WiFi Router Recommendations?

I haven’t compared it to the stock firmware, when I was investigating which router to purchase I stumbled across a thread on the whirlpool forums about the AC88U, people there were recommending Asuswrt-Merlin firmware as it cured a lot of issues that people were having, specifically Wi-Fi related. You can download it from this website: https://asuswrt.lostrealm.ca make sure to look up your specific model. It is free but I made a donation as a lot of work goes into it.

I’m not a technical guru but I can follow instructions, it was easy to install, through the Asus Web Router GUI:

Make sure you back up all your settings first, in case something goes amiss. They release updates regularly and it shows when an update is available on the home page of the ASUSWRT GUI.

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I would not by a wireless router. Get a decent router and add decent wireless AP to it such as the Ubiquiti Unify series. I have a Netgear r8000 and had issues with wirless all the time. I switched the wirelss off and bought a Unifi AC Pro and its been rock solid ever since.

Have to admit, even though I have not had a single issue with my router, I will be doing the same when it’s time to replace it.

Long term plan is to get the wi-fi away from the hi-fi. When I can afford to get some more cabling done on my house.

Fritz!Box 7580. Never had any issues.

Thank you for the info I’ll go and check it out.

Ubiquiti router, switch, and 2 access points delivered today. Hopefully will find t8me this weekend to setup and replace the Asus.

We posted some general recommendations recently:

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Networking_Best_Practices

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I’m glad you’re worked, it was a far cry from my experience, I was pretty close to running direct from a USB drive with NO network at all. All I did was fight it !

Mike

That would really suck. I had a really bad experience with an expensive Garmin cycling computer years ago. It would absolutely infuriate me, I couldn’t understand how a high end product could get to market that worked as badly as this. I got rid of it and will never purchase another, yet my friends swear by them and never have any issues. If Apple released a product with software as defective it would be all over the news.

Thanks for pointing to these blogs, @dabassgoesboomboom! Thought Roon gave this up long ago, so this is interesting for me in two different ways :slight_smile:

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Like others, AirPort Extreme experiencing problems. Upgraded to Netgear Orbi. Fantastic. Routinely 300 MBS and whole house coverage.

The following is my personal recommendation.

If I were to buy a router today, it’d be AC86U, not AC88U because the former uses newer hardware, the prevalent positive reports in my local computer forum, and the possibility to run Merlin firmware.

I believe buying a WiFi router is like buying a computer - look at the CPU, and more importantly the WiFi chips, known defects, and firmware. Generally Broadcom is safer, but there are exceptions. The best example is Quantenna. This is the greatest source of the problem with AC87U. I can understand @Mike_O_Neill frustration with it but there is a valid reason for it, and not necessarily representative of Asus Broadcom routers. Netgear R7500 used Quantenna as well. Guess what - they could not fix the problems with the original hardware, so they came out with R7500V2 using a totally different hardware design, dropped Quantenna and replaced it with Qualcomm.

Even if I like the Asus GUI, of the dozen or more Asus routers, I’ll only recommend particular models.

The AC66R mentioned above is a Best Buy version of AC66U. This is replaced by the AC66U B1, which upgraded the original old MIPS CPU to a newer ARM CPU. This new version has much of the functionality of AC68U, so I consider it to be a budget choice.

Currently I use a Netgear R7000 but its firmware failed to do something I need stably, so I run a hacked Merlin firmware on it, which in turn is based on Asus firmware.

The AC68U was good, but the original incarnation had a hardware flaw with the USB 3.0 interfering the WiFi. So the firmware fix is to slow down the USB 3.0 significantly. The latest AC68U C1 uses a faster CPU and fixed the USB 3.0 problem, and thus have hardware equivalent to the R7000 I’m using.

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Like I said in an earlier post I run the Merlin Firmware on my RT-AC88U.

It have not had a single issue with it, I purchased it in November 16 and it has been running 24/7 ever since.

This is not the best picture to show as I was the only one in the house and I wasn’t using any bandwidth but it will give you an idea how many devices we have connected at once, I have had a lot more when my sister and her children came to stay. I tried to push the router at that time with 8 iDevices streaming, Netflix on the ATV, music playing through the Zeppelin Air and YouTube on the MacPro.

The router handled it with no issues. Zero WiFi issues and my house is an old 1915 double brick affair.

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I use a Synology RT2600ac which integrates well with the Diskstation 1513+ that I use for my music library and to run the Roon Core. Works well.

We have built dedicated Roon systems seamlessly on the Ubiquiti platforms and highly recommend them.

The Ubiquiti AmpliFi system is wonderful, simple and affordable. https://amplifi.com

For larger projects we use the scalable Ubiquiti UniFi XG system with full duplex single/multi-mode fiber. https://unifi-xg.ubnt.com

I like(ed) a lot of things about the Apple AirPort line, especially the Express for AirPlay, but it doesn’t play well with Roon.

We have also had good experiences with Cisco Meraki, but it’s a licensed and directly supported system that’s more than most people need.

If you have a larger house and are considering a mesh system, I want to register a caution about the popular Netgear Orbi system. (Which, happily, I don’t see recommended above.)

I know a number of Roon users, including myself, have Orbi’s.

The Orbi’s have had dropout problems that have plagued most of the last year of updates. (Check the Orbi forums on Netgear for details.) I ran into continual dropouts until I purchased a separate router and ran the Orbi’s as access-points only. That should not have been necessary for a turnkey, mature consumer product, and it was also a little complicated to setup.

As the netgear forums report, previous Orbi users have switched to Eero, google, Ubiquiti and Linksys as a result. (I get the impression the Ubiquiti gear is really outstanding.)

I hope Netgear will get this worked out eventually (I’ve had great success with their Nighthawk routers). But, in the meanwhile, the Orbi’s aren’t really reliable.

I have a three AP orbi system with no dropouts in 18 months. Fast coverage all the way to the back of my yard. If you go mesh you definitely want a system with a separate radio for the back haul links. Orbi and Linksys velop are the only one’s that do. If you can run a wired backhaul then Ubiquiti APs are the way to go.

One of my bosses just bought AC86U to replace his AC66U original version (that after working normally for many years, has started failing). He reported that the WiFi throughput to his iPhone increased multiple times.

That was the best thing you could order for the money, I do this (wireless that is) for a living. For the price you can’t beat ubiquity. Everything else I have tested netgear, asus etc. not good. I represent wireless vendors like Ruckus, Aerohive, Meraki, HP, Cisco, Aruba, you name it but the value of Ubiquity is amazing.
Just be sure to configure if your devices are close in distance band steering to propose 5 Ghz to your devices, this spectrum is empty and you will get max performance.
There is an app on Android called Wifi Analyzer which will give you with channels are most used around you, you can evaluate and configure your channels manually to where less congestion and usage is. For 2.4 stick to 20 MHZ width (not 40) and for 5 GHZ you can go 40 (don’t try 80 as only a few devices may benefit.)

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Another happy Ubiquiti user here.

Thanks to @wizardofoz who helped me choosing ubiquiti unifi from Airport Extremes.

I live in a 2 story 4 room apartment here in Singapore. I previously used 3 airport extremes and one airport express to get signal to all of the rooms.
I use several sonos In some of the rooms as well as living room and used to have all the problems on the Sonos as others have reported.

Now I’m using the Unifi Ap pro upstairs and a Unifi Ap mesh downstairs (the only reason for the mesh downstairs is because some of my gears don’t have WiFi, so I connect it to a switch)

Now I have been using the Sonos non stop and testing it by playing next/prev tracks repeatedly with no issues.

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