Managed to wake up early again today after a brief bout of sickness (seasonal flu), and configured / installed the new router.
The home router is probably the most crucial (and the most under-rated) part of the computing environment at any home today. A good router is invisible, chugging away in the background and serving content at max speed to all of its connected clients - on the other hand, a lousy router makes its presence felt very obviously - bad Wi-Fi speeds, frequent disconnects and a generally miserable experience for the user (and even more so for the person maintaining the network).
I don’t upgrade the router too often and when I do, I don’t skimp on the purchase - you have to put the money out on this one to ensure you have a long lasting, pleasant experience. The router I replaced today was the Asus RT-AC87U, which I got in Sep 2016 and I replaced it with the Asus XT-8, which went live this morning (and seems to be stable for the couple of hours it has been running).
The AC87U was running just fine, but three new laptops (the thinkpad E14, and the two work laptops) were all equipped with Wi-Fi 6 capable Wi-Fi cards - I wouldn’t have bothered too much about this, and would have happily continued for a year or two. However, these laptops encountered frequent disconnects and would refuse to connect back to the Wi-Fi again. It would take a long cycle of turning off/on the Wi-Fi and/or rebooting to get the laptops to connect. All this with a VPN connection is a huge pain - a pain that pushed me to take the plunge into Wi-Fi 6.
I’ve had a good experience with ASUS routers, so the replacement would have to be another ASUS only. Ultimately, it was a toss up between the RT-AX92 and the XT8 and I went with the XT8 because it was better spec’ed and was more compact (with internal antennae) and looked much better. The other advantage of this is the mesh capability and I can buy another unit to provide additional coverage as needed.
The gripe - I’m just a little early for the Wi-Fi 6e bandwagon. The equivalent router (AT8) has already been released in the US, but costs an insane amount of money here - almost 2x of what I paid for the XT8. Anyway, I will probably upgrade to it after the next 5-6 years.
So, in about 12 years of switching over to Wi-Fi, this is the third router I have bought. The AC87U was preceded by the Linksys E2000 which was a 802.11 abgn router.
Next up - getting an additional internet connection and setting up dual WAN on the router to provide load balancing / failover.
Till the, rest easy friend, you are now the designated backup router.
