Over the past four months I have had the opportunity to try out and test many different wireless routers on my home network. This series of tests started when my old die hard Microsoft router died and I found myself trying to find a replacement that would work well with my rather difficult home layout.
Signal strength is a big deal when choosing the best wireless router for my home, as even routers that claim to have great signal penetration rarely seem to live up to their promises. So what is the best wireless router for use in most homes? In my opinion it comes down to two specific models depending on where the router is to be located and how far it needs to transmit, read more from here.
Best Wireless Router For Single Location Use
For a home where the wireless router is to be located in a single, centralized location and where the walls are made of wood with drywall coverings, in other reviews as well as my own testing the Cisco Linksys E3000 provided more than enough wireless signal strength to reach most of the house reliably.
The software allows for quick and easy setup and it so far has worked quite well with every network capable device that I have connected to it. The added feature of the E3000 that comes in really handy is the ability to connect a USB storage device directly to it to turn the drive into instant network storage.
Best Wireless Router For Difficult Situations
Sometimes there is simply no way to get any single wireless router to provide an effective signal to an entire home. In others it may be desired to set up a second wired network in another room far distant from the location of the main router or where traditional Ethernet cable cannot be run. In these cases it may actually be necessary to have two wireless routers in the home (or office) with the second set up to be a bridge repeater.
Almost none of the commercial routers provide this function as an easy setup option, but I have had great success using the Linksys WRT54G series routers running the free and open source Tomato firmware package. Using fairly easy instructions the WRT54G routers can be set up to bridge fairly long distances and have the added bonus of being able to increase the signal strength from the antennas simply by adjusting a setting in the router’s setup screen.
While there are literally hundreds of different routers on the market these days my personal experiences have led me to prefer the choices listed above. While no router or router setup is perfect for every situation it is possible to come pretty close with the models suggested here.
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