WiFi System Recommendations?
 

It's time to replace the Apple Airport Extremes that blanket my house with WiFi. They have been great for many years, but are getting old. Connecting is becoming flakey, and basically I now have to think about my WiFi system every couple of weeks instead of being able to ignore it for years.

Apple no longer makes the Airports, alas. So I'm looking for recommendations and reviews.

Goals:
I'm looking for a WiFi access point(s) system that is user-friendly, easy to set up, and that I will be able to ignore for years at a time. I'm not concerned about maximum speeds, as I'm too cheap to pay for the higher tiers of Comcast speed. Speedtest.net typically shows 12 to 20 Mbps down on my wired Mac. I do not want something that looks like a black plastic spider or alien warship prominently displayed in my living room.

Coverage:
Wood frame house, four levels to cover (basement, ground and second floors, third floor), each about 1,000 sq ft and close to square plan. Also want signal to reach the garage, which is wood frame and just 5 feet away from the house, and the treehouse which is about 30 feet away from the house.

Usage:
Your basic streaming of Netflix etc via computers and Roku, and web browsing, sometimes streaming foreign stuff by VPN.

Current Setup:
Airport Extremes on ground floor and third floor, connected by PowerLine networking. This works perfectly fine, or did for many years.

Ideas? Reviews?
I've been reading reviews of mesh systems like Eero, Google WiFi, Plume, they seem easy to use. Pricey but so were Airports.

Pick your price point...

The Best Wireless Routers of 2017 | PCMag.com

Geez, some of those are really ugly....

Have a look at Ubiquiti UniFi products. Easy to set up and manage, good performance for the price.

You should still be concerned with speed.

Just because you WAN side is lacking does not mean you want to ignore the LAN.

You want an AC router.

Theoretical throughput is a 1 gb+

If you are using extenders or access points that connect over WIFI the bandwidth helps mitigate loss to backhaul.

AC also supports beam forming. Basically it can tell where a connected device is in relation to itself and shapes / directs the signal at the connected device for a stronger signal.

Mesh is great if your connected device supports it. Not all do.

It's also not seamless. There is delay in hand off.

I have a nice white paper on it.

Let me see if I can dig it up.

I just installed a Netgear AC2600, took about 5min, most of the time was spent typing in the passwords on connected devices
It has great coverage, whole house and large pool are are now covered w/o repeaters, fast - beams mulitple 4k video faultless even to the far bedrooms

has all the pluses beam forming, Mu-Mimo, 160mhz, Quad streaming, USB 3 & eSATA

best features are ease of install and coverage, multiple 4k streams next best

Buy something good so it doesn't become obsolete quickly.

I bought an ASUS dual band AC as recommended by stomachmonkey and it's been great. 5g wireless does not go very far though, you will need a solution at each end of the house or something. Maybe an Ethernet-over-ac to get from the router to the other end of the house or the garage to another wireless point.

I'm going to guess that most of you guys have single level houses on larger properties. What do you think for my situation which is four floors on a small (50x100) lot?

My entire house + garage + tree house fits in a box 50 x 50 x 40.

None of those could be installed in a visible location in my house. They'd have to be hidden in closets or something.

https://www.amplifi.com/

One base and a couple repeaters and easy to add another in the rare case it's needed.

Found it.

This is a nice detailed paper on Mesh and also discusses some traditional tech in contrast.

Not a long read but very informative.

http://www.moorinsightsstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Consumer-Networks-Gain-Wi-Fi-Mesh-by-Moor-Insights-and-Strategy.pdf

Floors / ceilings are typically the hardest for wifi to penetrate.

It generally spreads horizontally and not vertically.

The signal envelope is not a perfect sphere.

I've installed Google's Mesh product in my house and it has been rock solid so far. I'm no tech person, which in part was the point of going this route. My house is an unusual L shape with the drop for all services in one corner. The basement and back rooms were trouble with the previous router/modem combo.

https://www.amazon.com/Google-Wifi-system-set-replacement/dp/B01MAW2294

Netgear R6300 - AC1750

https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/wifi-routers/R6300.aspx

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....L._SL1500_.jpg

https://amazon.com/NETGEAR-Router-AC1750-Gigabit-R6300v2/dp/B00EM5UFP4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494179960&sr=8-1&keywords=netgear+r6300

Hard to go wrong for $69

My house is 40x40 square and the ASUS is dead center in the basement ceiling. The 5g will cover but gets unreliable towards the edges. The 2.4g covers great.

Hmmm, my Airport Extreme (the tower one) I got a couple of years ago works fine with no problems. Apple still sells them, but noticed they are still $199. Had a problem with DNS and IP6 about a year ago, but Apple did a software update that fixed it.

Use one of the older pancake Airport Time Capsules as a wireless extender and it works fine as an extender (stopped using the time capsule because the drive cratered after a couple of years). Network is great even though stuffed away in cabinets and everyone in my neighborhood is running wifi as well. 7 other wifi networks show up and I have an electrical power line wifi barrier on my back property line. Both burried and above ground electrical. Can walk thru my back gate and see a whole different list of wifi networks on that side of the barrier.

Have a business Cable connection and speedtest shows the 50 down and 20 up whether anywhere on my property via wifi or at my wired servers. Waiting as long a possible before upgrading because seems everyone is coming out with so many newer, cheaper Wifi options now.

All I ever do managing my wifi is turn on a guest network when my brother comes to visit, then off after he leaves. It is much easier to turn on a non-passworded guest network than try to keep his laptop connected. He keeps deleting his connection settings and can't seem to remember OR type in a password. His name is Bob and he still asks every time he comes to visit, and several times when here if BobsWifi is what he uses to get internet.

Didn't bother to password my wifi until about 3 years ago. A neighbor got a virus that was trying to send spam thru my wifi.

The founder of the company I work for lives behind me and a major stock holder next door to him, and the President across the street from them. When g was fast wifi we brought in 3 different companies trying to get wifi to cross the electrical power line barrier on my back property line. Even with expensive enterprise wifi routers and directional antenna we couldn't get past the barrier to one of the houses across my back property line. Had those routers for a while and offered to provide free wifi to the neighbors up to 4 houses away (where the signal was still strong) on the my side of the barrier. Surprisingly nobody wanted free internet? Nobody even tried it. Between the hot rod wireless and the business internet connection it was really fast too. They each got their own ISP and their own wifi. Just don't understand some people.

I bought these.

https://www.amazon.com/Portal-mesh-wifi-system-2-pack/dp/B01MYRZNAQ/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1494184262&sr=8-2&keywords=portal+wifi

Easy setup and works very well. They are a little bigger than I expected, but they don't look bad. Covers all three stories of my house with strong 5GHz. Probably could have gotten away with just one.

I installed an Asus RT-AC3200 earlier in the year and it was essentially just plug in and go. I like the user interface and the ability to set alerts if an unknown MAC address tries to get in. I have a three level house and use range extenders on each level that are tied into the same WIFI as the main router. I bought them at Walmart for something like $25 each a year or so ago. I finally needed one down stairs as I use my laptop and the AutoEnginuity analyzing software now and then.

I have my large desk top, main flat screen, bedroom flat screen and both U-Verse boxes hardwired with CAT 6 cable. Mainly for security reasons.

I can send you a link to get a free Cisco Cloud managed Meraki AP, you just have to attend a webinar on cloud based managed.

Let me know

I'd like to do that. Sent you a PM.