Upgrading my router. Which one is best?

[Jennings1066]

Confused yet? So much great information coming your way. I would suggest reading up on different network setups and see what will work best. Mesh systems. Tri band routers. Access points. Two tri band routers connected together. Too many options.

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[The Demon]

I am not an IT expert but I know many, getting back to the OP‘s question my first thought is 200 MB speed depending on what you have in your house is not enough. If you’re going to be on Wi-Fi the entire time you need to up it but if you go wired on a lot of things using what I said you’re gonna be great. If you’re gaming a lot that’s out of my league. But 1000 MB speed has done me well with what I have.

 

[JohnnyGT]

Right now I'm using a UDMP and that HD Nano AP I suggested, on a 1gig Fios connection.

IPS/IDS are on with no hit to my speeds.

 

[FreePenguin]

I am not an IT expert but I know many, getting back to the OP‘s question my first thought is 200 MB speed depending on what you have in your house is not enough. If you’re going to be on Wi-Fi the entire time you need to up it but if you go wired on a lot of things using what I said you’re gonna be great. If you’re gaming a lot that’s out of my league. But 1000 MB speed has done me well with what I have.

ive monitored everything at peak speeds, if everyone is watching 4k tv, (Apple TV's) streaming, its like 10mbps each, lets say 4 tv's as there's 4 people, thats 40mbs. gaming, it really doesnt use much bandwidth, I think a ps5 clocks even less than that.

downloads, they happen, updates etc, but its real quick and done. not a constant stress on the internet. all the idle processes on the activity monitor literally say 0% usage, its just the fact that they are connected and taking a strain on the router for activity slots.

my friend has 1gbps and swears he cant live without it. but damn, how fast do you need to be to watch Netflix Lol

 

[BigRed550]

Given the size of your house I would invest in a mesh router/network. You’ll have better coverage and maintain high speed everywhere in the house

 

[JohnnyGT]

FWIW I'm currently using just one AP and have 5GHz coverage on all three levels of the house. 2.4GHz anywhere else on the property and into the street.

I recommend you move on from consumer grade hardware if you want to the best results. If you do stick with an all-in-one network box, definitely get something that supports an open source firmware like @shogun32 suggested. That will at least allow you to use its full capabilities...if you want.

 

[hlfbkd420]

lol my router is 5 years old. with 3-4x more devices than you. It handles the speed well, we Never use the full speed offered, its just too many devices on the old dual core router.

we have tons of smart tv's tons of fire sticks, tons of Apple TV's, we all have apple watches, all have apple phones, laptops, desktops, ps5' and ps4 and xbox one downstairs. my roomie I swear has 7 phones, I have a iPhone, gf iPhone, some iPads room mate Samsung. scales, treadmills, full Sonos sound system, apple home pods, and home pod minis, Nintendo switches, printer, nest thermostat, couple other random gadgets. I think thats most of it though. Keep in mind, there are 4 of us here, all in 20's and we all have wifi devices/tv's in every single room in house.

It keeps growing in list though.

I don't know how to help you then... I had 4 or more consistent streams going all summer with people working, schooling, etc... If there are 4 of you, how many devices can you use at once? Even if we all watched streaming TV while using Zoom/Goto, we wouldn't have an issue..

Nighthawk X8, Docsis 3.1 modem, 1GB connection... No issues. Upgrade your router then, sounds like you deserve it.

 

[shogun32]

every device occupies a transmit slot. So even if it's not doing anything but heartbeat packets there are only so many time-division slots that can be allocated across sub-bands.

 

[FreePenguin]

every device occupies a transmit slot. So even if it's not doing anything but heartbeat packets there are only so many time-division slots that can be allocated across sub-bands bands.

This.
It’s just because there’s so many idle devices sitting on the router band, it’s kicking random ones off and letting others connect

doesn’t have the brain to allow all of them to remain active at once. That’s my theory. Wasn’t til the last few items we added to the house where we started getting the drops on random stuff.
Pretty sure we recently hit the limit for sustainable devices

 

[FreePenguin]

I don't know how to help you then... I had 4 or more consistent streams going all summer with people working, schooling, etc... If there are 4 of you, how many devices can you use at once? Even if we all watched streaming TV while using Zoom/Goto, we wouldn't have an issue..

Nighthawk X8, Docsis 3.1 modem, 1GB connection... No issues. Upgrade your router then, sounds like you deserve it.

Room mates throw me a grand a month, so that’s why I wanted to make sure I get something that ensures no one was kicked or lose connection.

Now I will say this, I bounce between metronet and spectrum. Spectrum had more outages than metronet, spectrum is cable?

Metro is fiber optic. Metro not that I can recall ever having down time on their side but spectrum once a month would lose service to my area (nothing to do with my router etc) that’s all live but no internet.

 

[shogun32]

doesn’t have the brain to allow all of them to remain active at once

it's not a CPU problem, it's a protocol 'problem'. the spec says you can slice TDM slots only so small. You have too many devices and have filled all available slots. You may well have interference from neighbor devices that are beaconing loud enough to drop into/out of your network in erratic manner. That's why you white-list and for Mr. 7-phone man, you whitelist the TV/ipods/consoles but ban non-primary phones since they have data plans of their own.

 

[DrumReaper]

Man, this stuff blows my mind! Subscribed. Thanks for the awareness and assist from all you guys. Helping Penguin is helping a lot of us!

Our Firestick movie app can’t freezes occasionally and I don’t even have a third of the stuff on our network y’all are talking about and we have 300mbps XFinity with their router unit. Sometimes I just want to throw the shit out the window when it freezes but now I’m picking up and tracking some of the reasons why our app freezes during flicks.

Thanks guys. Keep it coming! Oh... and as my patients say, “I’m not a doctor so can you break it down for me?” Y’all are using some decent geek terminology and nomenclatures... if I get overwhelmed by stuff like “QoS”, would you all mind if I chime in and ask for a breakdown?

 

[shogun32]

Firestick movie app

is a piece of shit. How old is it? I can't remember if you can update the firmware or not. But get a Roku instead.

My Samsung TV has 'netflix' app but it's incredibly unreliable and has a major memory leak. The Roku does 'netflix' infinitely better.

 

[DrumReaper]

is a piece of shit. How old is it? I can't remember if you can update the firmware or not. But get a Roku instead.

My Samsung TV has 'netflix' app but it's incredibly unreliable and has a major memory leak. The Roku does 'netflix' infinitely better.

Does Roku have movie APKs like the firestick?

 

[shogun32]

Does Roku have movie APKs like the firestick?

I actually don't know what the underlying OS is on the Roku. The firestick is a bastardized Android. Amazon is shipping movies as apps (apk) instead of bog-standard media (mp4?) files? Or is the APK route their attempt at doing content rights management?

Or do you just mean 'apps' for accessing this service or that service? Yes Roku has a decent variety but I'm not familiar with the platform enough to know if you can side-load or if there are any glaring omissions. All we use it for is Netflix and 1 month rental of HBO when a full season of a show has been published.

If your firestick is older than say 2 years, you need to upgrade the software (if possible) or replace it. They have been notoriously buggy.

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