Replacement for AirPort 802.11ac

[Neorun]

Hi,

I have moved in to my new apartment and bought a Airport Extreme AC in the hope of getting decent WiFi reception in all rooms. I am all mac and had good experiences with older Airport Extremes. My walls have massive insulation that seems to include some metal. My issue is that I am unable to get sufficient signal strength in my kitchen which is 2 rooms away (2 walls) and about 4o-50 ft (15 meter). The FireTV Stick in the Kitchen is dropping out quite regularly, also my iPhone 6 is not getting such good reception as well. I have a Sonos System with a BOOST as the Master close to the Air Port. Sonos is working like a charm. I have also tried to extend my network with an older Airport Express that I had laying around. Placing that half way to the kitchen. Still not so good. I have also thought about a Devolo Wifi extender to get a second network in the kitchen - way slower but maybe a little more reliable. If I can avoid that I might replace the router.

I am thinking of replacing the Airport with either:

• Asus RT-AC2400
• Asus RT-AC3200
• Linksys WRT1900AC

Reasons for that choice:

Asus RT-AC2400
I have the AC2400 at work and so far I am quite happy. Yet from time to time it shows drop outs in the 5ghz network.

Asus RT-AC3200
Bigger might be better - but the price difference to the other two is quite significant…

Linksys WRT1900AC
Has gotten positive reviews, especially when paired with the DD-WRT Firmware that might make it possible for me to boost its antenna performance to rech into my kitchen and perform better than my AirPort.

Can you help me to pick the right product for the job?

Thx!

 

[Trip]

Bigger/more expensive is unfortunately not a guarantee of being better in the consumer all-in-ones; more like more money to be a paying beta tester. No thanks.

I'd stay in AC1900 territory or wait a little bit for AC2600 stuff to proliferate if you really want to go "bleeding edge". Otherwise, of the choices you listed, the ART1900AC has pretty-powerful radios and, I believe just-recently stabilized factory firmware. Other alternatives would be the Asus AC68U or Netgear R7000, the former running RMerlin, or either running AdvancedTomato.

Still, hoping that a single silver-bullet will fix all your wifi throughput/range issues might still be a fool's folly... many times there's just no substitute for multiple radios, instead of just more power on a single radio. If you can wire in more APs, either via Cat5e/6, or if not, via powerline or MoCa, that would be preferable. Set SSIDs to be the same, channels to non-identical, passwords to be the same, and you should be good to go.

Otherwise, there's always Ubiquiti UniFi.