This starts off as a rant/musing and develops into a plea for help. I know nothing about routers, but I think there must be a fundamental difference in quality between consumer-grade routers and enterprise routers. BT's Homehubs have wasted so many hours of my life, and recently another one died on me. A few years ago I had used some other old Netgear POS which caused much trauma too! I can't imagine the IT sector putting up with this for long, so can only assume the stuff they buy is better I replaced the duff Homehub 2.0 with a Netgear N300. This was expensive, and I hoped the price would bring quality. It did not. Setting it up was fine - a combination of BT Business's excellent Irish call-center and a reasonably sensible auto-setup wizard meant it was all working within the hour. 24 hours later it disconnected all the computers on the network except the primary. Resetting it fixed this for a few days. Now it has broken again, and quite fundamentally. I hereby pledge not to buy a consumer-grade router again but instead to look to the business sector for my networking needs! Does anyone here know of a decent, <£100 router? Wireless is not required, nor anything other than basic DHCP and compatibility with BT broadband.
Any ADSL router should be fine as far as BT is concerned (I assume you're on ADSL?). They authenticate based on the line, so everyone has the same username and there's no password. I've seen a few setups recently that had unique username/password combos though, so I'm not sure if this is what they're changing over to. As far as consumer routers are concerned, my experience agrees with you - it's entirely hit and miss as to whether you get a good unit or not, and many are not good to start with.
If your package is under 8mbps and you want internal commercial grade adsl and router I'm currently selling my old one. I will warn, unless you are extremely comfortable with linux, do not get into commercial grade equipment. It is usually not configured out of the box to do anything, and often requires doing things over the cmd line for initial configuration. If you want something more up to date, I recommend this.
Hmm, the line in question is under 8mpbs (and ADSL) but there is a second that should soon be higher. Ideally I will get 2 identical devices within warranty so that I only have to learn how one router works rather than 2. Thank you for the offer though, and for the advice about linux - I lasted about a week with Ubuntu so I'm not exactly a fan.
Previously had an AG241, it broke due to a mains cable hitting the phone line. Replacing it with a WAG320N, not had any problems. Not surprisingly: Changed ISP, was sent new router. For fun I tried this one, couldn't get it to work, WAG320N worked first go. Don't know why people like Netgear stuff (particularly routers), they are quite crap generally. Couple rules for spotting a crap router: Your router should never need resetting for any reason other than a firmware update. Port forwarding, changing the name/password for the wireless, changing the password used for authentication pretty much any thing should not require your router to be reset. Your connection becomes flaky with high connection initialization/closing applications cause other computers/applications to stop working properly. This indicates your router is under powered in terms of memory/CPU or is plain badly built/written. There are other reasons, but these are like the two obvious checks.
The new one I linked does have a customized openwrt image available for it which would be a lot more forgiving for a first timer. If you needed something more robust later on, you could always use a different os as needed.
We had a Linksys one that required a firmware upgrade to work. Out of the box it crashed several times per hour if the wifi was being used, and judging by the google results we weren't the only ones with the issue. How that got past quality control, or any sort of testing, I'll never know. Had another Linksys one in the past (different model) that degraded over the course of a couple of years to the point that the wifi didn't work at all and the internet connection got reset once or twice a day. On the other hand, my parents have a good old WRT54G that is ridiculously old and has never had any issues (except for one year when the wifi got a bit flaky, but we suspect external interference for that one).
You might want to have a look at the Billion BiPAC 7800(N) (the 'N' version comes with wireless N). It's not the cheapest router/ADSL modem you can buy but it's arguably one of the best.
Thanks again guys, you've given me lots of info If Billion does have as good a reputation for stability as they suggest then I will probably look there.
