We currently have Spark MaxFibre and a network supplied Huawei HG659B which, while fine for ethernet, seems to have issues with WiFi range, speed and reliability.
A test yesterday returned 338mbps down and 156mbps up while sitting directly in front of the router. I'm not too fussed about these speeds as I gather we should expect significant speed loss over WiFi. Trouble is the above is never consistent and somewhat understandably we get far worse speeds on the other side of our fairly small house.
The other week while trying to troubleshoot with a Spark rep, I got the following results while directly in front of the router:
- 88mbps both down and up on 2.4Ghz
- 230 down and 270 up (higher up speeds than down) on 5Ghz
Today I am in my room on the other side of the house getting the following:
- 1mbps down and 20mbps up (much higher up speeds than the appalling down speed) on 2.4Ghz
- 170 down and 107 up on 5Ghz
The Spark guy said there's nothing wrong from their end so our only solution is to buy new hardware. He kept mentioning a Netgear Nighthawk but wasn't specific about which one. I did a small amount of research and we bought a $350 Netgear Nighthawk D7000 V2 which only made our problems worse. Speeds were lower, range was worse and it would drop connection for extended periods completely at random. I'm not sure if it was faulty or simply incompatible but we have returned it for store credit.
So my question is, what is most likely to fix our issues? Our main requirements are:
- Range
- Speed over WiFi
- Price
We don't really need any fancy features, just decent WiFi that makes it worth having a MaxFibre connection. I have looked at other routers (I believe we probably don't need a modem router and can just buy a router?) and mesh routers but must admit I don't really know what I am looking at.
Options like Ubiquiti AmpliFi look nice but at $500 for the router and an extender plug, I would need to know it's going to work. Google WiFi looks great too but does it work with Spark? Could we just get a different, better router from another brand like ASUS?
Any helpful advice would be greatly appreciated.