I'd go to a Big Buy Box store but I've been misled and outright lied to enough times by sales associates who have no idea what they're talking about. I am hoping that this forum can give me the assistance I need.
I currently have an R6700v2 (January 2018) and I think it isn't up to the task of what I have on the home network. We have constant dropouts on the TVs, Alexa devices that lose connection, devices that won't connect, etc.
My home consists of just my wife and me, and we typically watch our own tv shows on different tvs. We stream to Amazon Fire sticks from an Amazon Fire TV box (hardwired). We can only stream to 2 Fire sticks at a time.
We have quite a few smart devices, too.
Brief rundown on what we need to connect:
11 Alexa Echo devices
7 Fire TV Sticks
Fire TV
3 phones
~10 tablets/pcs
8 smart outlets
12 smart bulbs
Networked AV receiver
several networked TVs
4 game stations
My questions:
Does all this mean that I need a router capable of ~60 devices?
Routers have differing numbers of "streams" capability, do I need just two since it's just the two of us, each running a tv?
For determining the best WiFi router for you, the first step is to check on how many devices are in active use during peak usage times. For example, are you planning to have all 7 Fire TV devices stream 4K video at the same time?
While there is always the option of going with something super expensive and high end (or even something more mid range like the RAX50 which has a high end 5GHz radio), but if your use case doesn't take advantage of what the device has to offer, or if your WAN connection is the bottleneck, then you will effectively be paying for extra performance that you will not use.
While you mentioned only being able to stream from 2 devices at once, that seems to point to a different issue that may not be entirely due to your current router. If you get a chance, try running a speed test https://www.speedtest.net/ using a wired PC as well as possibly a laptop or smartphone in the location of the fire TV devices that are using WiFi. This is to make sure that your WAN connection speed is fast enough.
The speed test over WiFi on the other hand will be for testing if at the distances of those devices if the speeds are fast enough.
Another thing to test on the current router, is to look at the attached devices list and see if your Fire TV devices that aren't using Ethernet, are using the 5GHz band.
If they are using the 2.4GHz band then that would explain your streaming issues (assuming the WAN connection is fast enough). If the router is using the "Smart Connect" function, and it is forcing the fire TV devices to 2.4GHz, then disable smart connect, and then have a separate SSID for the 5GHz band, and then ensure all of your media streaming devices are using the 5GHz band.
Unless you are in a rural area, the 2.4GHz band will often end up using a 20MHz channel width due to congestion, and depending on how many APs are in range, the airtime sharing can cause the effective throughput on that band to be in the 40Mbps to 120Mbps range. (and that is even with super high end models from all major brands).
This is why it is becoming increasingly more and more common to have low bandwidth IOT devices such as smart speakers and assistants on 2.4GHz only, and any media streaming device, smartphones, laptops, and game consoles (if on WiFi), to use the 5GHz band.
While the 5GHz band has a shorter range, when in a congested environment, the 5GHz band will be consistently faster than the 2.4GHz band until you reach the extreme ends of the range, where the 2.4GHz will simply maintain a connect at a longer distance.
Depending on how things are configured, you may not need to even replace your current router yet.
PS, for handling a large number of devices, while newer WiFi routers will do a much better job, largely due to better and more efficient airtime sharing, as well as using higher transmit power WiFi radios that will maintain a higher PHY rate over a longer distance, the device handling is influences heavily by the number of active devices. for example a device like a an Amazon Echo, will only periodically send analytics data when you are not talking to it, and when you talk to it, it will stream your audio to a random AWS server, but it is a fairly low bit rate stream, thus older WiFi routers or APs do not have much trouble handling many of them. The area where you will notice the most benefit are when multiple devices need to transfer a lot of data at once. For example, streaming 4K video on 2+ fire TV sticks, while a laptop on the same band is doing a backup to a NAS, which will try to use as much bandwidth as possible. Newer APs and WiFi routers are able to share the airtime far better than older ones.
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On a side note, for your mention of streams, those are spatial streams of the WiFi radio on the router. For example the R6700V2 will use 3 spatial streams on the 5GHz band and 2 spatial streams on the 2.4GHz band. For non MU-MIMO devices, those spatial streams will only transmit to one device at a time, and the WiFi radio will do airtime sharing where each device will take turns sending and receiving data. This process can scale pretty well where a single 3 stream AX1300 5GHz radio can easily have a dozen devices streaming 1080p video. With MU-MIMO (requires the client devices as well as the AP to support it), the extra spatial streams can be used to transmit to other devices at the same time, thus boosting peak aggregate throughput.
Then check back here for reports on the things you are considering, but remember that people turn up in this community with problems, not compliments. So look at reviews on Amazon, for example.
