ac66u or r6300 again ....

Hi and sorry for the same old topic, but its really urgent...
I`v read so many reviews about both these routers and I have a deadline of ordering one tomorrow. The reviews in smallnetbuilder are a bit too technical for me so I need an easy answer of which one of the two models to chose. It`s for an appartment with 2 big floors. Most important things for me are :
1. No drops and no restarts of the WLAN (cause I use only WLAN and not ethernet ports).
2. Range ... the router that my FiberNet Provider gave me was tp link wr740n, which is awful in range ... I don`t get almost any signal on the 2nd floor. And the walls in our appartment are really big.
3. Maintain speed - my connection atm is 30MBps download and 15MB Upload, but I`m planing to upgrade it to 50-25. I don`t want to lose any of the speed when moving around the house.
4. Easy to set up with 3 Powerline adapters (model XAV5602 from Netgear).

Its really urgent so please help
Thanks in advance !

 

I'd go with Asus on this occasion. I could possibly elaborate on that but since you find smallnetbuilder reviews too technical and simply want a recommendation I think skipping the technical part is OK this time.
Asus should do fine with your requirements 1 through 3, as for the no 4- it doesn't matter at all.

As always with Asus- firmware may and probably will take some time to mature but it's a great piece of hardware.

 

Thanks for your reply... it seems that not a lot of people could help me decide
have like a day or so to make my decision, so I think elaborating (although it may sound a bit too technical for me) will definitely help me clear up my mind

 

Almost all AC routers on the market are based on the same Broadcom chipset and the same radios for 2.4GHz and 5GHz so the difference between then is in the firmware and wireless amps and antennas (apart from other less important parts like USB ports and amount of RAM).

So in a way both those routers are very similar however Asus (typically for them) excels as far as RAM is concerned. Asus also uses external antennas rather than internal ones which always earns extra point in my book since you can orient them properly and more importantly upgrade them if you feel like it or need it.

With the same SoC you would expect both to perform in a similar manner in throughput tests (WAN-LAN) and that is indeed the case but Asus allows more simultaneous connections than Netgear. It is a firmware limitation of Netgear and it had been made on purpose but that might possibly play in Asus' favor is you use P2P technology heavily.

There's almost nothing between them in terms of USB performance (read/write)- if anything Asus is slightly faster.

As far as Wi-Fi performance is concerned Asus is by far the fastest of all Broadcom based routers. While the difference is negligible close to the router Asus' signal fades much slower than Wi-Fi signals of competitors so you get higher throughput at the same distance from the router (compared to R6300) and that pretty much implies greater range which smallnetbuilder confirmed by running Wi-Fi test at 50mbps on AC66u where other routers (R6300 included) were not able to connect at all.

So it's a better router compared to R6300 but it's extremely expensive, you would need a 802.11AC Wi-Fi card to really take advantage of what you will have paid for and it's still a first generation AC chipset so judging by what the history of 802.11n thought us- there's a lot of room for improvement in Ac field.

 

The D-Link DIR 868L is also one to look into.
D-Link DIR-868L Wireless AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit Cloud Router Reviewed - SmallNetBuilder

My R6300 is a year old and had had several firmware updates.The 2 USB ports are USB 2.0.My SanDisk Extreme USB 3.0 flash drives are not recognized in the R6300.

Connection strength and WiFi from 15' and going through 2 cement walls to my notebook with a Killer 1103 and Intel AC-7260 wireless cards is very good.