Cutting The Cord Router Advice

[nicastro78]

My family is getting ready to cut traditional paid tv. Trying to decide between Asus RT-AC3100 and Netgear x8

Current setup
Cable Internet 200Mb / 10Mb plan will upgrade to 1Gb next year when available in area

3 Children 5 to 15 yrs of age, wife, and I
Will stream 4 1080p streams from Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, or Amazon prime at any given time.
Xbox one gaming from time to time
Ooma VoIP
ADT Pulse
iMac (15yr autistic son uses for school)
MacBook PRO
4 iPhones
3 iPads
1 Nexus 6

With streaming becoming very important in my household. Will a dual band router be enough? Or do I need to go to tri band? Range is not an issue in this equation assuming they are marginally equal.

Thank you for advice in advance


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[thiggins]

"Tri-band" is a misonmer. It's actually tri-radio, i.e. two 5 GHz radios, one handling lower channels, the other higher channels.

Unless all your devices are in the same room, range is always an issue, particularly with 5 GHz.

What are you currently using for a router and what problems do you see?

You might be fine with a single AC1900 class router. But you might need a second router for coverage and more bandwidth.

 

[nicastro78]

I have currently been using a 3rd Gen Apple AirPort Extreme router. I live in a 2300 sq ft home. Coverage has not been an issue. Bandwidth saturation has been an issue on the router. My kids have already been streaming for a while as we prepare them for non traditional tv. Currently we average 600GB of data usage a month. I anticipate this to double especially in summer when not in school. I prefer to not have to replace routers often. I would like to build into the equation streaming for 4K in the next year or two.

Cat 6 runs are not desirable at this time. (Blessed with technology skills horrible with regular tools) an AP connect with Gb link would be awesome but not in the cards. Have to do this with one wireless router. With Tri Radio it allows for better load balancing but is it worth the additional cost over a single 5Ghz band?

If I decide to go Tri Radio am I better off with going with an X8 or with an X6? It seems that all the new routers (Netgear X8. Asus RT-AC3100, Asus RT-AC5300) with the new Broadcom chips are working really well out of the box with few reported growing pains

Thank you


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[thiggins]

Coverage and bandwidth go hand in hand. When devices have a weaker signal, they connect at lower rates. Lower rates limit available bandwidth by taking more airtime away from faster devices.

You can get more bandwidth by steering slower devices to 2.4 GHz and using 5 GHz for faster devices. But that assumes all devices get a medium to strong signal.

An easy experiment is to put all your streaming devices in the room where the router is and start them streaming. If all devices do ok, then you really DO have a range, coverate problem.

 

[Trip]

Given your topology and plans, I'm not sure any single consumer Wi-SoC box if going to give you the wifi availability and packet handling performance required for baseline quality of service, be it at 200Mb or 2Gb of WAN.

That said, I'd buy whatever box functions best as an access point first, router second. Then if (more likely when) performance needs a boost in any areas (radios, routing, QoS, switching, etc.) you can still retain ROI by using the all-in-one as an AP and dropping in whatever else is needed (x86 router, more APs, proper switches, etc.).

 

[nicastro78]

Thank you for the for the advice I am going to try and convince the wife to let run cat 6 along the base board and run my old Apple router as an access point. I will try and offload the slower devices to this AP. I will then connect my faster AC devices to my new router. I was able to get the Netgear x8 today for only $20 more than the Asus router. I decided that in the next couple months I will want to also add a NAS box and this router has the link aggregation for it. Maybe if I buy pieces over a few months my wife will be happier the the pocket book isn't shrinking all at once.

Again thank you for all the help


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[thiggins]

You don't need CAT6. 5e will work just fine. And you can get flat cable
http://amzn.to/1mQPE5o

 

[stevech]

I have several < 20ft. flat-cable cat5e cords. They're great - flexible. Can hide under carpet and tucked into baseboards.
I wonder if it works well with 1000BT for long cable lengths. Capacitance per ft. specs.