7. Closing Thoughts

Peer-to-Peer may be the domain of bootleggers, slackers and cheapskates today, but it probably will play an important part in the legal distribution of video in the not too distant future. Real-time video streaming, particularly of HD content that doesn't have the "H" compressed out of it, simply won't scale to the level needed for the content providers to make a decent buck.

So somewhere, sometime, the download experiments that movie providers like Movielink and CinemaNow are running will probably become a part of the normal video content distribution / acquisition system. And when that happens, it will be important for routers to be able to handle more than a handful of simultaneous connections. (See this article by Robert X. Cringely for his take on who the "legit" P2P players are likely to be.)

So assuming you buy the premise that your router needs to handle P2P, should you buy only the top performing RangeMax 240? In reality, most of the products tested will probably work fine on the broadband connections that most of you appear to have, judging from our Join our discussion on this topic