which wireless router to get?

[twoodcc]

so, at home, i have an apple airport extreme (wireless-n, non-gigabit)

i'm at school now. i could take that router to school, but then when i went home i'd have to bring the router with me and set it up everytime.

so i'm thinking about either getting another airport extreme, or airport express, and i could possibly get a non-apple router.

i just bought an airlink router - the cheapest wireless-n router there, and it's terrible. i can't even use it with my mbp (even started a tread here, but no help)

tell me what you think i should do?

 

[119576]

Airport Express all the way!

If we're being sensible, though - Netgear wouldn't hurt.

 

[ethernet76]

I don't see a reason to by an Apple router if you aren't going to use it's features.

Linksys has always been good to me. Netgears are OK.

I have a Linksys WRT150N. Easily the best wireless router I've had to date.

 

[twoodcc]

I don't see a reason to by an Apple router if you aren't going to use it's features.

Linksys has always been good to me. Netgears are OK.

I have a Linksys WRT150N. Easily the best wireless router I've had to date.

well i might use the features down the road.....like if i got an express, i could easily use the printer sharing and speakers....or with the extreme, put some hard drives on my network.

right now i'm thinking about getting the express, and putting that at home, and bring my extreme to college. what do you think? and then i'd have 1 of each

 

[twoodcc]

for those that voted the airport extreme, care to state why?

 

[johny5]

Get the extreme if you can afford it. I am not going compare with other 802.11n routers as I am sure that this has been done in the past, but the extreme works just great for me in all areas of my house. You can also use the usb port as a network printer port or an external HDD. The extreme even has its use as a gigabit switch.

Good value for money imho

 

[iPhonatic]

grr.. double post. wheres the delete feature :/

 

[iPhonatic]

I dont get the big hype about airport extreme. I bought one last week and i think its terrible. The speeds STINK. I've got a cable modem that I download at 700kbs when hooked directly to the ethernet port on my macbook pro. when running from airport, (which is in the same room 2 ft away) i barely hit 50kbs.
It took me about 15 minutes to download a 24mb file from xbox live.

I understand it wont be as fast when its not connected direct, but come on!

airports getting returned tonight.

i still love apple though

 

[johny5]

I dont get the big hype about airport extreme. I bought one last week and i think its terrible. The speeds STINK. I've got a cable modem that I download at 700kbs when hooked directly to the ethernet port on my macbook pro. when running from airport, (which is in the same room 2 ft away) i barely hit 50kbs.
It took me about 15 minutes to download a 24mb file from xbox live.

I understand it wont be as fast when its not connected direct, but come on!

airports getting returned tonight.

i still love apple though

at those speeds it is obviously interfering with other devices in or near your house. have you tried it both on the 2.4ghz and 5ghz range? they are set to the 5ghz range as stock, mine ran perfect on both however i did get more distance when i set it to 2.4ghz.

Do you have dect phones, any video senders, other woreless networks nearby?

 

[iPhonatic]

at those speeds it is obviously interfering with other devices in or near your house. have you tried it both on the 2.4ghz and 5ghz range? they are set to the 5ghz range as stock, mine ran perfect on both however i did get more distance when i set it to 2.4ghz.

Do you have dect phones, any video senders, other woreless networks nearby?

yes actually i do have another netgear in another room in the house. and theres a cordless phone in the other room.
My airport came set to 2.4ghz and i didnt change it to 5 beacause i wasnt sure what it was.
thanks for the info

 

[johny5]

no probs, you can also try changing the channel once you pick your best freq range.

Like I said, my extreme works great and I couldnt believe it was *that* much better than a wireless linksys router I had purely based on the fact that the linksys had 2 antenna's sticking up out of it whereas the Airport extreme has nothing

 

[ZachsMacDaddy]

If it weren't for the fact that it's becoming harder to find places selling them, I would recommend Buffalo routers. But because of the legal problems they are having here in the US you can't buy one unless you go with the N models.

I started converting everyone I knew to Buffalo routers running DD-WRT because they run so rock solid. If not for the occasional blackout mine would have over a year of constant uptime. Buffalo stock firmware is garbage, but with DD-WRT those things are fantastic.

I'm now in the process of converting our inventory of Linksys WRT54GS units to DD-WRT at work to use for our wireless network.

 

[twoodcc]

Get the extreme if you can afford it. I am not going compare with other 802.11n routers as I am sure that this has been done in the past, but the extreme works just great for me in all areas of my house. You can also use the usb port as a network printer port or an external HDD. The extreme even has its use as a gigabit switch.

Good value for money imho

thanks, i might do that, but still am not sure.