Request: I’m looking for something with high reliability rather than high speed. It needs to support 30+ devices.
Additional information: My house is about 30m (100ft) long, and the internet comes in by ethernet at one end of it. I’m happy to use a Wi-Fi extender if needed.
Context:
I’ve been having issues with both my current and previous routers. Devices are randomly unable to communicate over the network for several seconds at a time. Both ethernet and Wi-Fi are affected.
I live in Australia, so even the slowest router should be more than fast enough.
I have a large number of automated devices that need to stay connected at all times - even 5 second network dropouts are difficult to deal with. Internet dropouts are handled gracefully.
Any suggestions are gratefully received.
For life is tricky considering “end of life” products will typically still work reasonably well for decades after being obsolete, but might be susceptible to future exploits that end up unpatched, and you really don’t want to become part of a botnet.
With that said, I’ve had an Asus RT-AX88U for over 6 years now, it’s receiving regular updates, and there’s a third party firmware (Merlin) that adds some features and keeps being upgraded as well.
My house is 20m square, but I have a shed outside with some gardening automation going on, so overall it stretches 34m from router to last device. I have two Asus Zenwifi AX mini mesh-nodes, one upstairs and one in the rear end of the house (about 18m from the router and 14m from the last device), and I don’t have any connectivity issues.
Overall there are 22 devices permanently connected, plus another 4-6 randomly (two laptops, 2 phones, plus visitors).
Never had an unscheduled reboot, though I do install new firmware every 2 months which takes the network down for about 5 min.