Good dual band wireless router?

[Matt Meiser]

I've currently got 2 old G routers and a newer single band N router all used as access points covering my house. The N is centrally located and covers everything nicely but I can't get rid of the G's because we still have some G devices and the single band router causes everyone to slow to G. I'm thinking of replacing all with one dual band N device.

My requirements:
- good stable device
- wall mountable
- works as an acess point (doubt this is a problem, but just in case)

Any suggestions?

[Lee Schierer]

Matt, lightning recently took out our Netgear router which never worked well with my Blackberry phone. I replaced it with a Cisco Linksys E1200 and couldn't be happier. It took less than 10 minutes to install and set up. It has much better coverage than the Netgear router and best of all it connects to my Blackberry. It automatically sets up a guest connection if you want one. The one I have is a N type, I don't know if they make multi band routers.

[Bryan Morgan]

Netgear WNDR3700 and throw DDWRT on it. DO NOT get the one that says its "optimized for media" or voip or AV or whatever it says. That one has only 32 meg vs 64 for the standard model.

I have mine mounted high in my office. I can't remember the last time I've had to restart it, if ever...

Keep in mind though, with these smaller routers running N and G reduces the speed of N.

If you want to get a little fancier, I've used these at work with success:

http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-WRVS4400N-Wireless-N-Gigabit-Security/dp/B000H97UC0/ref=sr_1_20?ie=UTF8&qid=1316800244&sr=8-20

[Matt Meiser]

Bryan, if I run one band as my N network and one as my G (with different SSID's) doesn't that keep the N moving fast.

Do all N clients support the 5GHZ band?

[Bryan Morgan]

Bryan, if I run one band as my N network and one as my G (with different SSID's) doesn't that keep the N moving fast.

You can, but N isn't all its cracked up to be depending on your devices... which leads to...


Do all N clients support the 5GHZ band?

Nope. My Asus notebook's N card only runs at 2.4 but can use channel bonding (doesn't work right anyway... its cheap). The iPhone as far as I know only supports 2.4. If you run NG mixed on 2.4 and N on 5 (use 40mhz for both) you can connect N and G to 2.4 but at slower speeds and full blast N on 5 for those clients that support it. The wndr3700 supports this. You can also use AN mix on 5 ghz. Our Ciscos we have to leave on 2.4 NG mixed

208325

[Matt Meiser]

I'll have to check our n clients but it sounds like its probably not worth switching. Mainly its my work laptop, my daughters laptop and my iPad. 99% of the time it probably doesn't matter since we never stream video and don't move that many large files. My work laptop is also hard wired when it is in the docking station.

The N router I have is a Buffalo that came preloaded with ddwrt so after saying that, maybe I should just use it in ng mixed and not worry if the n clients aren't fast. It's got great coverage of the whole house where my older WRT54Gs take two. Then I can eliminate 2 devices on my network.

I'm a big ddwrt fan. I have it on all my access points. Originally so that I could do a wireless bridge to the shop, but even after running fiber out there i still like it because all have the same config interface. And I have one WRT54G2 that is dedicated as a DNS server because my router doesn't have a way to do DNS for devices with fixed IPs--like all these network devices, our printers, etc.