Do you use a cheap router?

Well, I have a Linksys WRT54G that I picked up at Wal*Mart for around $30 or so...I had a little trouble with the installation, but Linksys has a great support department. They went as far as to get on a conference call with Dell, my laptop manufacturer, to get it working. I get good signal strength pretty much everywhere. I will almost always have 'Very Good' to 'Excellent' strength at 54Mbps, even between multiple floors. Good router, good price.

I do have some of the weird connection problems that people are having in the thread below; but I'm not sure if I can pinpoint that on my router...

It is bad for gaming, though. I used to get pings of like 60-70, but with the router it is a "kicked-off-server" high of around 90+, somtimes in the hundreds! More than once, I've just bypassed the router, much to the anger of my family on the laptop.

Anybody know of a good gaming router? I'm willing to spend $$$, but only if it is the best thing since sliced bread or of similar importance.

~Ibrahim~

I've always wondered. Do you get any type of speed increase when using Gigabit over regular 100Mbps? Just wondering. (And thanks for, finally, booting that guy at Graphics)

~Ibrahim~

Ah, OK. Thanks! I was afraid it was one of those technologies that sound great, like 64-bit, yet they are somewhat useless. The most common words in technology always seems to be "cannot fully utilize".

~Ibrahim~

Very true.....The only security is a WAP key so my nieghbors don't steal my internet...

~Ibrahim~

What server were you pinging with 16ms ping? I'd love to get that ping. I have Bellsouth Fast Acess 3Mbps up/ 384k down. What I am saying is that I have pings in the 60's and 70's without the router and pings upwards of 90 with the router. The router has to be the problem.

I've heard this thing called QoS. Does this router have it? Did you enable it? How do you enable it?

~Ibrahim~

eh 3mbs up....

i think he meant 3mb down and the other one is up. if not then my rents are switching to bell south from comcast

Haha, yes, I'm sorry. 3Mbps down and 384k up. Sorry, got them confused!

So, how are you getting 16ms?

~Ibrahim~

$5? What a steal!

~Ibrahim~

Now that is a good deal. How was the CCNA test? Was it hell? Im too scared to take any cert test's.

Getting that chance to do some cisco level tech support is the key though.

my router is an old HP Kayak WS w/ 3 NICs and a IDE to CF adapter w/ m0n0wall running off a 8MB CF card.

I have my wifi and wired computers on seperate interfaces and then the wifi clients can gain access to the wired LAN via a Radius athenticated VPN.


my wireless router is a old linksys BEFW11S4 (B) router

and I have a sixteen port netgear FS516 switch for the wired pcs.

works very well...

at some point in the future I will probably get a WRAP board / enclosure for the m0n0wall for reduced power consumption vs. the Kayak but for now everything works pretty nice.

I forgot about this thread!

Well, I made my $35 router into a very expensive one. I've added VOIP, QoS, and a thousand other settings that I don't know a tick about. You want to know how? Modded firmware. Turns out my router uses a version of Linux and Linksys distributed the code. Many coders made some very nice firmwares. It is truly great, I love my Linksys WRT54G!

~Ibrahim~

Just for fun, I stopped using my linksys router and switched to my Linux server, hooking it directly to the internet with a secondary 10/100 NIC and using it as my router. For most stuff, the performance was identical (this server is dual opteron with 2G of RAM) but I was amazed at how much better bittorrent worked. For applications that have many connections, a powerful box like this makes a big difference.

(and no, I don't download music. I use bittorrent for knoppix downloads and such)

I always used Linksys stuff. I had a cheap Microsoft router at one time too with no problems.
One thing I noticed from supporting home based users though is to check functionality of your router if you work from a remote office.
Some of my remote people got these cheap D link routers and cannot route VPN traffic. I googled the issues and found out a certain range of D link's are known for this.
Never any troubles from Linksys's though to date.

You can use some OS's as a router. I know Server2003 you can, and I think some Linux as said above. Problem with that is processing power it might take up maybe? Also I think that could run into security issues. I read something in this networking book the other day where they mentioned to stay away from that function if possible. I think it was more on a business level thing though

Just to add with the comments, IMO, you have to look at the specifications of the routers you like to buy. Being cheap can sometimes lead to disasters and other future problems. On the other hand, you don't have to buy expensive ones just to get the best quality.
I would say that it should be a balance, but the first priority in my list is quality. I don't care if it is expensive or not.... as long as I won't get a headache down the road.

My last wired router was a SOHO Hotbrick... It's a soso product... lack of VPN flexability if you add it to an existing network but fine if it's the main router...

My latest router is kinda built manually...
RouterOS running on a mini desktop compaq P3 700, 256Mb Ram + 80Gig IDE Harddrive..., 2x Lan cards, 1x Atheros Wireless.

You can do ANYTHING with that !!!
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/MikroTik_RouterOS

STRONGLY Recommend it for any networking requirements.

It does not have to be a PC, They have a mad amount of models such as this one for example.
http://shop.ens-al.com/images/uplo [...] losure.jpg