Looking for a wifi broadband router, any recommendations?

[Mysterae]

Guys, I need a new wireless router for my Virgin Media cable broadband. My current router (Asus RT-N56U) just isn't cutting it for the wifi kit we have in the house.

Any recommendations around the £200 mark? I've looked at models from the usual suspects Asus, Netgear, Linksys, D-Link, DrayTek etc and the reviews are a bit of a muchness.

 

[hmmblah]

What's not cutting it about your current router? Are you on the latest firmware?

I prefer models with external antennas, like the RT-N66U. The N66U also supports dd-wrt instead of having to use Asus' firmware unlike the N56U which doesn't support dd-wrt.

You could also check out one of their AC models, but I don't feel the price is justified at all and reviews are very mixed.

 

[Mysterae]

Cheers for the post hmmblah.

With the N56U, it's the overheating when a few devices are using the network, un-directional signal due to the lack of antennae (the "AI Radar" actually makes things worse) and the poor 5GHz band are the problems with the N56U. When any of the devices that use 5GHz are a distance away from the router the signal is attenuated badly, and it's not far away or through particularly thick walls. For example, when watching the BBC News on my iphone 5s you can see the bandwidth being crippled, and the signal going to one bar or none - I'm only downstairs from the router! I could switch to the 2.4GHz band but that's not the point .
The GUI of the N56U is pretty good I'll give it that and the latest firmware updates have all but eliminated the outages caused by the overheating, probably at the cost of performance, but that's just my opinion.

I prefer external antennas too, harks back to my old Linksys WRT54G . I see Linksys have brought that design back, but it's a bit "old skool" for me, and I can't be arsed messing about the open source firmware like I used to all those years ago.