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It's time to replace my 13 yr old 2.4ghz Cisco AP1120 802.11b/g . The speeds i'm getting are very slow now despite my performance plan with XFinity. I bought a boost extender in order to get a better connection for a computer in a bedroom down the hallway from my access point , but still only getting around 3.5mbps. What 5.0Ghz wireless router do you guys recommend? I've seen an Apple Airport Extreme on Ebay that seems to be popular, but not sure how reliable they are in the long run. What other ones do you guys suggest? Thanks again.
I'm partial to the Netgear Nighthawk line. We have a number of them in use at small business clients and I have one at home, and they have been stable and problem free.
If you have newer AC wifi equipped computers a B/G router is going to the be the bottleneck, but if your computers are of the same vintage as your router, going to a new AC router will help a bit, but won't be a huge improvement.
When I upgraded to the Nighthawk I also swapped out the N wifi cards in our 2 laptops to an Intel AC card. In order to benefit from an AC router, connected devices must also have AC support.
Also, depending on what's causing the weak signal a new router may not fix it. 5G provides better performance then 2.4G, but 2.4 provides better range.
Take a look at PCMag's reviews: https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/routers . They're generally reliable. You might also look for band cona dogestion. Before we moved last year, I could find at least a dozen other folks on the 2.4G band, while 5G was empty. Channel overlap makes the situation even worse. On 2.4G, there are only 3 independent, non-overlapping channels, 1,6 and 11. Channels in between, if used, slow things for everyone, because 1,6,11 have protocols for media contention - more than one computer talking at once. These protocols do not work with intermediate channels, so everyone loses. That's a big reason why 5G is so fast - little traffic, little contention.
Whatever you do, make sure you change the default admin password. I have a great time when travelling finding networks that, once I'm logged in, I can access the router settings. I don't change settings, and often let the owner know of the vulnerability. At one BnB we stayed in, the owners had their own router for a private lan for themselves. Different lan password. But I still got to it because it sat on the main lan, and the router was accessible by IP address, which was easy to guess.
Second the 5GHZ is faster, but 2.4 has more range. 90% of people do not notice the speed increase from 2.4 to 5.
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