Needing replacment for dying E4200

[WhiteZero]

My old Linksys E4200 is starting to give up the ghost. It's randomly rebooting once or twice a day on the stock firmware. Shibby Tomato no longer suits me sadly, as it has very limited routing performance, topping out at around 100Mbit WAN routing, and has no NAT Cut-Through option to get around that.. I was really hoping to hold out until 802.11ax devices came down in price, but it looks like I'll just have to aim for a decent AC router.

So I'd like a decent replacement for under $200, maybe with better range than the E4200. I've got a 1200sqft ranch, so signal is good until you get to the far end. I do have a second AP in the basement that covers that floor and some of the far end of the home, but it would be nice to have 1st floor overage from the new router/AP.

I only have 2 smartphones, 1 tablet, and 1 PC (limited to 2.4Ghz) on wifi, along with my main PC on wired and a console. So I know I don't need anything very high end, just something with decent range and routing throughput to cover my 250Mbit cable connection (which I'm sure any modern router can handle), maybe increasing to 500Mbit if fiber ever lands in my neighborhood.

I'm a bit of a power user, using Tomato for many years now. Though it seems like most OEM firmware today has most, if not more, of the features I'd want to utilize anyway.

Doing my research, it looks like the Netgear R7800 is very nice, but it's also at the top end of my budget. Though with Black Friday coming up soon, it might get a nice discount. TheWirecutter recommends the R7000P because it feature Band Steering. But SNB seems to think that feature is overrated and that model is overall inferior to the R7000. The ASUS RT-AC86U also looks like a good choice for the price as well.

 

[Trip]

One nice component of the Asus units is Merlin firmware, which is just AsusWRT, but way more bug-fixed and feature-complete. It also includes fq_codel as an optional qdisc, which works wonders against bufferbloat. Many would argue that after 200 or so Mb/s, it's less noticeably beneficial, but depending on what your upload is and how much simultaneous traffic you have, it can still be quite helpful, and the 1 to 2 Ghz ARM CPUs on these all-in-ones can probably run fq_codel based throughput up into the 300-400 Mb/s range, maybe higher? Regarding Netgear, to the best of my knowledge, there isn't really a Merlin-equivalent that is as well integrated and natively stable. Tomato and DD-WRT Kong are available, of course, but it seems Shibby's timeliness is getting a little long in the tooth, and DD-WRT has always seemed to me a bit buggier than it should be, at least to me... maybe that has changed, though? If I did Netgear, I might look at OpenWRT, actually.

Anyways, with a recent price drop to $175 on Amazon, I'd probably roll with an 86U, load the latest Merlin version, configure up your network, blast that 2.4 Ghz out, and call it a day.

 

[avtella]

Whatever model you want, I would wait till the new ax routers release (very soon). That way you get a nice price drop on the current models.

 

[sfx2000]

My old Linksys E4200 is starting to give up the ghost. It's randomly rebooting once or twice a day on the stock firmware.

Wait a bit - check the AC Adapter as this device is getting long in tooth, they fail soft for the most part - minor investment until the 11ax devices start showing up

 

[WhiteZero]

I went ahead and got the Asus RT-AC86U. I'm sure I can be happy with that for a good number of years. By the time I want to upgrade again AX routers will be cheap and many more client side devices will actually support it.

 

[Easy Limits]

And you can rest easy at night knowing you have a community of 86U users here at this forum to help if you have any problems.

 

[WhiteZero]

And you can rest easy at night knowing you have a community of 86U users here at this forum to help if you have any problems.

Thanks! It definitely seems like a popular model. I've already been doing some reading on the forum. I was sad to see that it apparently has a bug where it wont power back on after a scheduled reboot?

 

[Easy Limits]

I don't know. I have not messed around with scheduled reboots.

 

[wesbez]

I went ahead and got the Asus RT-AC86U. I'm sure I can be happy with that for a good number of years. By the time I want to upgrade again AX routers will be cheap and many more client side devices will actually support it.

Indeed. The 86u is very affordable now with a beefy Broadcom SOC. VPN at full throughput. I don’t know where you are but amazon have slashed the price of this router. Currently £152.99 which normally is £190.