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Comment by jv22222 | Hacker News Reader

After 20 years of buyin (15+ routers) and searching for a wifi router that "just works"TM in large house scenario I finally found the ASUS AC5300.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0167HG1V6/

It has 3 radios on board 2x5ghz and 1x2.4ghz.

It has a mode that allows you to use a single ssid across all 3 radios. It uses QOS to dynamically switch each devices to the best radio for at any moment.

I purchased the same device for a small retail business and it works amazingly well in that setting too.

Highly recommended.

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I've really been enjoying my Ubiquiti setup that I switched to about 5 months ago. The internet has still gone down but that is due to my ISP and not the hardware.

Ubiquiti can get expensive for a home user, but yeah. It's rock solid gear, truthfully advertised and still a bargain at that price point.

Not expensive, a single UAP-AC-PRO is maybe $125, add a mikrotik hEx RB750GL and you're golden.

The 802.11N Unifi gear is <$200 for a three-pack and works of MikroTik passive PoE like the RB260, 5-port gigabit PoE with an SFP cage.

MikroTik and Unifi is an unbeatable performance/price combo for individuals, large homes and business scaling up to medium sized and multi-site deployments.

With those prices and features you can affordably dog-food the setup and support your friends and family.

This is more or less the exact setup I'm using (Ubiquiti AP and RB750). I've only had it for a few months but neither have required rebooting once they were set up and the performance is good enough to make my 150 Mbps connection the bottleneck.

I also enjoy the level of control that comes with having separate devices for cable modem / router / wifi AP, for example being able to ssh into the router to configure things like port forwarding.

I went with a full Ubiquiti setup (USG + CloudKey + UAP-AC-PROs) because yeah. Spent more than I should have, but the USG is actually a great dual-wan router. Already had a PoE switch for the APs though.

+1 for Ubiquiti Unifi. Got 2 AP's and a Router and it has been great with no issues so far (3 months). Upgraded as my previous combo router (with OpenWRT Gargoyle) would silently stop allowing wireless devices from connecting to the 2.4ghz at seemingly random intervals.

How do you feel about the security of the products? 20 year old PHP versions and the company itself was scammed out of tens of millions of dollars. I see good reviews from bloggers on the hardware, but the company doesn't seem to have made security a priority.

One recent example, there are plenty more out there: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/16/ubiquiti_networking...

That’s worrying indeed. But is the track record of Asus/Linksys/Buffalo/etc better? For decent security I guess the best option is to run pfSense or similar, but that seems to require more expensive hardware.

In 15 years my family has gone through maybe 4 routers total. The first was the original 54G linksys router, that didn't even have wifi, eventually we upgraded to the WRT54G, and had that for at least 8 years, finally it couldn't handle all the devices so we upgraded to an N, 5GHZ, we only had to replace that one because of a faulty surge protector and a power surge. Since then we've had no issues in a fairly large 6 bedroom 3 story house.

Since then we've had no issues in a fairly large 6 bedroom 3 story house.

It depends very much on the construction of your house and interference of other nearby APs. We have an access point with a six-element beamforming antenna array (2.4GHz and 5GHz, Airport Extreme). WiFi in a room next to the AP is still reasonably ok. But once there are two walls between the AP and a device, the signal is basically gone.

We now use Powerline Ethernet and get excellent transfer rates around the house. (Of course, performance depends on the wiring, etc.)

Over $300CAD for something that "just worked" a decade ago. I had a WRT54G that was rock solid back in the day that cost me $80CAD to buy, and now I have to pay 4X as much to find something "reliable"?

No, you can spend $50US on an Edgerouter-X and then another $80US for a ubiquity AP and have something that "just works" amazingly well. Or a little less and get an TP-Link EAP series AP[0].

[0] I went this direction and it's solid.

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