Routers

Your home network should be easy to conect to and use, but only for the people you trust. With a little bit of preparation and smart computer habits, you can protect yourself, your data, and your family from the less pleasant side of our connected world.

It’s time to upgrade from my old router to something new, but is the unique and spider-like D-Link AC3200 Ultra going to meet the needs of a harcore gamer in a household where everyone is connecting to the Internet and hogging the bandwidth?   

With 802.11ac (Gigabit Wi-Fi) now mainstream, we are currently in the midst of a big wireless router replacement cycle. I’ve tested so many routers in the past year that I’ve lost count. Despite the potential payoff of a new router, many people are reluctant to make the upgrade. Routers can be intimidating, and once our Wi-Fi is working, it’s such an integral part of our homes now that we’re naturally reluctant to do anything that might rock the boat. After getting a taste of what the latest generation of 802.11ac routers can do, I finally made the jump myself, replacing my own aging router. And to help you understand everything that’s involved, I chronicled every step of the process. Hopefully this account of one person’s Wi-Fi router upgrade will help to demystify the process and show why it’s worth doing.

If what we saw coming out of the Consumer Electronic Show is any indication, 2015 is going to be the year of the smart home. I wasn’t prepared for how much I would love smart devices like the mydlink Wi-Fi Smart Plug and the mydlink Wi-Fi Smart Plug+, or how handy the mydlink Wi-Fi motion sensor would be when it comes to keeping me informed on what’s going on around my house.Here’s what I found out when I set up my very own mydlink Connected Home.

Smart thermostats, smoke detectors, door locks and appliances have gone mainstream and are finding their way into more homes than ever. What sometimes gets lost in the list of cool things those smart devices can do is that they are connected. Without an Internet connection, most of them fizzle. Poor Wi-Fi means a poor user experience and for many people, their wireless router is the weak link in the smart equation. In this post, I’ll review the network and computer essentials for a smart home that lives up to the billing.

Wrapping up my overview of the big names in routers, the final instalment in the series is Netgear. The US-based company has a long history of manufacturing telecommunications gear (it was once a division of Canada’s Nortel Networks) and has an extensive line of wireless routers, Wi-Fi extenders and adapters for the home and small business market. You probably know it best for the Nighthawk series of blistering fast AC routers.

Post-CES 2015, we have a lot to absorb about what we can do to our homes. Smarthome gadgets are coming out at a rapid pace, and with many manufacturers now working together to allow you run their devices on the same apps, it’s good to get in tune with just how you can turn your every day home into a smart one.

Linksys was founded in the 1980s, previously owned by networking giant Cisco and is now under the ownership of Belkin. It’s probably best known for producing the top-selling router of all time, the blue and black Linksys WRT54G series. I’ve reviewed several Linksys wireless routers this year, including the WRT54G’s successor —the WRT1900AC— and always come away impressed. This is a brand that consumers and small business owners can count on for being at the centre of their high performance Wi-Fi network.

Wireless routers play an important role in how virtually all of your consumer electronics perform, but they’re often in the background and forgotten about. Not this year. In 2014, they became a big deal again, as the number of connected devices in homes exploded and a new Wi-Fi standard —802.11ac (or Gigabit Wi-Fi)— went mainstream. I’ve put together a list of five of the best Wi-Fi routers released in a year that saw many “firsts” and “bests” released.

When it comes to home and small office Wi-Fi networking, speed has always been important. But optimization is increasing becoming an even bigger deal. The Linksys ac3200 Tri-Band Smart Wi-Fi router is the latest model from this leader in wireless networking and this one combines speed with optimization, making it ideal for congested networks.