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I bought a Netgear "AC1450" model a couple years ago, since it was on sale and is 100% identical to the R6300, and uses the same DDWRT firmware (thereby making it an R6300 once flashed to DDWRT). At the time, it was a steal at $60 for a refurb and it has served us well. I'm happy with it for the most part, but we moved to a much larger home last spring and there are certain spots in the house that lack connectivity and there is zero signal on our back porch. I may end up setting up at least one additional wireless access point in the home since I had ethernet run to a wall plate on each floor (with the middle floor getting two in my wife's office to accommodate the modem and router), and it'd be fairly easy to hook up a router at least on the 2nd and 1st floors... but I'd kind of rather avoid having more networks crammed into the same house if at all possible.

The retail store I work at has some left overs from Black Friday and since people aren't too tech savvy in this area, there's still a pile of Netgear's fairly-new R7500v2 Nighthawk X4 routers which support MU-MIMO. They dropped from $145 to $125 to $100 but will likely drop lower. I'm sure they are great routers, but... is MU-MIMO really all its cracked up to be? Is it that big of a deal? And is this router likely to give me better coverage? I know it "looks" like it should, with all those huge antennas vs. my R6300s total lack of external antennas... but I can't seem to find anything online that indicates that these are significantly better in speed and range than the R6300.

Like I said, I'm fairly happy with my current setup, but its hard to pass up a chance at a top tier (consumer grade) router at less than half the normal retail price.

Didn't Scott Wasson try doing something similar?
Found it:http://techreport.com/blog/29108/mixing-power-line-networking-with-wi-fi-proves-intoxicating

biffzinker wrote:

Didn't Scott Wasson try doing something similar?
Found it:http://techreport.com/blog/29108/mixing-power-line-networking-with-wi-fi-proves-intoxicating

Having multiple wireless access points connected via ethernet is really common. Even I have done it before.

I was just asking about this router in particular.

Try it, if it doesn't work for you return it. What is so hard about that?

Oddly enough, working in ecommerce shows you just how easy it is to do that. Everyone who works in ecomm hates it, of course, but when you hear about people buying $10k worth of stuff just to return it all, it makes you feel better about returning a laptop or something that didn't work out for you.

biffzinker wrote:

Try it, if it doesn't work for you return it. What is so hard about that?

So we're not supposed to ask questions or research things anymore? We should just buy things fully intending to dump them back off on the retailers.

What a sad state of affairs. No wonder retailers have to waste so much time and man power sorting through other people's garbage.

ozzuneoj wrote:

biffzinker wrote:

Try it, if it doesn't work for you return it. What is so hard about that?

So we're not supposed to ask questions or research things anymore? We should just buy things fully intending to dump them back off on the retailers.

What a sad state of affairs. No wonder retailers have to waste so much time and man power sorting through other people's garbage.

Agreed, it is so annoying when I go into a store and the stock says x many on hand only to find out that someone "rented" the units.

The guy who I knew that worked with title of reclamation when I worked at Walmart managed to handle the returns from people without concern, he seen it as job security.
For examples: vacuums, carpet shampooers, laptops, consoles, stolen merchandise, and various appliances/electronics etc.

You would see carpet shampooers used once and returned same for vacuums, laptops the customer claimed were broken or couldn't figure out/same for game consoles, and Wifi/routers the customer didn't understand/trouble with setup.

I don't do it myself the use it once then return it.