NETGEAR - Nighthawk AX8 8-Stream AX6000 WiFi Router (RAX80)

I got fed up with my RAX80. Switched to Unifi and love it!

I had tomato on my r7000 after the Netgear firmware just straight up stopped enabling the wifi radios. It was solid for ~4 years after that. I only upgraded to get wifi 6. Now I have an rax-80 in AP mode because I upgraded to opnsense as my router. No complaints on the AP mode nighthawk

With a descent router wireless is nearly as good as wired these days. I speak as someone who was once a 'wired network' purist for the same reasons as you, and also someone who works from home. A good router, set in a centralized place will probably be a cheaper and simpler solution than wiring everything together. I use one of those nighthawk routers with four antenna. Alternatively, doing data cabling runs throughout your house can be in DIY territory. It would be much cheaper than hiring a contractor and you could be done with it in about a day depending on how many rooms you want patched in and how much you care about wire enclosures being visible. Lots of people just put cable mounts in the corner near the ceiling and run them outside the wall.

With a descent router wireless is nearly as good as wired these days. I speak as someone who was once a 'wired network' purist for the same reasons as you, and also someone who works from home. A good router, set in a centralized place will probably be a cheaper and simpler solution than wiring everything together. I use one of those nighthawk routers with four antenna. Alternatively, doing data cabling runs throughout your house can be in DIY territory. It would be much cheaper than hiring a contractor and you could be done with it in about a day depending on how many rooms you want patched in and how much you care about wire enclosures being visible. Lots of people just put cable mounts in the corner near the ceiling and run them outside the wall.

Netgear nighthawk for 6. Using tplink easy mesh for 7 and been happy so far

Definitely 👍. I use a Netgear Nighthawk with WiFi 6.

Considering that you’re using a very old 802.11n-only device, an upgrade to a decent WiFi6 device will modernize you greatly. These can be very inexpensive. I picked up a used Netgear Nighthawk WiFi6 router for $30 and it covers my apartment perfectly, despite the 200 neighbors. Then, when the future arrives and it’s time to expand, I’d buy something new. WiFi7 prices are only going to fall faster and WiFi7 clients will become all that more common, so it will pay to wait. Network gear is one of those things that you can’t future-proof. The tech changes fast enough, and the prices change fast enough, and the client support lags enough to the point where it’s is more efficient to buy for today, and not for 24 months from now.

stay away from netgear they are good, but once they no longer support the router they throttle your internet speed so you can buy a new one. only way to fix it is buy reverting to an older update making you vulnerable to getting hacked. plus the spectrum routers are netgear routers, so you'll be in the same boat where it will goes down every day. I had a netgear nighthawk gigabit router and it would go down every day and then when it was no longer being supported with the last update it was throttle to 200 mbs. try out an asus router, I've got one of their cheap $60 routers two years ago and I have not had any issues with it. if it goes down it's on the spectrum side.

Yeah, I gave up on consumer grade crap too, after I had a Netgear Nighthawk system that would randomly start spazzing out and start dropping packets on the wireless network and need a full power cycle every once in a while. Ended up going with Ubiquiti a few months ago and I've been pretty happy with it so far.

I agree. I have tried numerous Netgear products, going back to a PCMCIA card, and all of them have had problems. The last Nighthawk I had constantly resulted in "Connected, No internet" for too many devices.

They were all WiFi 6. I used a Nokia linksys Atlas, a TPLink one and a Netgear Nighthawk. Except for the Nokia (wifi5), none of them even came close to the signal penetration I got from the GLinet flint 2.