Which router

I recently changed broadband supplier and went from a lowly 1mb connection to a brilliant 24mb connection with the Origin Broadband in South Yorkshire Digital Region on FTTC. The supplied router was a Tenda 11N which to be honest has sufficed since I installed it, until weekend that is when I subscribed to Lovefilm and started streaming video which appeared somewhat jerky.

I did manage to connect a wired connection which improved the situation so have assumed that the streaming over the wireless network wasn't that brilliant.

I have looked at a few dual channel routers and would like some advice on which one would be the best option. The choices are:

Asus NT-56U which appears to get rave reviews but support seems to be pretty poor.

Linksys E4200 which is a bit pricier but appears to be well thought of

or finally Netgear N750

All I'm looking for is a router that will give good transfer speeds that will be reliable.

Before you worry about the wireless on the router, what is the wireless card in your computer? No point in changing the router if it's the PC wireless card holding things up .

Also, if you are running Windows, which? XP, Vista, or WIN 7.

Nothing over a wireless connection can be expected to be brilliant and smooth!

If you need brilliance and smoothness always go Ethernet.

The wireless card is a Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
on a Dell XPS M1530 laptop running Windows 7home premium

Nice

Shouldn't be any problem with that then, but it was worth checking.

In the short-term, while you wait for advice on those routers from people who have them, have you got InSSIDer running? Invaluable for avoiding neighbourhood channel clashes. I can see 19 other routers' wireless active even at this time of night. 9 are on Ch 1, 7 on ch 6. I'm on 1+5. (Not good, but most of the time it's the right place to be. I'd better check tomorrow and see how things are then. Maybe others have spotted it.).

Go for the Linksys EA4200 but make sure its version 2, not the older v1. I recently got the EA4500 (just an updated version of EA4200v2) and very happy with it. I stream Netflix HD wirelessly from the router upstairs to my telly downstairs (via Boxee Box) and it never ever stutters. Wifi N can be almost as good as wired provided you select an uncongested channel. The linksys also supports 5 ghz wifi and i'm using this dual band pci card on my desktop and again works like a charm

I've downloaded inssider as suggested and there are only 2 other users in my vicinity with an extra 2 BT openzone channels. The BT openzone and one other are using channel 11, another using channel 7 and I'm on channel 6.

As my laptop is capable ofusing 5ghz I may just take a chance and plump for the linksys after reading some positive reviews for it.

Do you mean you can only see another 4 wireless routers? The ISP they are on doesn't matter.

Is so, switch to Channel 3, as that uses up to Ch5, and the one on 7 uses down to 5. How strong is the 7? May not help, but can't do any harm.

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 19-Jul-12 15:19:20)