If a customer insists on a recommendation, I say every router you can buy in the store has problems, but the least problematic seems to be Netgear as long as you get at least a 3000 series. I have seen a high field failure rate on the WNR2000, and they can die a slow lingering flakey death rather than just falling over dead. Probably a WNDR3700 if you want gigabit and 3400 if you don’t. Some customers get to the store and get a 4500 because it’s on sale or $10 more. I like having gigabit ports but many customers these days don’t have a single wired device. The Netgear routers come with the WiFi already secured, they can be set to wireless access point mode, and they have a lifetime warranty (but who is going to go through the trouble). On the downside some laptops with Intel 802.11ac WiFi refuse to play nice with the Netgears, and the PPPoE default has to be changed from dial on demand.
I will no longer sell routers to customers, many years of bad experiences. But I will lease a managed Mikrotik (a nice one – typically a RB951G-2HnD or RB2011) for $5/month including free replacement. I won’t sell a Mikrotik to a customer for them to manage unless the customer is an IT professional. This does mean I don’t have a dual band (much less 802.11ac) managed router solution. Given our rural customer base, the 2.4 only WiFi usually works out better than dual band. Occasionally I wish for dual band so we could segregate some weak WiFi clients (like Dropcams) onto their own band. Mikrotik doesn’t seem to want to deal with getting equipment FCC approved in 5 GHz. Some of the routers customers have bought that have been problematic: Cradlepoint, Securifi, Amped Wireless (at least the range extenders). From: Brett A Mansfield Sent: Wednesday, October 07, 2015 11:30 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Consumer routers? I've had very bad luck with Belkin, D-Link, Asus (the worst), linksys, and low end netgear. I've had great success with the higher end netgear and the 3rd through 5th gen Apple AirPort Extreme. Prior to the 3rd gen and the 6th gen (latest) airports are junk. So I'm with you, pretty much every consumer grade router is trash now. Thank you, Brett A Mansfield On Oct 7, 2015, at 9:58 AM, Glen Waldrop <gwl...@cngwireless.net> wrote: Are there any consumer routers that don't suck these days? I used to recommend Linksys/Cisco, but since the Belkin buyout quality seems to be going down. They jink with teh firewall and I can't block specific outgoing traffic, can't remote admin anymore, etc...