Three years ago, the first wave routers were the next big thing, featuring data rates of up to 1.3 Gbps, three spatial streams and explicit beamforming. It was an obvious improve to the usual 802.11n routers and it was awesome. But technology never stops evolving and sooner than we expected came the ‘second wave’ routers. … Read more
LINKSYS is known around the world for its great networking products and it actually revolutionized the router world with its famous LINKSYS WRT54G. But, a long time has passed since then and a lot of other companies have developed great routers, at really great prices (ASUS, NETGEAR, TP-LINK and D-LINK, all pose a fierce competition … Read more
NETGEAR has made great contributions to the networking field over the years and has delivered lots of high quality routers (especially with Nighthawk R7000). Almost a year and a half ago, NETGEAR released the Nighthawk X4 AC2350, a second wave router, which offered a solid performance and it was well equipped, but surprisingly, it under-performed … Read more
The Google OnHub is a creation from the collaboration between Google and TP-Link and it’s the first from a series of routers (the second OnHub has already been released and it was created in collaboration with ASUS). The router looks quite different than your usual routers (although it does resemble the D-LINK DGL 5500) and … Read more
If three years ago, the 802.11ac was something exotic, expensive and not many devices were supporting it, now it’s equally widespread to the older 802.11n and is a necessary feature to consider when acquiring a new router. But, the 80.211ac technology has evolved to unimaginable levels and now, we have ultra routers which feature AC3200 … Read more
The Taiwanese company, D-Link, has a long, successful history in the networking business, being the market leader in WiFi products shipments all over the world, so most of us had high expectations about their new instalment. But D-Link waited too long to join the AC1900 party. We got awesome devices from NETGEAR, ASUS and LINKSYS … Read more
There is now an increased trend to ship laptops and phones compatible with 802.11ac technology and it is known that router manufacturers like to equip their routers with technology, sometimes, way ahead of their time (3×3, 4×4, MU-MIMO technology). But finally we see that the AC technology becomes widespread and you need to upgrade your … Read more
I am sure most of you are familiar with the Linksys WRT54G, a router that appeared in 2002 and was one of the first reliable devices of its kind, it was easy to use, affordable and most important, the software was open source. So, you could install DD-WRT, for example, and use the router as … Read more
In 2013, we saw a significant progress made for the 802.11ac standard as we were introduced with the AC2400 (4T4R) and later, we had the pleasure of greeting the AC3200 standard that further pushed the boundaries of 802.11ac. Today, we are going to review the ASUS RT-AC87U, a ‘second wave router’ that features really high … Read more
Even though these routers are quite old (2013), the NETGEAR Nighthawk R7000 and ASUS RT-AC68U are still as influential as the year they arrived. Both feature great speed and performance, both have interesting designs so let’s see which one is better. UPDATE (12.21.2016): Netgear has released a firmware (1.0.7.6) to fix the recent arbitrary … Read more