Need to replace the gash one from O2, so happy to spend to get something half decent.

No idea what the good brands are, but worried about Netgear – whenever I find an unsecured network it is always a Netgear one (well, nearly always).

WOuld be great if it was a powerful router that reached to the top of the house.

Netgear are fine they’re insecure as that’s how the owner has set them up.

For adsl or fibre?

I’ve got an Apple Airport Extreme. Brilliant. Never dropped out a connection, top spec – Dual band, Gigabit Ethernet speed, Decent WiFi speed etc. Truly fit and forget. Before the Apple router I had a number of different brands – Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, Belkin and the BT Home Hub and had problems with all of them from time to time. Switched to the Apple router and i’ve never looked back. I just switched off the WiFi on my BT Home Hub, plugged in the Apple Router via a network cable, it took about 2 minutes to set up and i’ve never touched it since.

Sorry, ADSL.

It is an Apple only household, so the airport extreme might be the way to go?

Draytek

If you use your existing router in modem mode then you can use a Asus RT-N66U. Very powerful.

There are plenty of threads on range extenders if main thing you want is wifi at top of the house.

I had a Netgear router, very good. Ran faultlessly for years. From memory default is “open” you have to set password so that probably explains why you see them as open and unsecured.

Billion 7800n.

Slight hijack. I have sky broadband, can I just plug any old router into the wall socket and keep the same provider or do I have to use their router? Reason being is the signal isn’t very good in the kids rooms.

Netgear domestic stuff used to have a flaky reputation. The Virgin “Super” Hub is made by them too and it’s pants. Very temperature sensitive and regularly crashes.

Draytek if you want industrial reliability, recommended by our consulting tech bloke from work. Very pricey though.

Belkin Linksys stuff could be good if they haven’t messed things about since the takeover.

Cisco stuff pricey and has NSA required backdoor in the operating guts.

@webwonk – we are an Apple only household but use non Apple router, that being said if I were buying again I’d be tempted with Apple looking at the Time Machine one with built in backp, quite an expensive solution (given external drives are £50 for 1TB) but “easy”

@wrightyson – no you can use a different router. Not sure how Virgin is setup are there 2 boxes or 1 ? BT use 2, first one is “modem” second is wifi base station/router – so in that case you just change the wifi base station. I note another poster kept the BT router but turned wifi off and added second wifi station wia Ethernet cable. If its just 1 box then you’ll have to programme router with username and password (IME) this is quite easy, you just need to get hold of them.

It’s just a single sky router. I got BT to do some work a while back and have a twin socket on the wall one port for adsl and the other for telephone, filter built in job I think. So just plug a decent router into the wall socket then, will it pick up my ip address from that?

@wrightyson Sky are a littel weird as they use a MER authentication type on the line so you can’t just change the router. Have a google around and check out the sky forums.

One way around it is to put the sky router into router only mode and then use another wifi access point like a Airport Extreme/Express.

One way around it is to put the sky router into router only mode and then use another wifi access point like a Airport Extreme/Express.

^ this.

Some great recommendations there, thank you.

Going to get a Draytek modem and plug it into a Time Capsule I have and use that as the wifi router. Can’t believe I had forgotten about that option.

We’re just waiting for the new MBPs (Haswell chipped) to get released and if there is any cash left over at that point I might look at Airport Extreme to get “5th gen” wifi, although I am not clear there is much value in that when I don’t (yet) have fibre to get properly fast internet.

Had a Netgear 804G (I think) router – from 2004 and it only gave up the ghost earlier this year. Was pretty good, replaced it with another Netgear, I guess the equivalent. Has been fine so far, no complaints.

Would say have used my Time Capsule as a wifi hub, but the signal strength, on the whole, isn’t as good as the actual router. Your house construction may be different..

When I got BT fibre the Home Hub 3 it came with was crap and needed rebooted almost every day as my devices kept loosing it. I bought an Asus 70 Dark Knight which has not needed touched since – it also gives me a good signal all over the house so I have no need for my wifi extender set-up.

Loads of set-up options to tweak… plus it looks cool 8)