Question Advice on a router upgrade ?

[BlasphemousMusic]

Since its black Friday and things are cheaper I wanted to upgrade my router. I currently have an
Asus RT- AC3100.

I've seen a few in the price range I want to pay. The TP-Link Archer BE550 (or BE9300) and the
Asus RT-BE92U seem to be two in the price range (max of $350). I'm certain either of those will be a significant upgrade. If there are any others in this price range I will def consider them.

I've only ever owned Asus and Linksys, I like the app, which admittedly i don't use often. I have a 2 story house but majority of clients are downstairs same floor as the router. I'd like easy software/app, no subscriptions for features, good signal range and somewhat future proof. Ive looked at wifi 6 and 6e but honestly id rather go for 7, with the prices on some of these. Not sure if that would harm my current things but I know for one my PS5 Pro has wifi 7.

 

[bill001g]

I suspect you will see very little difference between any newer router and your current one. Be very careful about chasing speedtest numbers and the fear of missing a good deal because of black friday.

First you only really more speed for large downloads. Most portable devices do not have enough storage to download large things. You really should run any game consoles wired if there is any option. All wifi is subject to interference which causes lag spikes in games. More bandwidth only helps when you download/install the game when you are playing online games most use well under 1mbps.

I have not kept up on the pricing of wifi7. They were stupidly high priced when they came out. Be careful not all wifi7 routers support all the wifi7 features. I know very few support the ability to use 2.4,5 & 6 combined....then again I have never seen a end user device that can do this.

Wifi6 was mostly marketing hype it had very little improvement over your current wifi5 router. Wifi6e does help because of all the bandwidth on 6ghz. Unfortunately that too is now getting over crowded and 6ghz has issue going through walls.

wifi7 is still a bit hard to say for sure. Early reports are you get almost no benefit over wifi6e. Maybe it is just because not enough people have it. I know there is lots of discussion about PS5 wifi7 being garbage...not sure if it is the PS5 wifi or if it is a more generic wifi7 issue.

Unless you have some large issue I would wait until you have more wifi7 devices. I would spend any money on trying to find a way to get some kind of wired connection to your ps5. MoCA over coax tends to be the best option when ethernet is not available. Powerline networks tend to be more stable even if it might be slower than wifi. Again speed only matters when you download games. You could I guess switch back to wifi to download and then use powerline to play.

 

[BlasphemousMusic]

I suspect you will see very little difference between any newer router and your current one. Be very careful about chasing speedtest numbers and the fear of missing a good deal because of black friday.

First you only really more speed for large downloads. Most portable devices do not have enough storage to download large things. You really should run any game consoles wired if there is any option. All wifi is subject to interference which causes lag spikes in games. More bandwidth only helps when you download/install the game when you are playing online games most use well under 1mbps.

I have not kept up on the pricing of wifi7. They were stupidly high priced when they came out. Be careful not all wifi7 routers support all the wifi7 features. I know very few support the ability to use 2.4,5 & 6 combined....then again I have never seen a end user device that can do this.

Wifi6 was mostly marketing hype it had very little improvement over your current wifi5 router. Wifi6e does help because of all the bandwidth on 6ghz. Unfortunately that too is now getting over crowded and 6ghz has issue going through walls.

wifi7 is still a bit hard to say for sure. Early reports are you get almost no benefit over wifi6e. Maybe it is just because not enough people have it. I know there is lots of discussion about PS5 wifi7 being garbage...not sure if it is the PS5 wifi or if it is a more generic wifi7 issue.

Unless you have some large issue I would wait until you have more wifi7 devices. I would spend any money on trying to find a way to get some kind of wired connection to your ps5. MoCA over coax tends to be the best option when ethernet is not available. Powerline networks tend to be more stable even if it might be slower than wifi. Again speed only matters when you download games. You could I guess switch back to wifi to download and then use powerline to play.

My ps5 is wired at the moment, I was looking to swap that out with my wife's pc which currently isn't.

I figured I would see better range and numbers for a newer router tho, over all, not just when downloading?

 

[bill001g]

The range is based on allowed transmit power...and remember the device needs to talk back so the router is only 1/2

The legal transmit power for wifi is the same no matter which version of wifi you are running...technically the newer ones are slightly less. So the distance the signal goes is the same for the newest routers as ones that are 10yrs old.

What is different is how the data is encoded into the signals so they can put more data into the same radio signal. This quickly gets into the messy concept of at what distance do you get say 100mbps. This tends to be impossible to use too much manipulation of numbers.

All that matters is say how many Db or radio signal you get. This is how the FCC tests things but what happens is almost every device puts out very close to the maximum radio power so all routers that use the same wifi chipset pretty much get the same numbers. BUT even this means nothing. Every house is different and that has much more effect on coverage that tiny difference between routers. This is why almost every review is worthless. Even professional reviews many times do it in their house so all you can say is if you have a identical house to the reviewer you can use their testing to select a router.

The reason more speed is only useful for download is other application will not use more speed even if you have it. Netflix for example uses 30mbps for 4k video and having more will not make it run better or faster. Things like online games use maybe 1mbps. Web surfing uses massive number of very tiny files. Technically each file will download slightly faster but you will not be able to detect it. The overhead of managing all the parts of a web page hide any gain.

Your average house really does not need more than 100mbps internet/wifi. You could have mulitple people watching different 4k videos and other playing games and surfing the web and still have extra bandwidth.

It only really matters when you need to download something like the old version of microsoft flight simulator which I have been told is over 130gbyte