Buying a Wireless Router - Why is this so hard?

[NiX]

As much as I love my WRT54GL and all the hard work its put in, it seems to be giving up despite many full resets and different firmwares. I was hoping to shift to Wireless N, mostly for the fact that there's a ton of Wireless G routers in my building. Every router I look at never shows up consistently in reviews. For every good review there's a bad, so can anyone suggest a Wireless N router? We're only 10-15 feet from the router, but can't run cable cause of the odd location of the den, so it doesn't need to be able to go through multiple walls or some crazy distance.

[Salamok]

You could Ginny Pig the new Cisco Valet for us...

[01101010]

As much as I love my WRT54GL and all the hard work its put in, it seems to be giving up despite many full resets and different firmwares. I was hoping to shift to Wireless N, mostly for the fact that there's a ton of Wireless G routers in my building. Every router I look at never shows up consistently in reviews. For every good review there's a bad, so can anyone suggest a Wireless N router? We're only 10-15 feet from the router, but can't run cable cause of the odd location of the den, so it doesn't need to be able to go through multiple walls or some crazy distance.

Ever since I found out marketing ploys having been using those reviews to steer folks, I gave up on many of them - or at least take them with a grain of salt. These days, it is truly a crap shoot of getting a decent "whatever" - hell even out of 6 of the same model and run you still get 2 that are shit. Running wire is always possible unless you have a bank vault between you and device, but I understand what you are saying. Good luck.

[Evil Elvis]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833320039

It even comes with DD-WRT.

[NiX]

Ever since I found out marketing ploys having been using those reviews to steer folks, I gave up on many of them - or at least take them with a grain of salt. These days, it is truly a crap shoot of getting a decent "whatever" - hell even out of 6 of the same model and run you still get 2 that are shit. Running wire is always possible unless you have a bank vault between you and device, but I understand what you are saying. Good luck.

I usually only read user reviews and sift through to see ones where it's not "THIS ROUTER SUCKS!!!!!"

Also, to the other suggestiosn: I'm in Canada.

[eldaec]

You're overthinking this. There is no meaningful difference between any of the brands you have heard of. Buy whichever is reduced this week at Best Buy.

[Minvaren]

As much as I love my WRT54GL and all the hard work its put in, it seems to be giving up despite many full resets and different firmwares.

o_O

I have a WRT54GS 2.1 or so, which is essentially the same router as yours, running DD-WRT.  While there are 12-15 other wireless-G routers within range of me (mostly 2wire units), what I found was throwing some +6db antennas on the router made sure that "I win" most any channel I pick.  The other thing that I've noticed is that the router seems to be very temperamental with regards to power surges/brownouts, so I would recommend a cheap UPS on the unit to guarantee 24/7 uptime.

I haven't really poked at any Wireless-N units yet, but Netgear seems to have really been going downhill the last few years across the board - YMMV.  Also, if you're going to be doing "extreme" wireless networking (Bittorrent or the like), find a unit with plenty of RAM on it.

[Morfiend]

I got this WRT110 which is the upgraded version of the 54. I had no end of problems with it for about 3 months. From horrible signal strength to not connecting to devices that are between 0 and 5 feet away to randomly not allowing my PS3 to connect. It was horrible.

Then I upgraded the firmware about 2 months ago, and it has worked like a charm ever since. Not one single problem, and really good signal strength.

[Chimpy]

If your laptop has an N card in it and your computer is in the same room as the access point, you should get something with N on it. It is not as much about the throughput difference between g and n as much as it is the availability of channels in the 5Ghz range vs the 2.4 Ghz range. N is much less prone to interference because of the number of available non-overlapping channels. Since you said there are a ton of devices in your building, interference is probably your biggest issue. You won't find a decent "blended" b/g/n device for under 100-150 bucks (blended means they have both a b/g and an N radio in them so they can do both at once) but you can find ok ones with selectable ranges for around 50.

While I am no fan of D-Link's enterprise equipement, I have heard no complaints from a client who we replaced her old b/g access point with a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833127254 (once I put it in N mode, it defaults to b/g).

[Murgos]

I usually only read user reviews and sift through to see ones where it's not "THIS ROUTER SUCKS!!!!!"

Yeah, most of the time when I read someone's angst ridden diatribe at a product and the only thing the only thing I get from it is that the writer is utterly incompetent.  It's pretty much completely devalued the usefulness of those types of reviews.

[fuser]

Every router I look at never shows up consistently in reviews. For every good review there's a bad, so can anyone suggest a Wireless N router? .

Buffalo WHR-HP-G300N $69.99/ncix (pricematch to $54/directcanada). I'm going to pick one up this week as I have been totally unimpressed with Linksys/Cisco's offerings. DD-WRT out of the box loaded is a big selling point for me.

edit: pricematch