Best wireless router to use?

I come to find today that my internet speed drops from 24mbps download to 10mbps when I switch from wired to wireless.(only standing a couple feet form the router. When I move down the steps in our town house it drops down to 2-1mbps. Looks as if I am in need of a new router. It also loses all of it’s settings, port forwarding, wireless password and everything the second it loses power.

I currently have a Linksys WRT350N which when I purchased it had everything I wanted. 10/100/1000, data connection for USB hard drive, and wireless-N. I am now VERY out of touch with the latest and greatest wireless networking. What would you recommend?

At this point I think I could afford to lose the 10/100/1000 and the usb harddrive if I had to. Biggest thing I want is wireless strength and I don’t think a signal repeater would help when I drop to less then have the original speed only 2 feet from the router.

For a home router with wireless both horizontal and Vertical, along with the 1GB ports and USB I would suggest the D-Link DIR-645 1000

How about if I said I didn’t care for the USB? Still the same? I was always a fan of Linksys in the past however as I stated above I have not had the time to keep up with everything reef keeping and everything networking. Are you a big fan of D-Link over Linksys in general?

Hudz, are you saying some routers transmit in a Planer signal rather than sperical broadcast? so that going up and down stairs, changing the vertical coordinate would weaken the signal? Like it dont send signals up or down as much horizontal?

I use an older linksys G WUSB54GC router and USB transciever. it gets me 13-14 mb/s receive and 4 mb/s upload from the back bedroom to front room puter when i test it on comcasts speed tester. but my E-MACHINE is 8 years old and is starting to suck wind.

I don’t like most Linksys home routers as they tend to get hot and then degrade in performance, though the E Series is suppose to be better

I think D-Link has one of the better home class routers. Easy to configure. The main reason to suggest this router is the coverage it provides, as you mentioned going downstairs, most routers signals fall fast vertically.

If you are more worried about raw performance and would be willing to move the routerachievehive it I would most likely suggest a dual band that supports 450Mbs like the Linksys E4200 v2

Ken in a nutshell yes, this can explain it better, most home routers use internal omni direction antennas

Routers are also line of sight, my brother had this problem in a large house so he got another router and placed it at the bottom of stairs and it boosted the signal like a relay.

Have you updated your firmware? This could do it. I had about 5 Linksys routers and was stuck on Linksys it was the kind I knew. I always had issues and was on the phone with them, they were helpful. But I asked the same question to someone who would know and he recommended d link so I got the dgl4500 gamer lounge. Wireless speed is just as fast as wired. I do power cycle mine every week or two. I have a strong signal all over my house. Just when I walk outside with my phone it loses due to the tinted windows. And d link support is good too.

[quote=“dunk, post:8, topic:5451”]
Wireless speed is just as fast as wired.[/quote]

From how far away? Same floor?

I am kind of shocked my wireless is soooo much slower. From what I remember 54mbps was old tech and this was years ago. So if my internet speed is 24mbps, I would expect the wireless to be the same. Firmware has been updated, I think it’s just time to retire it.

May have to wait until my next pay check, which may be a while.

Thank you everyone for the feedback, greatly appreciated, I’ll take a look at both of those dlinks.

I used to use LInksys and always seemed to have issues after so many months with them. Have never had a problem since I went to Netgear router with 2.4ghz and 5.0ghz (think its 5.0) wireless capability. I can play ps3 wireless with no issues on speed.

I just stumbled upon this article of the next generation of router.

might solve some of those problems.

I have never had any luck what so ever with D-Link routers. When I had cable internet a few years ago, they consistently failed.

Now that I live in the boonies and only have cell phone internet available to me, I use Cradlepoint and I will never look back. Even if cable or some other wired internet comes down my road, I will still use a Cradlepoint router. They are more known for their mobile, battery powered routers and routers with redundancy (most of their routers have an input for a 3g/4g usb modem as well as a WAN Ethernet input for failover and are intended specifically for commercial use), but they are some of the most secure and reliable routers I have ever used.

The next on my list is Linksys since they are owned by Cisco. We use them at work, and I’ve put them in for family and friends. Never had any complaints from any of them, and they are typically pretty easy to set up.

I have 2 ps3 systems 2 laptops an i pad and 2 phones and the apex connected all work well i had the 50 meg comcast internet and my download speed on comcast.net and speakeasy was 60-65 meg wireless and wired with the linksys wrt610n it was 30 max wireless and full speed wireless cisco and linksys are the same company but linksys is the cheap version not the $1000+ cisco professional routers. The D link i have is made for gaming and gaming is the most demanding. I have never had any problems with the d link and i host many games. but research everything and see for yourself. oh the better linksys i had would not allow me to play call of duty on both ps3’s. also when i played on one i would have to reset it to play on the other i opened ports and forwarded too dmz the ps3 and still no luck out of the box the d link did it.

Dunk- My roomate used to have that issue with his until we changed the router settings. We used to run 2 ps3’s on COD, 2 laptops, 1 desktop, 1 pad, 2 phones on the network. I do not think I will ever change back to cisco/linksys again. Gaming routers seem to be where its at.