Another point,.... D-link is as good as anybody's unless they threw it against a wall. Most people can't tell the difference unless they are reading white papers on Cnet reviews. There may be a 2% spread from the fastest to the slowest and has more to do with antenna and placement than brand. I have a Netgear, but bought it because it was the cheapest on sale at the time.
Point taken re. bandwidth available. And, major differences between home and enterprise use with potential of up to 30 users on a single AP in a production environment (AC Rev 2 is looking vastly superior in limited testing I’ve conducted).
For home use (which is my assumption for knarf’s application), I’ve seen a drastic improvement in the range available by moving from G to N. My shop/garage was out of range when the G router was in place, good strong signal after switching to N. Any bandwidth improvement was negligible since, as you correctly state, the ISP isn’t moving data as quickly.
I’ve installed and furnished support on D-Link, NetGear, and Linksys, (Cisco, Avaya, Aruba, Ruckus, Meraki and Meru in the enterprise space). All the home brands are basically interchangeable. Aruba has become the my favorite in the enterprise space - affordable, reliable, great management interface.
Have a good afternoon.....