Recommend Home Router

[mouseclock]

For my home internet package of 1000MBps, I am looking for a suitable option. There are so many options that I find myself confused. Budget is around USD$200.

I see there are some MU-MIMO linksys router (EA7500), is that the best/latest technology and should I go with it?

What about Asus RT-AC68U, Netgear R7000,Netgear R6300? How can I differentiate between routers and choose the right one? I obviously will use internet for downloading and browsing websites.

 

[Penguinapple1]

The Netgear R7000 is a really good router. Do you do much gaming?

 

[mouseclock]

Not necessary games. Just need something which is durable, reliable and max speed. All for home uses.

I like Linksys EA7500, it seems new and has MU-MIMO. So is that a good choice??

 

[bill001g]

The routers can have all the fancy features but if you end device do not also support them you are wasting your money. The vast majority of end devices only have 2 antenna so can only run 2 feeds. This means 300m on the 2.4g and 900 on the 5g assuming they have 802.11ac support. This makes a router that claims 1200 the optimum price/performance for most people.

Things like MU-Mino and beam forming are hard to say how much if anything they buy you. It is greatly dependent on your house more than the router. The test results you see are very in conclusive at least when you only look at independent reviews and not the manufactures.

tri band routers also tends to be a waste of money. No single end device can use all the bandwidth but you might be able to assign a device to each radio. Now this assumes you have no neighbors that want to use wireless also. The triband routers use almost all the available bandwidth so you pretty much guarantee interference when you have neighbors.

Don't expect high speed on wireless the very best devices talking to end device that also have 4 antenna feeds are only getting a little over 250m.

For wired the cpu speed is the main factor to how much you can get. Most 802.11ac routers can get more than 800m on a wired connetion. Again it greatly depends on your traffic. The are measuring a single machine doing transfers this is very different than say 100 machines with many open sessions each.

Unless you have end devices that can use advanced features I would look at 802.11ac devices that uses the 1200m number (ie 300+900)

 

[Penguinapple1]

I agree with Bill. Now yes, the EA7500 looks nice; a lot of the features such as MU-MIMO are not used very much yet. I would recommend you get a Netgear R7000, Asus Ac68U, Linksys WRT1900ACS or Synology RT1900ac. By the time MU-MIMO comes in to full use there will be way better routers available than the EA7500, I am not saying that you shouldn't get the EA7500, however a lot of the features that you will pay for on it won't work on the devices that your currently have. Let us know what router you decide getting.