I will tell about our buildings. These are 1980's constructions with solid 12 inch brick walls and all concrete. RCC structures.
Drilling with drill machine is headache even for professional persons.
Airtel got the job done inside 10 minutes. This isn't a problem if you own the premises. Punch a hole, run the wire in a conduit outside the house to upper levels as necessary.
And for that kind buildings,these apple routers just one each are proving adequate.
Small test for all those apple haters.
Does your laptop connect at full speed of your router and wifi card specifications.
Do you ever see connected at 300 mbps. 450 mbps.
Those are link speeds and do not mean much, what they do is confirm your client can talk 2 or three stream on both bands.
The real test is throughput. For that you need something like iperf. client + server and test throughput in different locations. That will give you a better idea as to how fast stuff really is or isn't being received. That is real world.
You are incredibly fortunate that you are happy with the extreme. But you had to take the risk and buy it. because it worked for you it may or may not work for others. That is the really frustrating thing about all this wireless business
Its easiest for student types & temp workers who only need coverage in the same room or at the most in the next one. They can go botom of the barrel cheap 2.4Ghz and be happy. Once you want coverage in the whole house the game gets more complicated.
My latitude 6520 with centrino 6300 connects at full 450 mbps with airport extreme and at 300 mbps with airport express.
For those who may not know where to see this,
Its either at windows task manager network pane. Or at networking center.
I'm not really sold on the three stream business as yet. Its good for a strong to medium signal once you get away throughput drops to the point you wonder what the big deal really is.
The reality it would seem to me in the router market is,
to get good one stream, you need to get a two stream router and to get good two stream you need to get a three stream. I'm not quite sure why that is. Maybe power amplifiers. maybe 2xT 2XR just receives better than 1xT 1XR
What do you all think ?
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thanks for taking out time to write an elaborate answer.. really appreciate it.. i think, any router above or around 10k price is proving to be good for my kind of requirements with 8 wifi and 3 wired devices at home + occasional guests pouring in my 2 story building of 15 by 60 feet dimensions each floor.. router placed in middle of both floors..
You will get good coverage in the region of the router and in the region directly above it. If you want coverage in the back rooms that might be challenging depending on how your house is built. Again if your requirements are light then it will not matter.
If you can find a vendor that will allow you to try out a couple of products then you will get your match. But the problem i find is once you open the box you own it. No return or exchange. And this is with flipkart, so forget about smaller shops.
with ddwrt though and if i touch 14k budget, i can have 2 usbs, dual concurrent bands and hdd streaming, 3g connection facility + fabulous coverage and throughput in n66 asus.. but 14k is a bit too much right now..
I'm looking at the wndr 3800 currently, it only has 1 usb but you can attach a hub so its not limited.
You don't want to get a 3700 because the one that is being sold right now is a v3. The one everybody raved about was v1 & v2. What is the wndr 3800 ? its a v2 with double the RAM & flash and some cloud software. It runs open-wrt & dd-wrt. open-wrt seems to be more attractive to me at the moment but i'm still trying to figure out what attractive actually means.
Router manufacturers have this annoying habit of keeping the model number the same and changing the hardware underneath.
wndr 3700 v3 has no 3rd party support as it runs a broadcom chip whereas the wndr 3800 can use all the stuff that was done for the v2 with the atheros.
if i have to remain around 10k mark, trying to figure out whats best..
Harpreet has a conservative suggestion that i've seen in other threads. If you own the house then you can wire it as you see fit and buy cheap TP-links N300s and set up access points as you like. That will give you very good coverage but you will be limited to the 2.4Ghz band.
Now whether 2 or 3 tp-links does a better job than one powerful router is hard to say. Pratik seems to think otherwise, presumably he ran those tp-links with dd-wrt and still found them to be lacking.
Thing with many cheap components is its modular and easier to manage and cheap to maintain, one router goes, replace it. you still have a network. You main guy goes and you have nothing until you get a replacement from the service center. Asus IIANM has a 3 year warranty so thats not bad.
You need to conduct a site survey, so get a program like inSSIDer or wifi analyser and see how crowded the 2.4 ghz space where you live actually is. it might be very crowded in which case you will be better off with dual band or you might be very lucky and find its not very crowded at all in which case 2.4 ghz will work very well. It stretches a third of the way further than 5Ghz does.
The drawback here, if you're lucky to have a 2.4 ghz spectrum is that it only applies on the day you did the test, 6 months or a year from now more 2.4 networks might crop up and mess with your throughput. You will then wish you had got a dual band. So there is a hedge to consider.
