Requirements for router in a 2-story house

I would like to buy a router for my new house, so I would like to know which router is the most recommended for a two-story house, considering signal range and strenght.

Besides the speed difference, is it the same to have a router with G or N-technology in my case?

Thank you.

 

I have a 3-story townhouse, with my Linksys WRT54GS wireless router on the 3rd floor. I get excellent reception throughout the house, even the first floor and garage.

 

I would not even consider a gs or g model, only the WRT54GL is any good. Those models are not very stable when in comes to multiple user or simotanious connection in excess of 70.

The GL model will allow you to run after market firmware.

On multistory housing, you want to setup in the middle area (floor) or the side that will give you the best coverage.

You also need to know what your going through. Concrete is harder to penetrate than wood. But as you increase the angle through the wall or floor the greater the loss. So it may take some testing to get the best location. Use Netstumbler and run a site survey, you will find areas that are very weak or dead.

 

The N router will give you a much broader area of coverage then a plain G or even a super G. You will need an N wireless card on the computers to take advantage of the increased speed, tho the range will be there no matter what wireless card you have.

Otherwise, if you have no N wireless capable computers, then get a super G wireless router and you should be fine in your house as long as you don't live in a pure concrete WWII bunker.

 

My computer is on the first floor, and my D-Link WBR-1310 is on the second. I'd assume it's on G. The signal is strong and I think I only got dropped once in the last week.

 

for the average Joe a standard G router should be okay within this house but unfortuately what effects wireless signals are the silliest of things such as stell RSJ's or massive amounts of concrete. heh!! As Adinu says to be on the safe side a N or older draft N router should be fine with this as it runs over a greater distance still keeping consistent signal strength.

 

N using the same 2.4 band width as g, so distance on only dependent on the SNR sensitivity of the radio. This is where the distance can vary between all devices. So to say 1 out distance the others is not true. 11n drops it speed real quick as distance is increased. If you had a old bad 11g setup and moved to 11n yes you should get better distance. But if you had a very good 11g don'e expect any distance increase, speed yes.

Now to future proof your network you could go with a 11n. The concenses is a v2 11n router will be able to be upgraded to the final spec whenever that happens in 2009. But link most new hardware it gets cheaper as production goes up. The problem with todays 11n hardware is every mfg is trying to get there firmware extra into the spec. The reason in most cases you must by a matching card to get the 300mbps speed. There is still a lot of problems with it. It would have been nice if they learned to play with each other on 11g before moving to 11n. The best hardware will be the dual band models. This will allow 11n users to use the less crowded 5ghz and 11g use the 2.4ghz at the same time without effecting each other. Currently most all of the firmware is buggy, so expect problems with Draft 11n hardware.