Some quick shopping and this one from Netgear is a good enough for us. It is quite new, and right now a great Black Friday deal.
Nighthawk BE3600.
It should handle up to 50 devices, 2,000 sq. ft., has WiFi 6 and even the newer WiFi 7. 3.6 Gbps speeds.
Just so everyone understands, this is a router only. It has to have a separate modem connecting to the ISP to work. We have service that comes over coax cable, at the maximum rate of 300Mbps. We are paying our ISP for the minimum service level speed they have. We could get faster service but it would cost more. Think of that service level kind of like a garden hose. We have the smallest one they allow. They have several different sizes larger than this one. But I get more “water” out of mine than I ever use so why pay more for a bigger hose that will still be way more supply than I need?
Another Just so every one understands, Netflix HD (or 720P) runs on 3 Mbps. That’s right, the speed for acceptable quality is just one percent of the minimum speed our ISP sells. An ultra high definition (4K) stream runs on 15Mbps. That means if we are watching a Netflix movie higher than our TV can even handle, it still only needs 3 percent of our total available. So what will I do with the extra 97 percent?
Prime Video recommends 18Mbps for 4K and Xbox Series X games.
Now that is for what each device can pull. So someone watching Netflix on one device, another person watching a Prime Movie on another, and the teen playing Xbox up in the attic, add these up to something about 55Mbps.
What does all that mean? Well, this Nighthawk can handle speeds of up to 3.6Gbps. In other words, 3,600Mbps.
Wait! We are only paying for 300Mbps but this thing can run something like 120 times that fast. Nope! Even though its capable of going much faster, we will never get anything more than the speed we pay the ISP for. Our 300 Mbps can feed something like 15-20 devices gaming, and streaming video at the same time. And no matter what, we will never get even one Gbps from our ISP without upgrading our service to that level. And why the heck do we need that? It won’t really make anything work better. My grandkids playing Xbox on my 300Mbps service will not see any improvement if I upgrade to much faster service.
I guess there is one aspect that you could see the difference. If I needed to download a huge amount of data, say a 5 gig file. My 300 service would take about 18 seconds. On 1 Gbps it would only take 5 seconds. I don’t download data files, or much of anything else though. If I was OK with paying twice my bill, 1 Gbps would be available. If thrice my bill I could get 2Gbps. But what would I ever use that extra access speed for.
OK, one more thing. This Nighthawk is a router. It takes the signal from the modem and distributes it to all the devices on my home network. It is capable of 3.6Gbps but will likely never see anything more then the 300 level service I have. I mentioned a modem in there though. What does that do?
The modem takes the signal from the coax cable and translates it into a Cat6 cable that is connected to the router. My modem, is newish technology and capable of up to 2 Gbps. If I was paying for that level, the modem could take 2 Gbps and feed it to the router. Again, the router would be limited to only 2Gbps and never see its full 3.6 Gbps potential. But alas, I only pay for 300Mbps, which means the modem is limited to and can only feed 300 to the router, which is limited and can only distribute 300 between all devices on my home network. 300Mbps can easily feed all the devices, even if a group of people show up on Thanksgiving.