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Picked up a free router off the curb, my old setup was so much worse lol | Tech Found on the Curb - Free To Speak

Picked up a free router off the curb, my old setup was so much worse lol

Found this Linksys EA7500 sitting on top of a trash pile last Tuesday near my apartment in Austin. Compared to the ancient Netgear I was using, the range on this thing is night and day. I can actually get a signal in my backyard now without moving my laptop around. Has anyone else scored a decent router from the street or are they usually junk?

3 comments

3 Comments

aaron7401mo ago

Oh man, the "range is night and day" part got me. Actually, that EA7500 is a tri-band router, so you should see even better performance if you connect devices that support the second 5GHz band, not just the main one. I found an old router once and it worked fine for a bit, but it crapped out after a few weeks because the power brick was all chewed up by mice or something.

kimfisher1mo ago

Wait, is tri-band actually useful for the average person or is it just a marketing gimmick? Unless you have a house full of devices that specifically support that second 5GHz band, you're not getting any benefit from it. Most peoples' phones and laptops don't even bother connecting to the second band unless you manually set it up. And that old router you found probably crapped out because it was ancient, not because of the power brick - those things degrade over time regardless of mouse damage. I'd rather just buy a new router and know exactly what I'm getting rather than pray an old one works for more than a couple weeks.

nancyg141mo ago

Ha, I hear you. I was super skeptical about tri-band too until I actually set one up in my house. I have about 20 devices (smart bulbs, a couple streaming boxes, phones, laptops) and the second 5GHz band honestly saved my sanity. Before, my Roku would buffer constantly when my kid was gaming. After I deliberately moved some stuff over to that extra band, it cleared up completely. You're right that you gotta manually assign devices, but for me it was worth not pulling my hair out over laggy Netflix.