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.
I'm not gonna shit on you for wanting nice looking stuff in your home like many others here are. Obviously it's performance should be unaffected, however you will save money in the long run by purchasing a nice new router for $60-120 and just using that. Saves you $10 per month so it pays for itself in under a year. I got a really good one on sale for $80 and have no regrets. It's about to pay itself off in a couple months and the performance has been honestly better since switching.
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.
JadeMoon085
