What Router do I need?
 

Hugh's thread on dumping Time Warner got me off my duff to so something about my cable bill. My last bill was $209 and that's ridiculous. I called TWC and got a package that has everything I've been paying for plus faster internet (20Mbps vs 15 Mbps) and phone service. My phone + cable was $240, now it's $144.
But I need a new wifi router. There are so many to choose from, from $39 to $200. How do I know which one I need??

Depending on your needs, just about any router will probably serve your purposes.

Most of the high end routers have gaming features or the latest in 802.11AC speed, both of which are useless unless you play a ton of games online or your wireless devices have AC capable wifi.

The run of the mill ASUS or Linksys will most likely do the job you need.

BTW, do you own your own cable modem? Comcast in notorious for "renting" customers modems for YEARS at $6?$10?$12+ per month, and you can easily buy those for $50 or less if you look around. It does take talking to someone at the cable company who knows how to set them up, but once I got that person on the phone, it was working beautifully in less than 2 minutes, just needed a couple #'s off the modem I bought.

You want an a/c dual band router.

Will be in the $150-200 range.

ASUS or Apple.

ASUS RT-AC66U Dual-Band Wireless-AC1750 Gigabit Router IEEE 802.11ac, IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n, IEEE 802.3/3u/3ab - Newegg.com

Mac - AirPort Extreme - Apple

FYI, if you are a T-Mobile customer you can get an ASUS for free, at worst a $25 refundable deposit.

You go dual band to separate your N devices from any legacy b or g that may exist in your environment.

Stick your legacy on the 2.4 spectrum and reserve 5.0 for N exclusively.

As we know WIFI networks operate at the max speed of the slowest connected device.

The second reason, does not apply to Patrick as IIRC he has a lot of acreage between himself and nearest neighbors, most residential WIFI is in the 2.4 spectrum. If you pull up available WIFI networks and see your neighbors there is a good chance you have overlapping channels. The more neighbors you see the more likely it will be.

A dual band will let you find uncluttered channels in the 5.0 spectrum.

I have two of those ASUS routers and they are worth every penny.

This is really Greek to me. We will be connecting two Macbook Pros, two iPhones, and two iPads. There are only two of us in the house, so we'll only be using two devices at a time. I can see both my neighbor's wifi so I'm close enough for them to see mine. Does this information help simplify the decision?

Probably not an issue especially if they are weak signals.

However the higher end routers will also allow you to attach a printer and a hard drive that can be used to roll your own personal cloud / centralized back up and they also provide iTunes compatible streaming services. Meaning you can stick all your music / videos in one place.

You probably would do just fine with a run of the mill WIFI router but I like to future proof.

5 mbps is fine unless you have a bunch of gamers on at one time. Why 15 or 20 mbps? Streaming Netflix only uses 3 at HD.

So if I get one of these fancy routers I can hook a Passport or other hard drive to it and Time Machine will use it to back up my computer wirelessly? That would be cool.

Yes, Time Machine will back up to a mounted share.

A hard drive hanging off the device to be backed up is the cleanest way as it's persistently mounted.

If the laptops never leave the house a share can also stay persistently mounted.

Apple Airport makes it more seamless but may not be worth the extra expense to you.

That's what I'm doing now. The Passport is plugged in when the computer is sitting static on my desk, but not connected if I'm moving around the house or traveling with the computer. The concern I have with this set up is that if someone breaks in and steals the computer, they'll probably steal my backup drive too.

My router with drives and printer is in the utility room where my main drops come in.

It's also where the litter boxes are located, no one is going in there ;)

Not a big deal to mount the share when you need it.

Can probably even roll a little Applescript to do it automagically for you.

There is always the uber pricey Airport Time Capsule option, comes with a 2 or 3 TB drive installed.

OK so I take it Time Machine doesn't just see the hard drive plugged into the router as just another drive. So you have to roll me a fatty to get Time Machine to see it?

Well it's a matter of does the laptop leave the house?

Do you take it to work?

Setting a shared drive to mount at login is not a big deal, takes 30 seconds to set up but when you take the laptop out of WIFI range the share drops and won't automagically reconnect when back in range.

So you can either set a little desktop alias to manually mount it when you want to or a script that mounts it when Time Machine kicks off.

You can do better than the Asus. They have this bad habit of pushing firmware that blows up your ability to access them thru the management portal. They're not bad at all though if you throw Tomato on as an iOS. I'm back to Cisco after a run thru dlink, netgear, Asus, and Linksys before Cisco bought them.

You can effectively set up a NAS device that acts like the backup hard drive you hang off your laptop. Pretty easy.

We just bought an apple airport wifi with the 3tb hard drive. It is very fast and automatically backs up our laptop and iMac. We also have an Apple TV on the same network. A little pricey but I no longer have to connect the separate HD drives and manually backup the machines. As with Apple stuff setup was a breeze.

WiFi Router
 

To learn a bit, go to the PC Magazine web site and read up on their latest router tests. I'm pretty sure that you will find that you really don't need a $2-300 router! Good luck!

ASUS doesn't "push" updates, That would imply the routers autoupdate which is not the case.

It's true they one firmware update last year that had issues. I would not say they have a habit of doing it.

The current AC6XX series are consistently highly rated in shootouts.

The bang for the buck, features + performance + price make them a great buy.

Right now I physically plug the backup drive in whenever I'm home and unmount and unplug it when I take the laptop on a job. Manually mounting it from the desktop without having to physically plug it in will be easier, so I'll go that route.