Which wifi router?

[jgl]

Those speeds are, as far as I can remember, not remotely achievable in anything outside carefully controlled lab environments.

But if you're just sending non-HD video, pretty much anything should suffice as long as your signal strength isn't screwed up by intervening concrete walls or a zillion other competing access points.

Essentially, speed is a red herring used by marketeers. As long as it runs on N or AC, you should be good for non HD streaming*.



* Disclaimer I'm not an AV guy. The only conversation I ever had with a professional AV guy about streaming over wireless was went something like "for HD forget it and go wired."

[Claire ex-ax]

What is "N or AC"?

And yes, some HD will be involved.

We only have a small place and the router can be placed so it can visibly be seen from the living room and spare room (office).

[Proplus]

What's Time Machine?

Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support

Its basically a function built into OSX. Just plug in an external HDD and switch Time Machine on, it'll auto back up every hour (subsequent backups after the first one only backs up changes made so does not keep taking up lots of storage space), and keeps older backups like once a week and once a month. Its backs up literally your whole Mac, including the apps, so if you ever want to do a wipe of your Mac or get a new one, just restore from a backup and voila. Stuff like Microsoft Office will get restored, without the need to enter the Activation Key again.

One other feature is you can enter Time Machine at any time. You can glimpse back to any of the backups in Time Machine and select the specific file or folder you want from then and retrieve it, comes in handy when you've accidentally lost a file or did some unwanted editing and saved the file by mistake.

If you don't want to have a wire (USB or Thunderbolt) connected to your Mac to do Time Machine backups, then you have 2 choices:

1. Get a Time Capsule, put simply this is rather like a Airport Extreme with a HDD built in, so you can wirelessly do Time Machine backups to it. The older Airport Extremes allowed you to plug in a USB HDD to it and could do the same, but not anymore with the latest model.

2. Get a network drive that will support Time Machine. I recently purchased a WD 3Tb MyCloud and it natively supports Time Machine backing up, so I've hooked it up via LAN to my router. I got this for "friend's" price for HK$700, and it normally retails for around HK$1100-1200, but still is a good cheap option.

[pin]

What is "N or AC"?

And yes, some HD will be involved.

We only have a small place and the router can be placed so it can visibly be seen from the living room and spare room (office).

I know where this is going....... (i.e. its going to end in tears).

My worry really is that you want to get something with all the bells and whistles, but you have no idea what these bells and whistles are (this is all sounding very similar to another regular poster here).

You will buy something expensive, new and shiny with every feature you want, but you will have no idea how to use or set up these features. You will then come to these boards asking vague questions and when people try to get clarification as to exactly what you are trying to achieve you will get increasingly frustrated.

Or I could be totally wrong.

[Claire ex-ax]

Mac Basics: Time Machine backs up your Mac - Apple Support

Its basically a function built into OSX. Just plug in an external HDD and switch Time Machine on, it'll auto back up every hour (subsequent backups after the first one only backs up changes made so does not keep taking up lots of storage space), and keeps older backups like once a week and once a month. Its backs up literally your whole Mac, including the apps, so if you ever want to do a wipe of your Mac or get a new one, just restore from a backup and voila. Stuff like Microsoft Office will get restored, without the need to enter the Activation Key again.

One other feature is you can enter Time Machine at any time. You can glimpse back to any of the backups in Time Machine and select the specific file or folder you want from then and retrieve it, comes in handy when you've accidentally lost a file or did some unwanted editing and saved the file by mistake.

If you don't want to have a wire (USB or Thunderbolt) connected to your Mac to do Time Machine backups, then you have 2 choices:

1. Get a Time Capsule, put simply this is rather like a Airport Extreme with a HDD built in, so you can wirelessly do Time Machine backups to it. The older Airport Extremes allowed you to plug in a USB HDD to it and could do the same, but not anymore with the latest model.

2. Get a network drive that will support Time Machine. I recently purchased a WD 3Tb MyCloud and it natively supports Time Machine backing up, so I've hooked it up via LAN to my router. I got this for "friend's" price for HK$700, and it normally retails for around HK$1100-1200, but still is a good cheap option.

I really only use my Air for backing up my iPhone and iPad. I should really explore it more.

[Claire ex-ax]

I know where this is going....... (i.e. its going to end in tears).

My worry really is that you want to get something with all the bells and whistles, but you have no idea what these bells and whistles are (this is all sounding very similar to another regular poster here).

You will buy something expensive, new and shiny with every feature you want, but you will have no idea how to use or set up these features. You will then come to these boards asking vague questions and when people try to get clarification as to exactly what you are trying to achieve you will get increasingly frustrated.

Or I could be totally wrong.

I really DO NOT want the bells and whistles. Just something that will do as I've explained, reliably. (And without him indoors losing the connection because I'm watching the Beeb.)

[pin]

I really DO NOT want the bells and whistles. Just something that will do as I've explained, reliably. (And without him indoors losing the connection because I'm watching the Beeb.)

Either follow JGL's advice (he knows his shit) or get this: ASUS RT-AC56U - Router 路由器 - 網絡 - 電腦 - 香港格價網 Price.com.hk

[flameproof]

For our needs, which would be preferable: 900Mbps or 1300Mbps? According to the bumpf, the 900Mbps should suffice.

My cheap router is 54M, that's totally enough to stream HD videos. With 54M I can D/L a 1Gb movie in about 2 Minutes or so. It still takes me 90 Minutes to watch the very same video. The bottleneck isn't the router, it's my watching speed.

[jgl]

What is "N or AC"?

And yes, some HD will be involved.

We only have a small place and the router can be placed so it can visibly be seen from the living room and spare room (office).

There are a bunch of letter codes that designate evolving levels of wifi protocols, each associated with a max theoretical speed. And I would emphasise 'theoretical' here as real world connections can be way crappier than these limits for any number of reasons.

A nutshell is that B and G are old. N is last generation and probably the most common. AC is a couple years old and comes with the more expensive routers.

Anything you are looking at in your price range is AC.

But you can pretty much ignore this stuff as geekery. Just get something new and at the higher but not bleeding edge of the cost range and you should be okay for the next handful of years. Don't buy a G router- they are practically relics. Practical and perfectly workable, but there's no reason to buy them nowadays.

The Asus N66U that has been mentioned is an N router. I bought one because I don't bother with bleeding edge tech- by the time my laptop or phones are capable of AC, new AC routers will be half the cost of what they are today.

Anyway, if you try to stream HD over the fastest wifi standard, you might get lucky or you might have to troubleshoot all sorts of obscure thing, regardless of whether you get an Apple or a non-Apple router. If your SO is going to give you grief for an Apple device, just get a top of the line Asus and if anything ever goes wrong with it, just say "well we should have gotten the Apple router instead"

[jgl]

We closing in on an ISP and a streaming box, but we'll need a wifi router, which we know fuck all about.

It will serve a streaming box, along with a Mac laptop (on occasion), a Dell laptop, an iPhone (on occasion), an iPad (on a rare occasion), and a Blackberry (on occasion).

The most important would be the streaming box and the Dell, but it would have to be able to be set up with the Mac as the Dell tends to travel. Would an Airport Extreme work with everything?

It doesn't have to be the cheapest option out there, we'd rather spend a few extra $$ for what's right and what's reliable.

Can some of you tech-savvy bods help?

If this streaming box thing is physically connected to your TV, then you could probably avoid a lot of grief by connecting it to the router with an Ethernet cable. Then you don't have to worry about highly variable latency, bandwidth limitations and contention from other devices when you're watching TV.