2), running either OpenWRT or LEDE (soon to be merged back into OpenWRT along with its Linux kernel wifi improvements), I've also replaced a couple of Drayteks with them since, and have installed 9 with 4 clients, either as access points (with multiple VLANS), or the same, but with routing and/or OpenVPN too. I haven't seen anything commercially available which can beat LEDE with ath9k hardware for latency and throughput with multiple clients and/or congested links (with ath10k hardware and/or the current OpenWRT release close behind).

[gerhardbieber]

I have Asus DSL N12U. and it also pretty bombproof!

[Dashers]

As above, use Ubiquiti for your wifi access points. Keep your routing function separate.

For router, get something running pfSense, either on of their own bits of hardware, or any bit of kit running it virtually. Best thing I ever did to my home network.

[dave87]

I have found the TP-Link Archer C7 to be a good unit. I've used it solely for home use, but it does have a 24 port GbE switch and a (lightly populated) 48 port 10/100 switch connected to it and it's been fine.