I remember when that really started to become a problem, late nineties/early 00’s. A ‘hack’ was to put on a timer [one of those plug in ones with the dial on the front] that would cut power to it for a few minutes, once a day. People found it cheaper to buy a $5 timer than a $150 router, and that would buy a few more months or a year.
At least I’m not the only one who thought this was a thread about woodworking.
I was all set to talk about how great the old Porter Cables were.
My apologies to the moderator!
I have no doubt this is true. The full story is this router sat in its box for many years before we put it to use. Our older router (also a Cisco Linksys) lasted for many years before crapping out. Sounds like my suspicion is correct - cheap quality electronics. :rolleyes:
I’d like to understand your reply in simpler terms:
a) What is an “AP”? And, what does “AP” stand for? (Or, is knowing the term “AP” good enough, like one does not really have to know what “http” stands for to use a url.)
b) While I understand the term “CAT5e” (or, simply the term “CAT5”), what is a “CAT5e UTP”?
That’s funny! Coincidentally, we were at an elaborate train garden where you could push various buttons to make various train accessories in the scenery move. One button was simply labeled “gondola”. Well, right up front in your view was a gondola train car on a siding, but the button had no effect. Then, the gentleman behind me pointed out in the background were skiers on a mountain, and the type of ski lift used gondola cars to go up the mountain. Language is a funny thing! 
Stupid question: Is DD-WRT a make or model or other? Checking on Amazon, their search feature instantly brings this up as a suggested search entry; however, the actual search returns nothing called a “DD-WRT”. Instead, it appears DD-WRT is a feature???
It’s custom firmware that was popularized with the venerable WRT54G router from Linksys many years ago, but it can be installed on many routers.
This firmware gives much more functionality and tweakability than the factory firmware that comes with your router.
Don’t listen to any of the other posters. DD-WRT routers on old Linksys is not the answer and hasn’t been for years.
There’s 2 great choices :
a. If you just want to buy a highly reliable router that requires basically no effort whatsoever to use, getGoogle Wi Fi. (not to be confused with Google Fi). Note that if you want to connect more than 1 device by ethernet, you need a $20 switch. Also there’s a cool wall bracket you can get with these that lets you mount them high up on the wall, this improves wifi range considerably.
The reason it’s superior to basically all the other options is (1) exceptionally good and stable software (2) statistically this product has the highest rating on Amazon I’ve ever seen for a router, it has a massive score edge over anything else. Google is unlikely to pay shills, Fakespot gives it a B, and there’s ~5000 reviews with an average of 4.4 and the overwhelming majority of them are 5 star. The reason this matters isn’t just e-wang points, it means that for most reviews the router actually works correctly and well and doesn’t need to be rebooted, and it rarely has a hardware failure. This has been my experience as well. I use just 1, but you can buy them in a 3 pack and mesh network them, where only one of them needs to be connected to an internet source.
Oh, I noticed I linked the 3 pack on Amazon, you just need 1 unless you have a large (more than ~2k square foot) home. 1 is around $100 though I have seen them for $80.
b. Ubiquiti products. These have extremely high ratings. They are a little expensive and they are subdivided into separate boxes: a “wireless router” from Ubiqiti is both an “edge router”, costing $40-$80 depending on model, and an access point, which is intended to be ceiling mounted to improve range. (around $100 depending on the model for the AP). They are meant to be used by professionals but there are GUIs and straightforward ways to set these things up.
I wasn’t quite prepared to be so blunt about DD-WRT, but I agree with you 100%.
That firmware was the cat’s pajamas in 2010, but time has marched on, and it doesn’t do much good for you to have all kinds of bells and whistles in your router if it’s connecting with a tired old wireless protocol. Want your iPad to work wherever you are in the house, without fail? Install a modern mesh network.
Regarding the list of choices, don’t leave out Eero. They are neck and neck with Google Wifi and beat them in some key areas, with the obvious disadvantages of being more expensive and having a subscription model for Eero Plus. Nevertheless, if the price fits and the things that come with the subscription fit your lifestyle, you can’t go wrong with it.
To be honest, after my research into this, it really came down to Google Wifi and Eero, with no interest in any of the competition. There were problems with each of the others, such as Ubiquiti requiring a PC running their controller software (not sure if this is still true), or devices not providing a wired option for their backhaul or…the list goes on.
Well, yeah. Back in the day (2007ish, it was obsolete around 2010) DD-WRT was more reliable than the garbage that routers tended to come with, and you could, with a lot of manual effort, get multiple DD-WRT routers to mesh network. In 2007, seamless mesh networking capable routers weren’t sold at every electronics retailer and this was a major accomplishment.
Now what you actually want, even if you are skilled in IT, is a router that is transparent. It shouldn’t require any setup other than the absolute minimum required, and it should provide a generic connection to the internet that is compatible with basically everything, and it should do this reliably. And yeah if you have a big enough house, you want to still have a strong wifi signal everywhere in it, so your kids in their upstairs bedrooms can use their tablets and laptops and you can stream netflix on the toilet in every bathroom you might happen to use, and check youtube videos on how to fix your specific car from the garage.
I am a programmer who has resorted to using assembly language in the last couple years, so it’s not that I can’t perform the manual effort, it’s that I think that technology that is now fully developed and mostly stable should be seamless and transparent, so we can focus our efforts on new things. Just like I can write multithreaded code using locks and mutexes but I would much rather use a threading library that is as simple to interface with as possible and well established and reliable. That way I can focus on adding meaningful features in my software instead of fighting the same race conditions and other hideous bugs that happen when you use more primitive and dangerous tools. (or how routers used to sometimes require manual firmware updates, manual reboots, manual port forwarding, manual assignment of IPs to machines, etc)
AP is short for Access Point (where you get to your network)
UTP is Unshielded Twisted Pair (Fancy name for CAT[whatever] wire–the twists determine the number, it is how any interference is canceled out)
“AP” is an abbreviation for “[wireless] access point.” “CAT5e” refers to Ethernet cables that typically have an RJ45 plug on either end. An RJ45 plug looks like a scaled-up version of a “phone plug,” AKA RJ11. CAT 5 cables are only rated to work with an older, slower (100 Mb/s) Ethernet standard, while CAT5e works with gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mb/s). There are also CAT5 and CAT7 cables, which are most useful for corporate networks using 10-gigabit Ethernet.
If you plug a plain CAT5 cable into a pair of gigabit ethernet devices, they may run at full speed, but it’s not guaranteed. If they don’t, they’ll still work but will fall back to 1/10th that speed, or 100 Mb/s. It’s getting harder to buy new Ethernet cables that don’t meet at least the CAT5e standard.
“UTP” stands for “unshielded twisted pair,” which describes most Ethernet cables. (You can skip the rest of this paragraph if you like; any Ethernet cable you’re likely to encounter will be a UTP cable). Shielding wraps the cable in conductive foil, creating a Faraday cage that prevents stray radio waves from creating interference in the shielded cable. In an unshielded cable, twisting pairs of wires together also helps reduce interference.
There are three main kinds of devices people are discussing here, and the terminology can be confusing:
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Routers, which connect to your modem and both share your internet connection with other wired devices and act as a gateway/firewall between your home network and the big, bad internet;
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APs/access points, which do no true routing but rather provide a wireless network for your home. These must be connected via ethernet cable to a wired router as described above, and
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“Wireless routers,” which act as gateways/firewalls and provide a private wireless network for home use.
Non-geeks often use these terms interchangeably, so watch out for that. Most wireless routers can be configured to act as APs. This lets you use an old wireless router as an access point by turning off its routing functionality.
I myself use a small, inexpensive wired router and a separate AP. This is the trend among geeks, but the trend among non-geeks is to use a wireless mesh router, which is a wireless router with supplemental APs (“mesh nodes”) that typically plug into electrical wall outlets.
In theory, wireless mesh networks can’t match the throughput of a single wireless access point because the mesh nodes use some of the available wireless bandwidth for backhaul (forwarding your connection to the main wireless node at the router). In practice, the loss of peak throughput is unnoticeable to non-geeks.
You don’t need a mesh network unless parts of your house have poor coverage. If you live in a smaller place, you can probably get by with one device (a wireless router) or two (a wired router and an access point). If you can cover everywhere you care about covering this way, it would be a waste of money to spend more on a mesh network.
If I were you and could get by with a single wireless router, I’d get the Ubiquiti Amplifi cube:
It’s $150, which is pretty reasonable for relatively high-end gear. (IMHO, you want to buy relatively high-end networking gear because it won’t overheat and lock up, requiring a reboot). You can add mesh points to it later if you move and need more coverage. It’s also available packaged with two mesh points if you need to cover a larger area right away.
Ubiquiti has a new product called Amplifi Instant, which is a little less expensive: $100 for the wireless router alone and $180 when packaged with a mesh node. Myself, I’d still get the Amplifi HD, but if price is an issue the Amplifi Instant will give you an extremely low-maintenance home network for a little less money.
This particular card-carrying geek does not prefer the “small, inexpensive wired router and a separate AP” approach.
I did that for years, using many different tools, but some geeks get tired of manually crafting firewall rules and other hands-on stuff.
These days I’m with SamuelA, I just want it to work. And by using wired backhaul, there is no loss of bandwidth in the nodes.
Sorry to add to the confusion.
A) AP is short for wireless Access Point.
B) the actual cable that carries your Ethernet signal is most often an Unshielded Twisted Pair: Cat5e is the minimal standard required for 1Gbps Ethernet.
Both are useful terms to search for.
I am puzzled by the mentions of DD-WRT. It’s been in perpetual beta on the current version for 10 years. OpenWrt, OTOH, is in far better shape and is in active development. (They have even unforked the LEDE project.)
Either is really just for the more expert folks to install and configure.
Sadly, the newest firmwares from many manufacturers have stupidified their configuration interface so you can’t even do basic things like port forwarding in some cases.