What is the best 802.11n router available?

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brett July 14, 2011

What is the best 802.11n router available?

I need to get a new router considering a couple things:

1. Speed -- we will have 5 people ravenously drinking up the interwebz simultaneously.

2. Printer AND hard drive capability via USB - The router has to be able to do both of these things but not necessarily at the same time (i.e. it could just have one USB port).

What router would you recommend? If you haven't found an amazing one yet, have you found any routers that I should avoid?

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groovechicken 10 months ago

Is there any reason you aren't looking at the Netgears? There is another discussion we have had around here about the WNDR3700 and I shared my feedback on it, which was pretty positive. You should at least browse the discussions about it before finalizing a decision. gdgt.com/netgear/wndr3700/

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nelson 10 months ago

I'm sure I'm gonna get flamed out of the water with this answer, but I have always been a big fan of my Apple Airport Extreme. I have three computers, two phones, and two tablets using my WiFi network at home and I am backing up to a USB drive and printing wirelessly.

My measure of success for a router is how easy the network is to setup, secure, and maintain. I have no intention of tinkering with it constantly, which is why I love the Airport devices. They are simple to setup, simple to troubleshoot, and I am getting a consistent 30 Mbps down from anywhere in my home.

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SadBoring 2011-07-15 16:27:24

No flames from me. I've been through a bunch of routers and only my Airport Extreme handles my 50mb Internet connection properly without performance loss.

kewlfocus 2011-07-15 16:42:45

Also, in iOS 5 you will be able to manage them via your iPhone/iPod/iPad. That's the only thing missing from AE is web management.

brett 2011-07-15 17:35:14

Is it easy to set up and maintain via a Windows Machine? We have one in the house and tried it last night. It was horrible to set up, consistently dropping the cconnection and just randomly rebooting.

groovechicken 2011-07-15 19:46:15

Personally, I have always hated Apple's wireless products for several reasons... the biggest being the lack of a web GUI, meaning you have to run an app in OS X to do it. Supposedly, there is a way to do it from Windows, but the previous Director of IT couldn't get it to work, so he would call me to make changes when he needed to. When I took over, I started phasing them out and we now only have a few still in service in places that aren't very critical.

Other notes:
1. If you want to do port forwarding, avoid Apple.
2. While the file sharing feature sounds great, there was an update to the firmware that made it unstable, requiring a reboot ever several days. There was not another firmware update for over 1 year. Don't ask me whether that fixed it or not because I only put up with the issue for a few weeks before moving the student file share to a dedicated NAS device.
3. Certain chipsets that are often used in the PC market have issues with Apple's chipsets for some reason. I had more students have problems with the Apples than with any other brand of access point we ever used over the years.

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TheTodd 2011-09-18 12:16:43

The recently released Airport Extreme model is the most fantastic router I've ever owned. I frequently buy competitors dual band routers that are well reviewed and each time they can't match the A/E Extreme's performance. Make sure to buy the A1408 Model as there's no way to tell from the box which was is the updated version. My performance went up by 30% and my effective range was doubled!

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