Need a router

johnno124 · January 20, 2019

My Family have been dealing with a shitty ISP provided Modem Router and we want to get a wireless router to cover the whole house rather than having to deal with an extension.

I have been looking at the ASUS RT-AC58U and was wondering if there are better than this for a cheaper price.

I live in Australia so need prices in AUD and less the $130AUD is better. However i don't want to be reducing performance.

The house is roughly 450 square metres if that is of any use.

Thanks For your Help.

SupaKomputa · January 20, 2019

If the house is big, a single router won't do better.

450m house is quite big.

You still need one or two repeaters.

Most router can only reach 2-3 barriers (walls).

And the signal will be decresed with each barriers.

This router support Access Point mode, which can act like a repeater for your ISP router.

Get this and a long cable and put it in area which the main router signal starts to degrade.

This can be done wirelessly, but to ensure highest bandwidth, use a lan cable.

Most of ISP fiber optics router also acts as a modem, so you will need it on eventually.

Dwarffy · January 20, 2019

If you do buy that, make sure that the recever/sender dongle on your computer is also dual channel, and then make sure it uses 5Ghz instead of 2.4Ghz. The difference is that 2.4Ghz doesn't pass trough concrete, and 5Ghz does... my router is in next room ~10m away with concrete wall in between, and 2.4Ghz is unusable at gaming due ¿packet loss? but 5Ghz works just fine... But like Johnn said, you might still need repeater/signal booster since wifi cover area is something like 50 meters? (this number was pulled from my magic rabbit hat, and thus might be incorrect)

Joonikko · January 20, 2019

Does the house have any ethernet wiring to other rooms from where the ISP modem is located? If so, you can easily connect a wireless access point that can be more centrally located in the house, though 450 square metres is quite big, so a single AP might not be good enough.

If you don't have the option to use ethernet cables to connect a dedicated access point, the TP-Link RE200 WiFi extender has gotten good reviews and its cheap. Also some routers have a WiFi repeater feature (I have a used D-Link 868L router as an extender and it has been working fine).

Other (but quite expensive) option is a wireless mesh network solution, where the main node is connected to the modem and the other nodes connect to it & each other wirelessly (or via ethernet). The main feature to look in mesh network solutions is a dedicated radio & channel for backhaul traffic.

Some links: