Our old Netgear router has seen better days and as the kids now all have at least two wi-fi devices plus our stuff I need to find an affordable router that won’t be swamped by multiple connections.

Can any of you techy geeks recommend a particular model, thanks in advance Paul

you might be better off with a couple of routers cabled together to give you broader coverage. Make each one use the same SSID and credentials.

Netgear?
Apple?

Asus Dark Knight (make sure the firmware is up to date).

Or something from Draytek, but considering your reference to ‘geeks’ their stuff might be a bit too hardcore for you.

Asus Dark Knight

I run one of the Asus dark night setups with a Merlin firmware which allows you to alter the power of the signal.

Excellent bit of kit.

No idea if you can buy them unless subscribing to Virgin, but the new Superhub is great – massive coverage compared to my old (Sky) router and two frequencies too.

whatever you get go for a dual band router which separates faster devices from slower ones – this improves performance.
We use a pair of Apple Airport Extremes (£50 each of eBay) that are linked with cat6 and running the same SSID. This gives seamless wifi throughout the house [willywaggle] which is too big for a single device [/willywaggle].
It was not done to increase the amount of attached devices (of which we now have too many) which any decent router should be able to cope with.

I really rate the Draytek 2710n – most of our home based staff have them. Easy to setup in basic mode but loads of features if you want them. Great WiFi coverage too.

http://www.broadbandbuyer.co.uk/Shop/ShopDetail.asp?ProductID=8106

Be careful with Draytek stuff, not sure if this still applies to more recent stuff but I’ve used it in a hotel before to gain access to STW:

http://sixgun.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=4327

One of the best reviewed routers at the moment is the ASUS RT-AC68U. Worth a look if your devices support wireless ac.

Had 3 routers last year

Netgear N600 – good range, brilliant ui and app, occasional crashes – died after 2 weeks

Asus RT56Nu – best range, ok ui, crashed quite often, ran quite hot – died after 3 months

TPLink Archer C7 – good range, slightly better than the Asus on 5Ghz, slightly worse on 2.4Ghz, ac compliant, 1 crash in 8 months, UI better than the Asus worse than the Netgear, runs totally cool, bloody bright LEDS/notification lights

I really don’t rate Draytek stuff, even the enterprise kit feels like you are constantly beta testing their firmware releases. Memory leaks, firewall rule lists limited to arbitrary (and low) number of rules, various tables (e.g. NAT and routing) tables becoming full causing the router to stop making new connections.

Thanks for the replies, they are much appreciated, I’m going to avoid the the brands with too much “fanny/faff factor” I’m a fit and forget type of guy!

I recently replaced an old Netgear DG834GT with a TP-Link TD-W8970.

Very pleased with it. Couldn’t make my mind up whether I needed dual band or not but where I live we’re not in the range of many of the neighbour’s wifi and don’t have interference issues. Also it’s only my Mrs and mine’s Google Nexus 4 that support the higher band so decided it wasn’t worth it in the end.

The old Netgear quite regularly needed a reboot to sort out issues… Internet access lost, forgotten wifi settings, wired devices disappearing.

I haven’t touched the TP-Link for 2 months…

Thanks for the replies, they are much appreciated, I’m going to avoid the the brands with too much “fanny/faff factor” I’m a fit and forget type of guy!

All 3 of the routers I talked about above were pretty much fit and forget, the Netgear being the easiest followed by the TP link with the Asus just a little bit more complicated (but I think that may have been my fault)