Router for a place saturated with other Wi-Fi networks

[krneki1]

I'm looking for a wireless router with a stable, highly reliable connection in a place heavily saturated with other Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth connections. One client will be connected through 2,4 GHz 802.11g connection and another one through LAN, while the data rate will be low (max 200 KB/s). There has to be no packet loss and uptime has to be 100 %. I have already tested Linksys WRT54GL in such environment and it crashed within few minutes with occasional packet loss beforehand. On the other hand, Cisco Meraki MX64W worked without a single problem.

Cisco is out of my budget, I am looking more towards ~200 $. Currently I aim for Asus RT-AC68U, Asus RT-AC87U, Linksys WRT3200ACM and Netgear AC1900 (R7000), but I don't really know what is the crucial thing to look for. Which router would you recommend? Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Guessing this is residential. For business we always separate the router from the wireless.
I've had an Asus RT87U...still have it, I just don't use it anymore. But it was very fast and stable..handled heavy loads very well. The stock firmware was great but I still flashed it with 3rd party "Merlin" firmware.

Although I have fairly extensive experience with higher performance routers and excellent 3rd party firmware for many home routers, I'd never promise 100% uptime to a client using residential grade hardware. If you want 100% guaranteed uptime, closest I'll get is 99% by providing dual business grade linux based firewall appliances running in failover mode, and we're easily starting at about $5,000.00 just to install/set it up.

You have to figure out what's causing the router to fail. I highly highly doubt it's the wireless noise. Heavy wireless interference from a bunch of neighbors will affect wireless clients, but a wireless access point/router should not care one single bit.

Your Linksys wrt54gl crashed probably from old age. I sold/installed literally hundreds and hundreds of those way back in the day..but man..that was a LONG time ago. I flashed most of those with either Tomato or DD-WRT. And they can't handle todays internet speeds, not to mention IP6.

Your wireless performance will require a good site survey and determining what channels to use. You're in an already noisy spot..the answer is not to get the biggest most powerful AP you can...else you're just adding to more noise. The answer is to sprinkle a few APs around..all on low power. Carefully adjusting the channels. If you have a lot of neighboring wifi your 2.4 area is likely quite limited, since you have (assuming you're in the US) just 3x non-overlapping channels. May have to look at dual radio AC...get 5.0 in there, you got a lot more channels to work with (depending on how wide you want to run them).

 

[Sky-Knight]

*sniff* *sniff*

I smell a torrent hound...

 

[fencepost]

Requirement for 0 packet loss and low bandwidth sounds more like a monitoring system to me, possibly IoT if it's not possible to switch it up to 5GHz. If it's any kind of upgradable hardware then a switch to even a USB-based 5GHz adapter would make more sense if it's truly a very "noisy" environment.

 

[Markverhyden]

Even for residential I stay away from retail labels. You can pickup a Ubiquiti ERL3 for under $100 and a separate Unifi AP AC LR for a little over $100. Superb performance.

No such thing as zero packet loss. While you have control over the site you have no control over anything else, so that is a myth.

 

[Bryce W]

I second Ubiquiti. Cheap with lots of features to find the best channels/locations in a congested area.

Your Linksys wrt54gl crashed probably from old age. I sold/installed literally hundreds and hundreds of those way back in the day..but man..that was a LONG time ago.

2005. Its 13 years old but strangely still sells pretty well even though it only supports 802.11g, not even the N after it, let alone AC.

 

[brandonkick]

I seem to agree.... sounds like the old linksys unit is just well... old.

If you already have "routing", then just get a unifi access point and mount it as centrally as you can.
A lot of ISP's provide gateways these days, so you get 4 ports on the modem itself. Just run a line for
the hard wired workstation and run a line for the unifi.

Do a site survey. You say "saturated" but it may really not be that bad. You do have some ability to
tune your Unifi into the less crowded "spaces". That may not even be necessary.

If you require such uptime, is there a possibility of just hard wiring both machines? Wi-Fi just introuduces
a whole crap ton of possibility for things to go wrong.

 

[TechLady]

So far I am very happy with my Synology RT2600AC Wi-Fi AC 2600. Really nice middle ground between residential and business level, terrific & intelligent UI, a little pricier than the usual lot of residential routers (Netgear, etc.), but still reasonable. I may be permanently switching away from TP-Link in the near future.

Personally I avoid Netgear like the plague and I seem to remember a lot of other techs here do too.

 

[fencepost]

I'm on a WNDR3700 running OpenWRT and have been for years, but it may be time to retire it soon - it's been getting a little flaky on the 2.4 side.

Was an amazing unit for a long time and still is though. Dual band, gigabit ports, decent enough RAM and flash. Many years ago I actually set a few up as APs in a place where we also needed a switch and where running cabling in the ceiling was going to be ugly. The last of those will finally be coming out of service in probably a month or so.