Hi all, i recently moved from BT Infinity to a 100MBit fibre to the building with Hyperoptic. Only problem is that the wifi on the hub is pretty feeble and only 2.4Ghz, which means it gets a lot of interference with other networks in the building. Currently I have my old BT router plugged into the hyperoptic one, but it's pretty unreliable, so I'm looking for a much more robust dual-band wifi option. What are my options (preferably for sub ~£50)? -EC
Anything up to AC1900 is 1x 2.4Ghz band and 1x 5Ghz band. Above that just adds another seperate 5ghz band, which is useful if you have 3 other flatmates who all want to be streaming Netflix over wifi at the same time; otherwise, don't bother. More importantly, are you going to be using this as a router, or just an access point? An access point has to do a lot less work, so is far less likely to crash, so you could get a cheap AC1200 router and disable dhcp.
https://routerboard.com/RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT Excellent piece of kit and much smaller than the pictures make it look. You can even run a virtual machine on it. As above for Unifi: scrimp for a couple of weeks and buy this. Only this is a full router and the featureset in my opinion blows Unifi away. But it's one for the geeks. It's Android to Unifi's Apple.
I've placed an order for one of these: https://routerboard.com/RB952Ui-5ac2nD My apartment is pretty small; most of my devices are less than 5m away, so hopefully the smaller unit shouldn't cause any problems.
Abort, abort, abort! That wireless is ****! Edit: The whole thing is ****, the Ethernet ports are only 10/100... what is this... 1999?
For a small apartment running 5ghz only it'll be fine. And it's half the price. But it's 2x2 so 850mbps ac maximum and as stated above 100mbps uplink. If you were replacing your router too the daddy unit I linked would be better but for just a hotspot the one you grabbed should be fine.
I'll give it a try, and if it doesn't suffice, I can see about returning it and getting the bigger version.
Nope, says 5ghz is single chain. No beamforming, no MRC, no fast speeds (tops out a 433mbps, but needs 80mhz, which not all devices support).
Have the unit now, and wifi is indeed a little wimpy, but reliability has been rock solid (even if it does get a little hot), so generally pleased. In future the daddy unit would probably be the better option, but I'm happy with the current setup.
