A friend of mine sent me an ad that he had seen for upgrading your home or small business router.  The company was selling routers for around $150-$200 with promises of increasing internet speeds for your connection, increased wireless connection range, less crashes, less disconnects and software upgrades improving hardware.   My friend wanted to know if this is just marketing hyperbole to get people to buy routers or is there some truth to it?

My response: A little bit of both.  It is marketing to get people to buy more routers.  But there is some truth to it.

Here’s the overview:
The standard router you get from your Internet Service Provider (often for free) will do the job for most people.  You can connect as many devices as you like and they all will be able to connect to the internet.  No bells or whistles, just connect to the internet.  In theory, you’d be limited to about 256 devices (you run out of IP addresses and a basic router wouldn’t do vlans) but the network would start to slow down too much if you got more than about 12 simultaneous users on a regular router.  Having said that I’ve had 2 of these standard routers fail on me in my time so they don’t last forever and are not as stable/reliable as they could be.
There is a higher class of consumer router.  They will do everything the standard routers will do but add a lot more features.  For example:
  • Quality of Service or QOS.  Deciding which type of internet traffic gets priority.  So you can prioritise say gaming traffic over video traffic.   Or video streams over torrents.
  • Better Security Firewalls and rules to say what gets in and what gets out.  Want to Block outlook from sending emails or block some websites?
  • Better logging and alerts – e.g. Send me an email when I get to 75% of my data usage.
  • VPN connections to connect to your home network from other places
 
However:
Some of the stuff like Dual Band 5Ghz and 2.4Ghz leaning in the direction of marketing fluff unless you specifically have some devices that only connect on those frequency ranges or you live in really packed wifi area like an apartment complex.
Cars are a pretty good analogy.  A standard Toyota Corolla, for example, will get 4 people from A to B in a reasonable time.  A BMW 5 series will still get 4 people from A to B but they have better controlled air conditioning, lighting and comfortable seats.  They can watch a dvd on the way and let the car park itself when they arrive.  They both do the same job and the first will be fine for most people but the later is worth it for anyone who wants to spend the money for those features.
Of course like the routers, these cars usually come with some options that are superfluous as well.
Conclusion:
If you want better control over your network and don’t mind spending a little bit of time to set up a router, then the upgrade is probably worth it.  If you want 4 devices connected to the internet and don’t really care about things like security or traffic shaping, then stick with your standard router.

 

Extra for Experts:

If you’re a little more technically minded, the firmware (software) on some routers can also be upgraded with 3rd party software such as DD-WRT or Tomato Firmware.  These in turn add extra features to routers beyond that which manufacturers generally include in their firmware.