I have had a Netgear Nighthawk RAX36 for a couple of months now and it's pretty great (I have a 1600 sq ft single floor house). If you have a large house, my cousin uses Netgear Nighthawk RAX43 with a couple of APs (he has a 2500 sq ft house with two floors). He has the Spectrum 1gbps plan and it works perfect with RAX43. I am still on the old 400mbps plan but my RAX36 supports gigabit internet.
My Nighthawk AC1750 died last year. I replaced it with Netgear RAX36S and it's been fantastic. I use my computer as a media server, so I opted for a Netgear router without a NAS (the new gen Netgears work better without it). After swapping to the RAX36S, I was able to upgrade my Spectrum from legacy 400mbps to 500mbps.
Don’t purchase anything less than Wi-Fi 6, because it has beamforming and other really great technologies. So, range won’t be your problem on the 5 GHz band. Also, no matter what router you’ve got, switching to Wi-Fi 6 will definitely give you a huge improvement in stability.
And don’t buy anything from Huawei especially those secondhand ONTs they are unstable instead, buy a cheap ONU if you have fiber you’ll find them for like 2k 3k, and connect it with an ASUS or TP Link. These are the only two companies I would recommend, or maybe Netgear.
I’ll just give you some models you should look for in your range: **ASUS AX58u, NETGEAR RAX36s and TP LINK AX55 (you'll only find the TP-Link brand new)**
That’s all you need.
Just did this - 7 people, 3 floors.
Went through a few mesh systems (tplink be4800, be5000, XE75). Hated the way mesh worked, walked to another room device would hang on the further node and online games were choppier (higher ping and latency) than a single nighthawk (even had wired backhaul from main to second of the 3 nodes). Then went through multiple Netgear Nighthawks (rs200, rs300, rs500, axe3000). Ordered a refurbed RS700S for $349, its a beast but better coverage, better speeds, lower pings, less latency than any of the Mesh systems.
Dead spots where we got 5-10mb/sec now getting 550mb. Using the nighthawk app I could see with the RS500 60% signal level in some of the dead spot areas, now getting 90+%. I've got a 1GB connection from Spectrum and they overprovision so wirelessly with iphone 17 getting over 1gb a floor above or under the router and up to a room away still. Wired to PCs getting 1.1-1.2 gb too. I tested speeds in every room of my house with each system to record speeds.
I found a single, more powerful router to be a much better and consistent solution for 3 floors and 7 people.
I currenttly have a Wifi6 Netgear Nighthawk. I just upgrade my ISP speed from Fiber 1GB to Fiber 2GB, and this router does not support a 2GB input (only 1), so I want to take advantage of the speed.
Now, everyone here says Ubuquity this and that, but, I do not care about network management, or really customizing it or setting up a ton of different things. What I care about is speed, and coverage for my entire house.
This current single router (that is positioned at the center-about of my house), covers the entirety of our 2000 sq foot house. Outside the house like on teh patio the signal starts to get dropped. I am using all 4 of its LAN ports, 2 for gaming computers, and 2 for gaming devices. We have multiple 4K tv's running off Wifi, we have at any given moment 2-4 people all gaming with no lag at all (one of them is on a 1600 mbps wifi 6 card that seems to work really well), we have many cell phones, ovens, fridges, whatever, there's like 100 devices connected to this thing through wifi I don't even know them all, split amongst all 3 of its bands. We have ZERO issues and its been a great router. I simply want to upgrade from 1GBS to 2GBS signal so we continue to have even less issues and download things faster and future proof ourselves as new devices come out.
Does this Ubiquity (UDR7?) router fit the bill? I don't really want to buy any mesh or extension pieces or whatever, because it doesn't seem like I need them, if this single 3 year old Netgear router handles all this pretty well. Otherwise I'm looking at Asus ROG wifi7 routers, may be the new Nighthawk, though that doesn't seem the best anymore (?), but overall I've liked Netgear honestly, they've been my last 3 routers.
Yes the ISP gave me a year deal for the same price as 1GB, I get 2GB, but then realized my router doesn't actually support it. We do game a lot, all of us, and there is the occasional lag, though I'm not sure that's us. Honestly 1GB has been totally fine so far.
Yeah I'm not going to be setting up VLANs or segment devices or any of that, I'm not really that involved with the network. Just want everyone and every device to be happy out the box 😄
Interesting, thanks. I'm trying to avoid spending a bunch of money which is why traditionally I just went with a single powerful router. Also it helps managing the network in general, though I try to avoid that as I know just the bare minimum of messing with routers.
JadeMoon085
