I'm looking for some input from folks who have had "hands-on experience" with some of the higher end dual band wireless AP's.
Background:
I have a 4,500 square foot rancher (single level home) in a U shape floor plan, located in Southern California. We currently have a Linksys WRT610N on one end of the house near to and connected to the SB6120 DOCSIS 3 cable modem. The WRT610N serves as both a wireless AP as well as a wired gateway serving up DHCP for a Linksys E3000 that resides in the office/media room. The two routers are connected via CAT6. Both routers run WPA2-AES Personal (mainly because I'm too lazy to set up radius.)
We have 4 hardcore gamers, appleTV, shared wireless printing, iPhones, iPads, and several IP Video Cams for security. We use AirPlay to push content from our phones and/or pads to the AppleTV as well as concurrently stream content from the net. I do development work and it's not unusual for me to push and pull 25 to 50 Gig files to and from the cloud.
Needless to say we have some fairly heavy data transfer activity going on and it is not unusual to watch streaming content choke to a crawl often resulting in long load latencies on the video streaming devices along with frequent Max Headroom behavior.
I've run various speed tests from both routers and have decided to (in addition to verbally abusing Cox) upgrade the SB6120 to an SB6121 (with low expectations) to deal with the provider side of the issue and now want to do the same with the AP's (because you just can't blame the cable company for everything forever.)
Assume, for the sake of argument that signal strength to/from either AP is adequately strong and not an issue, and that the CAT6 run between AP's is well within spec.
So, after the changing the cable modem, I'm going to "upgrade" the AP's.
I've read a number of the reviews, looked at the stats, scratched my head, and decided to humbly ask members of the forum who have had hands-on experience to comment on the performance and reliability of their hardware and ask, if money were no object, which dual band, wireless AP's would you select for the job considering the amount of traffic we move.
In this scenario, I don't want to have to have to reboot/power cycle any hardware and I'm thinking that Lan to Wan throughput along with wireless concurrency and reliability are the most critical priorities.
I'm leaning towards a couple of Linksys E4200v1's since they are available locally (I like to support my local retailers) because they seem (based on the review here) to out perform the E4200v2's (depending on use) and because I can flash them with dd-wrt down the road if needed (a low priority consideration.)
Other routers I am considering are something from the Netgear WNDR series or the ASUS RT-N56U. This is the point where my head starts aching as there are numerous tradeoffs between the three manufacturer's products. If I assume that the backplane speed and wireless concurrency of each product is well in excess of our peak internal demand (and I realize that may be a reach) what, besides price, differentiates these products and makes one stand out over the rest?
Thanks in advance,
Jeff
Background:
I have a 4,500 square foot rancher (single level home) in a U shape floor plan, located in Southern California. We currently have a Linksys WRT610N on one end of the house near to and connected to the SB6120 DOCSIS 3 cable modem. The WRT610N serves as both a wireless AP as well as a wired gateway serving up DHCP for a Linksys E3000 that resides in the office/media room. The two routers are connected via CAT6. Both routers run WPA2-AES Personal (mainly because I'm too lazy to set up radius.)
We have 4 hardcore gamers, appleTV, shared wireless printing, iPhones, iPads, and several IP Video Cams for security. We use AirPlay to push content from our phones and/or pads to the AppleTV as well as concurrently stream content from the net. I do development work and it's not unusual for me to push and pull 25 to 50 Gig files to and from the cloud.
Needless to say we have some fairly heavy data transfer activity going on and it is not unusual to watch streaming content choke to a crawl often resulting in long load latencies on the video streaming devices along with frequent Max Headroom behavior.
I've run various speed tests from both routers and have decided to (in addition to verbally abusing Cox) upgrade the SB6120 to an SB6121 (with low expectations) to deal with the provider side of the issue and now want to do the same with the AP's (because you just can't blame the cable company for everything forever.)
Assume, for the sake of argument that signal strength to/from either AP is adequately strong and not an issue, and that the CAT6 run between AP's is well within spec.
So, after the changing the cable modem, I'm going to "upgrade" the AP's.
I've read a number of the reviews, looked at the stats, scratched my head, and decided to humbly ask members of the forum who have had hands-on experience to comment on the performance and reliability of their hardware and ask, if money were no object, which dual band, wireless AP's would you select for the job considering the amount of traffic we move.
In this scenario, I don't want to have to have to reboot/power cycle any hardware and I'm thinking that Lan to Wan throughput along with wireless concurrency and reliability are the most critical priorities.
I'm leaning towards a couple of Linksys E4200v1's since they are available locally (I like to support my local retailers) because they seem (based on the review here) to out perform the E4200v2's (depending on use) and because I can flash them with dd-wrt down the road if needed (a low priority consideration.)
Other routers I am considering are something from the Netgear WNDR series or the ASUS RT-N56U. This is the point where my head starts aching as there are numerous tradeoffs between the three manufacturer's products. If I assume that the backplane speed and wireless concurrency of each product is well in excess of our peak internal demand (and I realize that may be a reach) what, besides price, differentiates these products and makes one stand out over the rest?
Thanks in advance,
Jeff
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