Netgear AC1900 or D-Link AC3200

[JoshuaB123]

I'm trying to decide whether I get two NETGEAR AC1900s or one D-Link AC3200. I have around 20 or so devices in my house, 11 being mobile devices, and the rest wired devices which I have a 16 port network switch for. If I get two AC1900s, call me greedy, but I can have one for myself for my personal devices and the rest for the family. But I can get the more powerful AC3200 for the price of two routers.. Any ideas? Suggestions? Also I have CAT7 cables running back and forth for the wired devices.

 

[kanewolf]

The "more powerful" WIFI router won't make any difference for your devices because they aren't AC devices. Get the two AC1900s.

 

[bill001g]

There likely is little to no difference performance wise. It will be a simpler setup with 1 router rather than 2.

You may not even get that much difference between a single netgear and the fancy routers with 2 5g radios.

You will almost always hit your ISP limit well before you use all the bandwidth even in a single radio. Your largest issue is going to be able to get even 1 802.11ac router to run without interference from neighbors. When you attempt to use the tri band routers they pretty much attempt to use every available channel in the 5g band. This means for it to work well no other neighbors are using wireless.

The 5g band is quickly become as unusable as the 2.4g band because of routers like these because everyone is stomping all over the top of each other.

 

[mwm87]

As someone who owns a Netgear AC1900 (the D7000 model, basically an R7000 with a modem strapped to it), I'd recommend against going Netgear. Their firmware is atrocious. For instance, it doesn't allow you to alter the configuration of the built-in firewall, which is a problem given that, by default, it responds to requests on open ports with a DENY rather than just dropping the packet. This gives information to someone port scanning you for no good reason.

I've also telnetted into the router and read some of their firmware source code (which is GPL), and they actually have the router configured to hijack DNS requests to routerlogin.net and redirect to your internal router address. I'm guessing this is designed to make accessing the admin interface easier, but I've had this function go haywire on me when it started redirecting ANY DNS request to my router admin page. The only way I could get around this was by setting static DNS addresses on my client machines.

And to top it off, their admin interface just kinda sucks, and looks like it was rushed out the door before actually being completed. Of course, all of this is irrelevant if you're planning to flash custom firmware like openWRT or something (though this is not an option for my D7000 because of the modem component, but I believe the R7000 has custom firmware available).

EDIT: just to add, given that wireless is your main concern, the netgear firmware doesn't provide any way to fully disable WPS, which is a major security risk for wireless networks. It's a pity, because the bandwidth and range on the AC1900 is excellent, based on my own experience and benchmarks I've read.

TL;DR - The Netgear AC1900 has great hardware, but terrible firmware. If you're going to flash custom firmware, AC1900 might be good. Otherwise would recommend against.