Budget router with good coverage ?(c1200,rt-ac1200, dir-842 or rt-ac53)

[BigBrainedBrett]

Hi, newbie here.

So I'm looking to buy a router for my mom's house. It's an L shaped one-story house. The router will be placed at the top of the L and I want the signal to reach a a room at the "toe" of the L. Her current router is a 10 year old unreliable 20$ piece of -- that constantly needs to reset and doesn't reach the room I'm staying in when I'm visiting. It's annoying for me but unfortunately it's not very important to her so she's unwilling to move the router to a more central location and she's not willing to spend a lot of money for a decent networking solution.

The only thing I'm looking for is coverage and reliability. Her budget is ~90 USD but I live in Sweden where router prices are high. Features like 3g/4g modem/file server/print server will not be used. She's got a 100/100 mbit fiber connection but speed is not very important. Wired performance does not matter since all devices will be conncted wireless. I've been mainly looking at routers with 3+ external antennas since I imagine it can provide a bit better range in certain situations. Reliability is important because I can't go over there to help every time the Internet goes down.

Router prices are high in my country and popular choices like the Asus RT-AC58U, Asus RT-N66U, Asus RT-AC1200G Plus, D-Link DIR-878/9 are outside of my budget.

I've narrowed the search down to four options. The Asus RT-AC1200(89 USD), Asus RT-AC53 (85 USD), TP-Link Archer c1200 (89 USD) and the D-link dir-842 (80 USD) (links to official spec sheet provided, converted their price in local currency to USD). Which one of these would you prefer? Can I get away with an even cheaper router? Right now I'm leaning towards the RT-AC1200 or the TP-Link archer c1200 since they both got good review on digitalcitizen even though the asus review is for the RT-AC1200G Plus version.

Would be very grateful for some guidance.

 

[lighting]

I would think of it as two separate problems. You need a new wifi router so your mom can have reliable internet, and you want to be able to get wifi in the far corner of the house.

The first problem is easy -- most any new brand-name router should be reliable and give her what she needs.

For the second problem, I assume you have a typical Swedish house with nice solid masonry walls that do well at stopping wifi. I would try and borrow a unit like the ones you're considering and make sure you can reach the far corner of the house before you buy anything expensive. Or make sure you can return whatever you get. 5 gHz isn't going to matter to you -- it's very unlikely to make it to the far corner of the house. But a wifi repeater at the center of the house (so it's not looking through the outside walls) or a directional access point like the Engenius ENS-202 might work better than even the best wifi router. The repeater could be a second basic wifi router in repeater mode. You might even try it with her old router, see how that works. Though if it's ten years old it certainly deserves a respectful trip to the recyclers.

 

[mreg376]

Hi, newbie here.

So I'm looking to buy a router for my mom's house. It's an L shaped one-story house. The router will be placed at the top of the L and I want the signal to reach a a room at the "toe" of the L. Her current router is a 10 year old unreliable 20$ piece of -- that constantly needs to reset and doesn't reach the room I'm staying in when I'm visiting. It's annoying for me but unfortunately it's not very important to her so she's unwilling to move the router to a more central location and she's not willing to spend a lot of money for a decent networking solution.

The only thing I'm looking for is coverage and reliability. Her budget is ~90 USD but I live in Sweden where router prices are high. Features like 3g/4g modem/file server/print server will not be used. She's got a 100/100 mbit fiber connection but speed is not very important. Wired performance does not matter since all devices will be conncted wireless. I've been mainly looking at routers with 3+ external antennas since I imagine it can provide a bit better range in certain situations. Reliability is important because I can't go over there to help every time the Internet goes down.

Router prices are high in my country and popular choices like the Asus RT-AC58U, Asus RT-N66U, Asus RT-AC1200G Plus, D-Link DIR-878/9 are outside of my budget.

I've narrowed the search down to four options. The Asus RT-AC1200(89 USD), Asus RT-AC53 (85 USD), TP-Link Archer c1200 (89 USD) and the D-link dir-842 (80 USD) (links to official spec sheet provided, converted their price in local currency to USD). Which one of these would you prefer? Can I get away with an even cheaper router? Right now I'm leaning towards the RT-AC1200 or the TP-Link archer c1200 since they both got good review on digitalcitizen even though the asus review is for the RT-AC1200G Plus version.

Would be very grateful for some guidance.

Take a look at the Asus RT-ACH13. It sells for about $65US, and it provides excellent coverage in my three floor vacation house, with excellent stability.

 

[doczenith1]

None of the above. While slightly over your budget the Asus RT-AC1750 (same as RT-AC66U_B1) can be had for 100 USD. The RT-AC1750 has the same hardware as the RT-AC1900 (same as RT-AC68U) in a slightly different form factor. The reason for the difference in speed rating is that the AC1900 gets 150 more Mbps on the 2.4 band when used with a compatible 3 stream client using a faster modulation scheme.