No usb 3 is a big let down

Being beaten by the Homehub3 on 2.4GHz at distance is also a big no no…

AC just needs more time to develop IMO. I am still fine on my 5 year linksys router that is only up to wireless G. Been more than enough for my family.

Sky Router (new white one) has actually been better for us than a HH3, better throughput and better signal….we can't saturate that so I'm pretty sure that we'll be fine. However I do have a managed Gigabit Switch and CAT6 for important ahem “stuff”

Why would you spend £170 on this when most broadband supplier give you a router for free…

Niskin
Why would you spend £170 on this when most broadband supplier give you a router for free…

Because the router that most broadband suppliers “give” you is of poor quality? Certainly that's a complaint that most Virgin Media customers will be all to aware of.

That said, I couldn't even begin to justify the cost of this router when there doesn't seem to be much in the way of concrete advantages for the typical home user.

To be honest I think one of the ways AC is most helpful is it requires a minimum of 2 antennas iirc, most of the bad N-grade configurations of the world are caused by either not supporting 5GHz or by using a single antenna, which respectively limit you to the very busy 2.4GHz band (takes a huge chunk out of speed in my experience) and to the lower speed variants (like my N-grade nexus 4 only pairs at 72mbit maximum, whereas my N-grade laptops will link at 300 and 450mbit because I chose 2 and 3 antenna cards).

I also find it a bit odd that the quoted speed for AC is 1.3gbit/s when for instance Intel only sell 2 antenna cards, so the most you'll get is 867mbit.

Apart from the issues I've raised above, more wifi speed is always good, though it'll be another generation at least before our routers can max out the potential speed of AC.

As for expensive routers for home use, yeah most people will only have to spend £30-50 to cover all their needs, there are those that go above and beyond though. I bought an Asus RT-N66U and I don't come close to maxing out its abilities, I just needed something with the rock solid reliability of Linux (now running Tomato) and the speed of a modern device (wrt54gl couldn't stream high bit rate 1080p content over wifi, not enough bandwidth). If I used it as a NAS as well, ran the torrent client (transmission) , used it as a vpn, ran multiple subnets and virtual wifi networks for guests, used heavy QoS and everything else though it'd be worthwhile spending as much as I did.

If you can't install DD-WRT/Tomato/etc on it, then it's almost worthless. The stock firmwares on almost every router is fairly poor in terms of stability and features, you're at the mercy of a commodity manufacturer if a security flaw ever appears, and if there's an auto-update function then features you purchased may suddenly disappear (e.g. the Cisco Linksys ‘connect cloud’ fiasco).

The Asus rt ac66u is still better as it provides antennas, though for the price I wish they added usb 3 it would be great to convert an old SSD into a nas drive.

usb 3 is on the ac68u thats due out anytime.

GoNz0
usb 3 is on the ac68u thats due out anytime.

Didn't know that - thanks. Got to say that I'd prefer to spend the money on the Asus rather than this Netgear, as every one of the four Netgear routers I've owned has had issues with range, (and the last two were unstable to boot).

pinkpound
No usb 3 is a big let down

+1 USB 3 should be default for manufacturers - especially at this price point…

Brewster0101
Being beaten by the Homehub3 on 2.4GHz at distance is also a big no no…

Absolutely appalling results @ 2.4GHz :D

Niskin
Why would you spend £170 on this when most broadband supplier give you a router for free…

My thoughts exactly. I've got sky fibre, and am actually wired up myself but phones etc. in the house use the wireless, but I just bought a gigabit switch for a tenner so my NAS connection was speedy, and the rest is fine.

pinkpound
No usb 3 is a big let down

Just thought I'd point out that over a wireless network you will not likely hit the max transfer speeds of USB 2.0 which will peak around 280 Mbits/second so in many cases USB 3.0 on these routers is something of a gimmick.