Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

Hi,

I'm looking at getting a new router as my current router does not allow me to utilise the full 20mb connection when I use the wireless network but if I wire it I can use the full 20mb.

I will be streaming movies and audio from my pc to my laptop and Xbox360 so I was thinking of maybe getting an N router and then upgrading my PC's usb 11g to N at a later stage.

Could you recommend any routers?

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I do like the Apple one's, I currently have an Apple Airport - this one is Wireless N although with most routers, your network is only as fast as your slowest ones - so if your running a g adapter or even a b, it will be reflected as only that.

It's a good idea to upgrade your pc's usb to a n-adapter, on the XL package you can get one of those netgear wireless n sticks for just £25 from VM, so that's a decent offer there, the wireless n router is also £25 addon, so if your looking for a cheap one, go for the netgear one from VM.

Back to Apple, I have the Airport Express, it's quite a small piece of kit but so powerful - it supports upto 5ghz wireless N compared to that VM 2.4ghz frequency, so the Apple one is better, but if you have no need for speeds higher than 20mb then you should be okay.

With the Apple ones, you can also network a printer so you can share across the printer, and also wirelessly stream music to the router to connect to a pair of speakers!

They are on the expensive side, with the Express model coming in at £79, while the higher spec one (dual band, so you can run G and N mode and get the best speeds even on older laptops you may have without a N adapter). Setup guest networking and stuff like that comes in at £139.

But as I've mentioned previously, depends on whether your the type of person that will splash the cash for something that will last a while, or just looking to get a cheap medium one to replace every year or so.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

How good is the one netgear at VM is offering? How good is the usb one they offering too?

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

The USB is a must have in my opinion, it's not bad and for the price your getting a good deal - as for the router, many are having problems with reaching full speed with 50mb, but if you want to be set for the future, possible 50mb upgrade or so, then there are other options to try.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

Do you know what the model numbers are for them and I'll google to see what other reviews have to say about them.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

and the usb?

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I think it's the WN111 by the looks of it.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I'd always advise a Linksys WRT router.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I would second that as a better choice that any other router made for home users

as the truth is there all crap and with limited memory or cpu and fold under heavy load eg bitorent maxed :D

it all ways go for a buissness/ enterprise class router

our a linux box eg say smoothwall if on a budget

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

any specific WRT model?

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I'd advise this one:

http://www.linksysbycisco.com/US/en/products/WRT54GL

It allows you to update the routers firmware to TOMATO or DD-WRT. You may not need to, but it can be better for advanced users, for things such as torrenting, gaming, etc.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I do like the idea of open source firmware but is it future proof being a G router? Any N routers?

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

if you want "future proof" you could aways go and get a few of these http://www.wifi-stock.com/details/ubiquity_rs.html RouterStation motherboards at 44.66€ and populate seperately at more cost OC, with your choice of (upto3) miniPCi radio's

the key points for this (wireless) router motherboard being the far better grade of CPU onboard than the tat thats inside all so called consumer grade router UK sales such as VM etc sell you (OC its sold,before someone tryed and currect it, what do you think £50 of the £80 installation fee, Plus the initial one months pre-payed 50Mbit VM BB fee OC..., is for), and bigger memory footprint onboard as a generic thing.

OC Atheros MIPS SOC are not your far better industrial grade PPC+Altivec SIMD (powerPC) based router SOC/CPU ,but at 680MHz ,they are more than good enough for your average SOHO/larger home networks for low power use.

although the current and upcoming microPC motherboards are getting there, RouterStation motherboards still seem to have the edge as you get real power and future proofing as long as there are 11n ,Wimax and related mini PCi cards made available for them and the Linux OS drivers to match....

"Over all system configuration

• CPU Atheros AR7161 MIPS 24K running @ 680MHz
  
• MEMORY DDR 64MB
• FLASH SPI 16MB
• Three MINI-PCI Slots supports Type IIIA
• One USB 2.0 Host
• One UART

"
infact the only down side seems to be they are only 10/100 fast ethernet ports, not todays generic 1000/1gig ethernet router ports, your wise to be buying today....


http://wiki.ubnt.com/wiki/index.php/RouterStation
"
RouterStation Software Specs

RouterStation ships with OpenWRT Kamikaze. Ubiquiti only provides limited support for the software, but full support for the hardware.

All documentation for the use of OpenWRT can be found at the following website:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/kamikaze/docs/openwrt.html
Please look forward to a quick setup guide for a single radio setup.
"

its odd though , given the Pro nature of these boards and supplyers, they DONT seem to carry 11n miniPCI radio's or even list them, but we know they exist as they are in a LOT of laptops today... and senao/EnGenius make one or two...

---------- Post added at 12:07 ---------- Previous post was at 11:53 ----------

you can advise these old 11G ONLY routers all you want but your NOT ever going to get more than 20Mbit out of them over the wireless connections with uncompressable binary torrent files and the like, more like 15Mbit or less MAX with that low grade CPU/SOC inside.

only upper mid and high range 11N routers with better CPU's (you need to check the real PCB board spec ,forget the brand sticker on the outside) can really cope with the 50Mbit VM and all security options turned on.

but just about all 11N's will manage upto 60Mbit/s (11n to 11n only, with NO 11g/b wirelessly connected) if your careful with your security options, but that takes time to get your head around, and get right, on a place by place install....

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

Hi popper,

I think thats a bit to extreme for me I dont want to be building my own router from scratch. All I want to have is to be able to surf the internet at my full 20mb connection(of course I understand that this would only happen if only one device is turned on and using the connection which is almost 99% chance in my house as its myself and on rare occasions my wife.) and be able to stream my media to my xbox360 and my second laptop from my desktop.

I quiet like the idea of some routers having USB storage slot for external usb HDD or other portal storage. I dont have an external HDD but might get one in the future.

---------- Post added at 15:43 ---------- Previous post was at 15:28 ----------

Sorry just realised that I posted this in the wrong thread. MODs could you move this to the network section?

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

your 360 will only play smoothly HD 1080 level4.1 content upto 10Mbit/s ,plus 2 channel sterio AAC inside an MP4 container (use AviDemux to convert any content you have thats got more AAC audio channels than that, use MediaInfo to check that) due to the weakeses of the MS codecs included in their current 360 firmware, and they wont update them apparently, so any 11n with the wanted usable USB2 ports will do, even the old 11g will do as the 360 wireless IS only the old generic 11g anyway....

although you could use a wireless11n AP in bridge mode and wire that directly into the 360 Ethernet port and still have wireless AP to wireless router, but again , thats more techy and "extreme" to set up....

but you gain nothing from that as the 360 doesnt allow direct access to its HD from the LAN, so a generic wired 360 connection is by far the better option to keep your multi device wireless 11n speeds up, just Keep all non 11n off the 11n wireless bit, and use a seperate directly wired 11g router in to a spare 11n router port for these old bits of kit....

id still get an 11n today as it will still have the slightly better internal CPU to cope with processing demands of faster 11n +security throughput, but check out the 3rd party firmware pages for some USB HD enabled 11g and 11n compatable kit.

your going to get far better USB support from these although the 11n 3rd party firmware support seems rather spotty right now.

somone here Must have a working 11n with working USB2 HD device drivers from one of the freeware firmwares on there by now.!

VM-CM<wired>WAN-port-11n-router-lan-port1<wired>11g-router-WAN-port

connect all old 11g to the 11g router wireless channel/mac and all 11n kit to the 11n router channel/mac, but keep them apart as far as you can and be sure to use non overlapping channels, 1 and 11 for instance, theres only 3 real non overlapping channels in home 11* kit remember.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

Linksys have made an N-Router based on the linked one I think, but I can't remember where it was.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

I have a Linksys wrt160N speed can vary depending what else is on the wireless and how much interference.etc there is

However It's not actually doing any routing and is being a switch and wi-fi AP

The routing is being handled by a ALIX2D3 Geode lx800 with 256mb ram running pfSense which is also Load-balancing my Dual DSL lines.

This is from my desktop which is connected via a wireless N bridge to the WRT160N (which then connects to the Alix) there are 802.11G clients active on the network at the moment

[img]Download Failed (1)[/img]

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

load ballancing, looking at the upload rate, i wonder if its perhaps "bonding" both DSL or you are using non consumer lines at that rate :angel:

why didnt you just get a mini PCi wireless card for that ALIX2D3 Board with 3 LAN and 1 miniPCI ?
http://www.mini-box.com/Alix-2B-Boar...N-3-MINI-PCI_4

?

i also wonder how that CPU: 500 MHz AMD Geode LX800 maches up to the #14 CPU Atheros AR7161 MIPS 24K running @ 680MHz

with such a large price difference, i think id still go for the Mips RouterStation 3x LAN, 3x miniPCI, 32 MB RAM motherboards.

but then you do have the far larger generic ram and the x86 compatability although again iv not used any Geode to date so cant say how they run or what specs they/it have, SIMD ?, MMU ?, micro core engines etc... is it in essence a 486Dx....

remembering the higher CPU clocks dont matter as much...., as they are different CPU familys, overall data throughput processing does though OC.

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

They've been tested at 83Mbit/s or so on pfSense apperently if there is no encryption going on, can't vouch for the truth of that as I don't have enough bandwidth to hit that high.

I find my wireles being the bottleneck, it is load balancing I think the speedtest must be using multiple simutanious transfers, its 2 Adsl2+ lines using Annex M (I live near an exchange).

I get about 38down/4 up hardwired (and sometimes on wireless but wireless is a lot more variable) it's possible for me to get slightly more if I used a different modem on the 2nd line I lose 4Mbit/s of sync due to the AR7 chipset in my 2nd DSL modem.

Sync is 23.9/2.5 on one line 20/2.7 on the other

I'm not at home right this second and don't have it configured for console access from the Wan side but i'll get a dump of the cpu info if possible for you later if that helps?

Pfsense might not be the best thing for running a router on, I choose it becuase I was able to set it up to load balance without to much trouble ;)

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

Hmm didn't relise Freebsd lacks something like cat /proc/cpuinfo :td: so it's not as easy to get the cpu info as id hoped.

not sure if this is any help whatsoever.

hw.machine: i386
hw.model: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS
hw.ncpu: 1
hw.byteorder: 1234
hw.physmem: 259497984
hw.usermem: 225472512
hw.pagesize: 4096
hw.floatingpoint: 1
hw.machine_arch: i386
hw.realmem: 268435456
hw.aac.iosize_max: 65536
hw.amr.force_sg32: 0


gateway:/tmp# dmesg | grep CPU
CPU: Geode(TM) Integrated Processor by AMD PCS (498.05-MHz 586-class CPU)

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

its not such a bad CPU/SOC as it turns out http://www.amd.com/us-en/Connectivit...E13058,00.html

if it bugs you not having a detailed command for FreeBSD, in passing, i also found an old Freebsd version of CPUID , its not been updated for a long while and doesnt seem to have any Geode references but its a single C file and if you have a FreeBSD compiler handy you could run that up http://www.ka9q.net/code/cpuid/

http://www.paradicesoftware.com/specs/cpuid/index.htm has the Geode references, but again not updated in a long time ........

Re: Recommend me a router on a 20mb connection
 

it would probably be more hassle than it's worth as id have to remount the filesystem RW (Embedded pfSense runs read only apart from the config, supposidly to prolong the life of the CF card) I'd then have to find either another machine to compile on or install all the compilers.etc on the router :(