Question Recommend a good Router for Xfinity in PA?

[mikehende]

Hey guys, a bud of mine was told by Xfinity [Comcast] that he can either rent a router from them or buy his own. He's located in Old Forge in PA and wants net service mainly for phone usage and wishes to know how many mbps he should get and a good router for his situation, any ideas please?

 

[bill001g]

What do you mean "for phone usage". If you mean the end device will be a phone and not say a desktop or laptop then you likely need far less bandwidth.

In general the minimum plans you find are about 100mbps. This is more than enough for even a family with multiple devices in use at the same time.

100mbps is still likely more than a lot of people actually will use. Watching something like 4k netflix uses about 30mbps. So you could have a couple people watching different netflix programs and some web surfing going on and you would still be fine.

The main use a of highspeed internet tend to be gamers who are impatient and don't want to wait for some 20GBYTE game to download. Although you can download data to a phone there just is not enough storage on the phone itself for anyone realistically to be download huge files.

As to what device you use the first place to start is to read the list of routers the ISP supports. The devices can vary both where you exactly you live and the plan you choose. The ISP has not upgraded their whole network at the same time.

Also slower plans allow you to use routers that might be a bit cheaper. The ones that support gigabit plans tend to be kinda expensive.

The lazy way is to just buy the same model as you are renting from the ISP.

Key here is you need both a modem and router. You can buy them separately but this is more done for people that want a higher end router. Most combo modem/router units are fairly basic.

 

[mikehende]

Appreciate it, will pass on your info, thanks.