Which router is best for me?

Hey all,

I am getting a router for my father's house, which I will be living at since he is closer to my school. My Dad.... is not that technology literate, so needless to say I will be the only one using the wireless in the house.

My room is directly above the office room where the modem/new router will be.

Besides schoolwork, I will be primarily gaming and downloading fairly large files (Skyrim mods and such). This will be done through wireless since we have no way of routing an ethernet cable up to my room. I want a good connection in which I can get good reception all throughout the house. I don't want any drops in connection, and good latency while playing games online.

I have already bought this wireless adapter for my pc:
Newegg.com - TP-LINK TL-WN722N Wireless Adapter High Gain IEEE 802.11b/g/n USB 2.0 Up to 150Mbps Wireless Data Rates 64/128 bits WEP WPA/WPA2, WPA-PSK/WPA2-PSK (TKIP/AES)

That being said, I'm looking at 2 routers at the moment, 1 budget router and the other one is more expensive, both very good reviews:

Newegg.com - Rosewill RNX-N150RT IEEE 802.3/3u, IEEE 802.11b/g, IEEE802.11n Draft 2 Up to 150Mbps Wireless Data Rates 1 x 10/100M WAN; 4 x 10/100 LAN
Newegg.com - TP-LINK TL-WR1043ND Wireless N Gigabit Router

These are both Wireless N I believe because I am told that's the way to go. Obviously the TP link is better than the Rosewill, I could tell from the price difference, but is the TP Link overkill for my needs? Is the TP Link only marginally better? I just don't want to waste an extra $30 for features I don't need.

Side question. Does 150 Mps differ that much from 300? Since I will never achieve either of those speeds I assume not.

Thanks guys!

 

I would recommend a TP-Link here- partly because I've been recommending it for a while now as the best band for the buck router and partly because I decided to put my money where my mouth is and bought it a while ago.

It's a very good unit indeed- no shortcomings whatsoever (although I'm using 3rd party firmware).

150mbps adapter won't do much difference but to be honest you should have waited and chosen an adapter to fit the router not the other way around. Buying a budget adapter and a not-so-budget router is not the best way to get your money's worth.

One possible issue is the location- the worst place to be is directly above a router with omni-directional antenna. That said you may just rotate the antenna or replace it- TP-Link has antennas that can be changed/upgraded.

 

I assumed, both with the reviews and since the brand is the same as that TP Link router, I wouldn't have any problems.

Which way do the antennas need to be facing then? Up won't get good reception? Do you think I would need better antennas then?

Thanks for the reply, btw

 

That's how an omni-directional antenna works- directly on top of it is the worst place to be.
But if you rotate the antenna by 90 degrees it should be OK.

 

So the TP-Link is omnidirectional as well as the Rosewill? I see, so if I point the antennas forward instead of up I shouldn't encounter any problems then.

Or did you mean rotate as in keeping the antennas in an upright fashion and spinning them a quarter of the way?

 

I meant to lay them flat instead of upright.

 

Okay good, because pointing them forward is in the direction of outside our house, don't want reception there! I'll do that then.

So even for my basic needs you still recommend the TP Link over the budget Rosewill router?

 

Yes- it's a good router with a decent factory firmware which if needed may be replaced with DD-WRT, or OPenWRT/Gargoyle.

As a rule of thumb you should never buy a low end hardware- it's always built from leftovers and meant to be sold to people who have no idea what they are buying.

TP-Link is by no means expensive- it's actually the cheapest of the good routers so it's worth the price.

 

Also, in response to your first reply... the wireless adapter doesn't seem like the "budget" type.

In fact, it looks like the best one on newegg for a basic consumer. A lot of the reviews stated that they get speeds just as fast as they would on the wired connection. Also a lot of people have reported very low latency on online gaming. I don't care if it is budget or not, it looks like it gets the job done as good as a $50 adapter. I hope this little thing won't let me down!

 

I actually didn't know this. I know budget hardware is somewhat unreliable but never because we get the short end of the stick kind of parts! I will avoid budget in the future, unless it is like the TP Link wireless adapter!

 

There is many options for you from wifi to wall plug/power line depending on the cash you want to spend, I game on wifi on heavy data transfer games and works fine. Wall plug would give you a bit extra space should the internet have a micro busrt "internet thunder storm more or less" where with wifi it is more sensitive to fluctuations and messing wiht your lag / ping / packet loss.

Powerline cost / Wall plug for 2 adapters 1 in 1 out $60 if not on black friday special somewhere and very primitive speeds here in the USA / old technology, UK/Europa has been running at 1GB/s lan speeds for 3 years already.

Wifi routers - Most major brands the "cheap = garbage", recent $250 netgear and linksys wifi routers is complete junk so it is difficult to fix price vs junk or not today.

Just do research and read reviews.

Wifi
You can also look at "Airlive n.mini" $34 very small and very solid, can get 2 of these and lan cable from 2nd to your laptop.
Engenius is a good brand as well and most higher prices models is a engenuis cloned with another label on it.
DD-wrt has issues for 14 months already with the wifi drivers and we could not fix it yet so do not focus too much on DD-WRT it is hit or miss now.

USB wifi search for either atheros or 20dbm or both then you would not have issues with wifi signal, your usb TP link has the 20dbm power rating.

Wifi router the D-Link DIR-655 is a very good one / solid for a long time if that is in your budget or black Friday special. Try to go first for atheros based wifi routers and 2nd for broadcom at this time. Again stay away from DD-wrt newer than 14929.

You might want to look at Wireless Reviews - SmallNetBuilder website they have a lot of reviews and technical data / tests of most models.

For what you need - You can use any old wifi router even one that is 5 years old provided it's wifi speed is more than your internet connection, ie: cable modem runs at say 5MB/s / 512KB/s then use the wireless in 802.11b "11MB/s" mode as it is more robust than G or N at this time and use a fixed channel number say 802.11B and channel 7~9 is usually least congested. Then disable all firewalls in the wifi router and let you pc + software run a firewall for best performance. The modem would have it's own firewall active as well and might have inbuilt wifi that just needs to be enabled.