[SOLVED] New router shopping - what to get

[Nabby]

Background:
I was living in a small house outside city limits and between my roommate's and my routers both acting as access points, wireless N has been more than sufficient and I just never upgraded. However, I have moved to the busy center of the city by myself with a single N router and even in my 900 sq ft apartment, it's just not cutting it with all the neighbors providing interference. There's a LOT of networks showing up around me, and running Tomato on my router I can see my connection speeds jump around from the 100's all the way down to 7mbps and I can feel it when my YouTube videos start to buffer frequently. I've also added echos to every room, so that's not helping.

Now, I'm only paying for 50mbps internet - I have Alexa playing music across the whole apartment, I play a little Final Fantasy XIV and I watch YouTube a ton (in 4K). But I'm also running a headless file and media server in the closet that I seem to struggle getting a good signal from even though it's probably the closest thing to my router.

So what's the best technology to upgrade to in this situation? Only my PC has an AX card in it. Everything else supports AC. My budget would be to pick up a single AX router or a set of mesh AC routers like eero's. I don't know if any of the neat new features of AX (like the OFDMA or tri-band) will do anything for AC only devices. But mostly I just want a way to get the best signal to and from several AC devices in a congested environment. I would love some advice.

 

[kanewolf]

Background:
I was living in a small house outside city limits and between my roommate's and my routers both acting as access points, wireless N has been more than sufficient and I just never upgraded. However, I have moved to the busy center of the city by myself with a single N router and even in my 900 sq ft apartment, it's just not cutting it with all the neighbors providing interference. There's a LOT of networks showing up around me, and running Tomato on my router I can see my connection speeds jump around from the 100's all the way down to 7mbps and I can feel it when my YouTube videos start to buffer frequently. I've also added echos to every room, so that's not helping.

Now, I'm only paying for 50mbps internet - I have Alexa playing music across the whole apartment, I play a little Final Fantasy XIV and I watch YouTube a ton (in 4K). But I'm also running a headless file and media server in the closet that I seem to struggle getting a good signal from even though it's probably the closest thing to my router.

So what's the best technology to upgrade to in this situation? Only my PC has an AX card in it. Everything else supports AC. My budget would be to pick up a single AX router or a set of mesh AC routers like eero's. I don't know if any of the neat new features of AX (like the OFDMA or tri-band) will do anything for AC only devices. But mostly I just want a way to get the best signal to and from several AC devices in a congested environment. I would love some advice.

There is not much you can do. Until 6Ghz WIFI6e is released, all your neighbors are fighting over the same frequencies. You need to move devices to a wired infrastructure, especially 4K streaming TVs.

 

[Nabby]

There is not much you can do. Until 6Ghz WIFI6e is released, all your neighbors are fighting over the same frequencies. You need to move devices to a wired infrastructure, especially 4K streaming TVs.

Thanks. That's one of the things I was looking at - moving the router and modem to the living room and just running 20 ft of ethernet cable around the edge of the room. I was just hoping that a newer standard would be more data dense, if that makes sense. Like if there's more data in each packet at the same frequency, the same number of dropped and resent packets wouldn't have the same performance impact.

 

[kanewolf]

Thanks. That's one of the things I was looking at - moving the router and modem to the living room and just running 20 ft of ethernet cable around the edge of the room. I was just hoping that a newer standard would be more data dense, if that makes sense. Like if there's more data in each packet at the same frequency, the same number of dropped and resent packets wouldn't have the same performance impact.

The "newer standard" when the 6Ghz spectrum becomes available will be much cleaner in a congested environment. But AX standard is still 5Ghz WIFI6 You need to wait for WIFI6e.
With 50Mb ISP speed you could drop your 5Ghz channel width to 20Mhz. That might allow you to find a hole that is less used and get better stability.