Asus RT-N66U replacement?

[Chippy_boy]

I wonder if anyone could please help me choose my next router?

Currently I have an old Asus RT-N66U which I have to say has been absolutely brilliant. It's totally bomb-proof and stays up for month upon month upon month without any issues at all. It get rebooted only when we have a power cut, which is perhaps once a year!

But unfortunately, clearly it has no AC wireless and increasingly I have devices that do support AC, so I'd like a new AC router.

I am tempted by the R7000, but I can get the R7800 for only £10 more. Would it be silly to get the R7000 when the R7800 offer so much more for so little extra? Or would the R7000 be the better "bomb-proof" replacement for the Asus?

I don't really need (or would know how to use) any fancy facilities. The only thing I would mention is that I use wireless HD video senders which uses the 5GHz channel 36 and I need to steer clear of that.

Edit: Should I also consider the N7000 (I'm on BT Infinity 2) or is it best to steer away from routers with build-in modems?

Thanks for your thoughts!

 

[L&LD]

Advice; steer away from combo modem/routers.

The 'bomb-proof' replacement to the RT-N66U is the RT-AC68U (or one of it's best incarnations to date, the RT-AC1900P if you have access to a BestBuy where you live).

The NetGear products may offer great hardware, but the code, software and extended support (past the first few months of introduction) is sorely lacking vs. Asus routers. If you want to use your new router, securely, and for the longest possible time, Asus routers are still the best option today over anything else available (consumer).

 

[RogerSC]

Given the choice between the R7000 and the R7800 for a little more, I'd definitely go for the R7800. I have both, and the R7800 has better wireless on 5GHz. (the band that I care about), and has a faster CPU. The main benefit of the faster CPU, as I see it, is that if you get into using a home VPN it should run faster on an R7800.

By the way, the argument that Netgear doesn't support it's "flagship" routers for very long seems odd to me. They are still issuing new firmware for the R7000, almost 3 years after it came on the market. I would suggest being careful which Netgear router that you select (this goes for other router manfacturers as well), but my take on this is that both the R7000 and R7800 will have long support lives from Netgear. The R7000 already has had years of support and is continuing to be supported. And the R7800 stock firmware is the best in terms of reliability and performance that I've seen at this point in the life of a router before. My R7800 has currently been up for over 3 weeks on the latest firmware. The last time that I took it down was to try dd-wrt firmware, and now I'm back on stock firmware again.

There's also a Netgear support person monitoring this forum, and he has been very forthcoming and helpful.

One suggestion is to look at the reviews of both the R7000 and R7800 on this site, and compare the features and performance of each. That might give you a better feel about what choice to make.

 

[Killhippie]

I wonder if anyone could please help me choose my next router?

Currently I have an old Asus RT-N66U which I have to say has been absolutely brilliant. It's totally bomb-proof and stays up for month upon month upon month without any issues at all. It get rebooted only when we have a power cut, which is perhaps once a year!

But unfortunately, clearly it has no AC wireless and increasingly I have devices that do support AC, so I'd like a new AC router.

I am tempted by the R7000, but I can get the R7800 for only £10 more. Would it be silly to get the R7000 when the R7800 offer so much more for so little extra? Or would the R7000 be the better "bomb-proof" replacement for the Asus?

I don't really need (or would know how to use) any fancy facilities. The only thing I would mention is that I use wireless HD video senders which uses the 5GHz channel 36 and I need to steer clear of that.

Edit: Should I also consider the N7000 (I'm on BT Infinity 2) or is it best to steer away from routers with build-in modems?

Thanks for your thoughts!

I would not call Asus support fantastic tbh, sadly most home router manufacturers have their good and bad sides. As far as Netgear the R7000 has been having patches for the last 3 years and Netgear have been pretty proactive patching R7800 which was much more stable out of the gate than the R7000. The R7800 which is still a better 4x4 Mu-Mimo router than anything Asus has at this time mainly because of its Qualcomm chipset. The R7800 is a great router and you would get good service out of it. The routers runs cooler that its Broadcom siblings, it has Streamboost if you need a half way decent adaptive QoS. All in all I would say the R7800 is a good buy. Also as has been said avoid all in one routers if you can, you will get a better separate setup than and all in one IMHO