Stable replacement for R7000

[Carnagerover]

Hi all,

I got the R7000 pretty much when it was available in the uk and have had nothing but problems, I have tried DD-WRT as well as the latest firmware from Netgear and without going into it I have problems with either, so I am looking to replace it for something stable, I crave stabilty, I don't have any AC devices so it doesn't have to be AC, I got that for the proofing the future and all that, would hurt either though.

My current devices,

Netgear GS108T Smart Switch
Iphone 5s (5Ghz)
Iphone 4s (5Ghz)
Apple TV 3 (5GHZ)
Ipad 3 (5Ghz)
Ipad Mini (5Ghz)
Ipad 2 (2.4Ghz)
Xbox One (WIRED)
PS4 (Wired)
Dune HD media player (Wired)
Roku (2.4ghz)
Youview Internet enabled box (Homeplug)
Gaming PC (Gigabit Wired)
Work Laptop (2.4Ghz)
Zyxel NSA 325 NAS (Wired)
MD MyCloud 2TB (Wired)

I work from home and as a family all these devices get used a lot, most devices are plugged into the Switch and then the router via Cat5E.

I would love stable Airplay, devices remembering that they are connected and most of all 5Ghz that is stable, not requiring reboots or generally being rubbish.

Please help if you can

 

[connorm]

iphone 4s can not do 5GHz

i have recently upgraded from my very stable rt-ac66u to an r7000, but i havnt had any issues with my r7000, i get full 105mbit of my connection almost anywhere in my condo

 

[htismaqe]

If you're looking for something in the same class performance-wise to the R7000, both the Asus RT-A68U and Linksys WRT1900AC are comparable.

They're both pretty stable now as well.

The Asus has 3rd party firmware available and has a pretty robust feature set compared to the Linksys. I like the Linksys for the simplicity and it's been nothing but stable for me over the past several months.

 

[RogerSC]

Interesting, both dd-wrt and the latest Netgear firmware updates have been stable for my R7000. It's been working great, up for 8 days now, which is when I updated to the latest Netgear firmware. It was up 30 days when I was on vacation this summer and not available to change firmware *smile*...that was on dd-wrt 24345M OLDD firmware. I do like to try new firmware, but try to leave a working version on the R7000 for at least a week.

Just one quick question, after you update the firmware, do you do a factory reset to defaults and then manually re-enter your settings? A lot of ground-zero problems can be caused by not doing this.

On the other hand, you have some clients that I don't have. Although we do have 2 iPhones and an iPad here, so some Apple stuff, too, along with the other wireless clients that we have. And wireless-AC client, as well.

 

[Carnagerover]

Interesting, both dd-wrt and the latest Netgear firmware updates have been stable for my R7000. It's been working great, up for 8 days now, which is when I updated to the latest Netgear firmware. It was up 30 days when I was on vacation this summer and not available to change firmware *smile*...that was on dd-wrt 24345M OLDD firmware. I do like to try new firmware, but try to leave a working version on the R7000 for at least a week.

Just one quick question, after you update the firmware, do you do a factory reset to defaults and then manually re-enter your settings? A lot of ground-zero problems can be caused by not doing this.

On the other hand, you have some clients that I don't have. Although we do have 2 iPhones and an iPad here, so some Apple stuff, too, along with the other wireless clients that we have. And wireless-AC client, as well.

Thanks for the replies guys,

I always do a factory reset of all my settings between firmware changes, I have used 24345 OLDD before but still had an issue with 5Ghz, the NEWD causes the reboot bug for me. On Netgear official I have different problems but equally annoying.

Thinking I might drop down from AC into something with stellar 5Ghz N and wait until the hardware matures a bit on all these AC routers, it's starting to get a bit mental all these new revisions.

 

[TonyH]

Hi,
R7000 is one of best work horse for the time being. When I had it, it just worked fine for me.
Now I am using R7500 but I miss R7000 very much. R7500 has to go through what R7000 did.
I just don't understand why OP has so much trouble to a point of looking for a replacement.

 

[htismaqe]

Hi,
R7000 is one of best work horse for the time being. When I had it, it just worked fine for me.
Now I am using R7500 but I miss R7000 very much. R7500 has to go through what R7000 did.
I just don't understand why OP has so much trouble to a point of looking for a replacement.

To be fair, I bought my R7000 in February so before they hammered out a lot of the issues.

But between the issues I had and the absolutely horrid tech support, I'll probably never buy another Netgear product, even though I had been a loyal customer and beta tester for several years. It was that bad.

 

[Carnagerover]

Starting to go round in circles with trying to find something new,

The Linksys WRTAC1900 is a little rich for my tastes cost wise at £199, the Asus AC68U seems like I would be almost buying the same router again, although I suppose if the stability is there then it's a different story.

I have also been looking at the Asus AC66U as well as a host of other Linksys D-link and other routers.

 

[htismaqe]

There's a pretty significant difference in features between the R7000 and AC68U when you compare the firmware, especially given the fact that RMerlin's firmware is unlike anything you'll find for the R7000 (it's based on stock firmware, not DD-WRT or the like).

 

[RogerSC]

Starting to go round in circles with trying to find something new,

The Linksys WRTAC1900 is a little rich for my tastes cost wise at £199, the Asus AC68U seems like I would be almost buying the same router again, although I suppose if the stability is there then it's a different story.

I have also been looking at the Asus AC66U as well as a host of other Linksys D-link and other routers.

You really can overthink this. If it were me, I'd just focus on what you need. I don't need to look at D-Link routers because I've never really had a great experience with one. That narrows things down for me, to a choice between Asus and Netgear. Those have been the companies I've gotten the most performance and reliability out of their products.

Then, how much bandwith do you need? The main difference, speed-wise, between the wireless-1750AC and wireless-1900AC is "turboQAM", which it is unlikely that you'll use. The other advantage of the 1900AC routers is that their CPU's are likely faster, and dual-core. This comes into play mostly if you're running a VPN server, where there's a lot of encryption activity, or other CPU-intensive add-ons. Also, if you have a very fast ISP download speed (say over 500Mbps), then a faster CPU can give you more throughput. If your needs are fairly vanilla, though, the RT-AC66U or other 1750AC router would be fine, and would serve your bandwidth needs.

I do think that external antennas also have value, so that narrows things down some, too. I really think that you're looking at a fairly small group of 1750AC or 1900AC wireless routers. Then, choosing between them, you can look at reviews on this site, use the router charts and ranker. And read reviews on sites like Newegg and Amazon where they get a large quantity of reviews. Be careful about the reviews on Amazon, as they often group the reviews for a product family together, so you have to be sure to read what product the review is actually about.

You can make a choice, and buy it at a place like Newegg, Amazon, Fry's, Bestbuy, etc. where you can take the product back within 30 days if it doesn't meet your needs. So you're not really making a final, lifetime decision here. Take your best guess and go for it.

If you try to read everything, though, you're going to get confused, since for any given router there's someone out saying that their router is the best thing since sliced bread. But that's always the case for any product family, there's specific units that are lemons and ones that end up on the upside of the reliability curve. None the less, the odds are better of having a good experience if you stay with a company that tends to produce reliable products.

 

[Trip]

The unmentioned alternative here is of course to step beyond consumer routers altogether and get a solid business-class wired unit, then use your R7000, its replacement or purpose-built AP for wifi. One way to do it would be a $100 edgerouter lite. Or if you really crave stability, just pop for a Cisco 1921 K9. Get some pro-level help from a colleague for a few beers and maintenance should be fairly light. Yes, it's more than what you're probably looking to spend, but how much is your time/frustration worth to you? I realize that's a loaded question, but you catch my drift...

All that isn't to say an all-in-one from whomever won't work for you, but honestly, if you're at your wits end already with one of them and you've got the skill and resources, I'd give the above approach a shot.

 

[Carnagerover]

The unmentioned alternative here is of course to step beyond consumer routers altogether and get a solid business-class wired unit, then use your R7000, its replacement or purpose-built AP for wifi. One way to do it would be a $100 edgerouter lite. Or if you really crave stability, just pop for a Cisco 1921 K9. Get some pro-level help from a colleague for a few beers and maintenance should be fairly light. Yes, it's more than what you're probably looking to spend, but how much is your time/frustration worth to you? I realize that's a loaded question, but you catch my drift...

All that isn't to say an all-in-one from whomever won't work for you, but honestly, if you're at your wits end already with one of them and you've got the skill and resources, I'd give the above approach a shot.

Thanks for the great alternative I appreciate it, the Cisco looks like a dream but it is out of my price range, however the edgerouter lite looks great, however does that function as router/firewall? From what I have seen so far it looks quite complex to setup for my experience level with this kind of thing.

The R7000 would plug into one of the ports and function as AP?

I am definitely interested in something like this

 

[Trip]

Hi carnage. Yes, you've got the basic idea. Any access point would need to be wired into the router, or wired to a switch, which is then wired to the router, etc. All wired routers will of course route and *most* will have at least light-duty firewall capability built-in. To be fair, you might be better off with something more user-friendly, as routers such as the ERL are more or less enterprise-"capable", but with very little support bundled in, which is where the cost savings is found. You can really end up "paying" the difference with your time and frustration. So perhaps best to steer clear, and my apologies for misguiding you if I did.

On the simpler side of things, if a 100mb/s internet port is enough for your connection, the (dare I say it) TP-Link R470T+ seems to get quite positive reviews. For a consumer unit, it seems to fair quite well in terms of reliability. Things get pricey when moving up to GigE WAN (1000mb/s). It's tough to find reliability and user-friendliness at a cheap price in that segment.

Here to help with any more Qs.

 

[Carnagerover]

Hi carnage. Yes, you've got the basic idea. Any access point would need to be wired into the router, or wired to a switch, which is then wired to the router, etc. All wired routers will of course route and *most* will have at least light-duty firewall capability built-in. To be fair, you might be better off with something more user-friendly, as routers such as the ERL are more or less enterprise-"capable", but with very little support bundled in, which is where the cost savings is found. You can really end up "paying" the difference with your time and frustration. So perhaps best to steer clear, and my apologies for misguiding you if I did.

On the simpler side of things, if a 100mb/s internet port is enough for your connection, the (dare I say it) TP-Link R470T+ seems to get quite positive reviews. For a consumer unit, it seems to fair quite well in terms of reliability. Things get pricey when moving up to GigE WAN (1000mb/s). It's tough to find reliability and user-friendliness at a cheap price in that segment.

Here to help with any more Qs.

Thanks again,

Looking at it in more detail like you mention the Edgerouter is a little too far out of my wheelhouse. My internet is 150Mbps down and 40Mbps up.

Any other suggestions?

 

[Trip]

OK, so you're going to want gigabit WAN and LAN, and something well-supported, ease to use. I don't know if you're opposed to using Apple stuff, but perhaps the newest Airport Extreme base station? Supposedly it's quite reliable. You just need to make sure you download the Airport utility in order to configure it, and you should be good to go. It happens to have built-in wireless, but that's more of an afterthought I would say. It may work well enough, but I'd still plan on possibly needing to use a separate AP(s) for wireless. From there, we're probably back down to consumer all-in-one territory, as frankly, I'm out of ideas.

 

[Carnagerover]

OK, so you're going to want gigabit WAN and LAN, and something well-supported, ease to use. I don't know if you're opposed to using Apple stuff, but perhaps the newest Airport Extreme base station? Supposedly it's quite reliable. You just need to make sure you download the Airport utility in order to configure it, and you should be good to go. It happens to have built-in wireless, but that's more of an afterthought I would say. It may work well enough, but I'd still plan on possibly needing to use a separate AP(s) for wireless. From there, we're probably back down to consumer all-in-one territory, as frankly, I'm out of ideas.

From what I understand Apple AirPort Extremes don't support DYNDNS which is something I use. I don't mind trying the R7000 as a AP only but not sure what Router I would get. It would have to be gigabit like you say, I have a GS108T so it wouldn't need more than two extra ports other than the WAN

 

[Carnagerover]

As for the router,

This seems promising;

http://www.linksys.com/en-us/business/products/routers/lrt224

Reading through the review on here it looks good, I would also like to use the OpenVPN connection it provides.

 

[Trip]

Wow. Didn't realize that. OK, moving on. If I may backtrack a bit -- they're definitely are generic options for <$100, but it will continue to be a trial-and-error approach. For example, I've personally had great success with AdvancedTomato flashed onto Netgear WNDR3500Lv2's for many of residential installs... But from what you indicated earlier, an out-of-box solution is preferred. "Small business" routers like the Cisco RVs or the LRT224 you mentioned could be an option, but like the consumer stuff, feedback seems to be all over the map and it's probably a trial-and-error affair there as well. On the firewall appliance side of things, perhaps a Zyxel USG40 or Fortinet fortigate 30D might be worth a look. You can think of them as firewalls, with routers built in, as opposed to the stuff above, which are more routers, with firewalls built in as secondary in importance. I routinely have multi-month-long uptimes with USG20s and 20Ws deployed for small business clients. The interfaces and setup of those may be a bit complex for your taste, though, not sure.

Maybe give the LRT224 or a Cisco RV a shot. I'd be interested to see how those fair in a use case like this, anyways.

 

[Carnagerover]

Wow. Didn't realize that. OK, moving on. If I may backtrack a bit -- they're definitely are generic options for <$100, but it will continue to be a trial-and-error approach. For example, I've personally had great success with AdvancedTomato flashed onto Netgear WNDR3500Lv2's for many of residential installs... But from what you indicated earlier, an out-of-box solution is preferred. "Small business" routers like the Cisco RVs or the LRT224 you mentioned could be an option, but like the consumer stuff, feedback seems to be all over the map and it's probably a trial-and-error affair there as well. On the firewall appliance side of things, perhaps a Zyxel USG40 or Fortinet fortigate 30D might be worth a look. You can think of them as firewalls, with routers built in, as opposed to the stuff above, which are more routers, with firewalls built in as secondary in importance. I routinely have multi-month-long uptimes with USG20s and 20Ws deployed for small business clients. The interfaces and setup of those may be a bit complex for your taste, though, not sure.

Maybe give the LRT224 or a Cisco RV a shot. I'd be interested to see how those fair in a use case like this, anyways.

Thanks again for the comprehensive reply, after looking into your suggestions I agree they may be too complex for my level of experience, I was surprised when reading the LRT224 review that the R7000 has more throughout power compared to this SMB router, more than I require at close to gigabit speeds for sure but still.

I have been looking on the Linksys forums for this router and nothing seems to out of the ordinary, however official forums are rarely the best place for positive experiences with routers.

Now I am left wondering if using the LRT224 and the R7000 will provide me with a better experience or if I will just be downgrading my network.

 

[Trip]

You'll probably be fine with the R7000 set as an AP and wired to a solid router. Looking a bit more into the LRT224, SNB reviews it pretty favorably, there are a few decent Amazon/NewEgg reviews, some good, some not so good... Here's the UI demo. It does look to be decently supported (live chat, phone, email). With many SMB-type products, firmware updates are few and far between past the initial round of obvious bug-squashing, and if it doesn't work the way you're hoping at the time of purchase (running the latest firmware version), assuming it's not user error, you're usually better off replacing it with something else, rather than hoping or waiting for a fix to be pushed out. Enterprise-class stuff, different story, but then again that kind of immediate care is what you're paying for. If it were my $200+, a nice middle ground might be a Zyxel USG40(-NB variant without the security license). You can see the interface here (user: demo pass: demouser). A heavier UI (on initial load, at least) and a bit higher learning curve, but the USGs have been rock solid stable for me (*knock on wood*). Zyxel also seems to be pretty good about firmware update releases and their telephone support is usually pretty good. Overall, it's not until you really start pushing the functionality and/or throughput limits that units like these start to falter. In your case, I'd expect either to perform as well and most likely way better than your current setup.

EDIT: I don't know what the ceiling is for your budget, but another powerful option might be a Netgate APU2. A dual-core single-chip platform like many of the "high-end" consumer routers, but ready to go with pfSense, fully supported for 1 year, for $299, and an option for a 2nd year as well. If you read up on pfSense, you'll see it's approachable for novices, very customizable with different packages as well. Just another option to look into.