After bouts of random throttling and cutting off my connections speed by 20mb I've come to the conclusion that my router is dying/going full retard and I need a new one. Networks have always been a bit of a grey area with me so I'm usnure what to get, obviously it needs to be an N class for wireless gubbins but it'll primarily be wired and it has to be able to tolerate at 120mb internet connection. oh yeah. id also like to try and keep it < £100, as cheap as possible would be nice ideas?
I've read good things about the Asus RT-N66U. Here is good review on it. According to the review it has WAN-LAN performance of 732Mbps. It currently costs £109 on Amazon or PC World. I know it is a little bit over budget...
if you can push to £121.44 the drayTek is flawless but at £88.66 the Asus is spanking bit of kit as well DrayTek Vigor 2710n £121.44 Asus RT-N56U Black Diamond £88.66 Netgear DGND3700 £114.30
The linksys e4200 is supposed to be amazing! We're getting 150mb/s internet friday with either the e4200 or the ASUS RT-n66u
I can vouch for the asus, its so good I bought two (not both for house use of course). Its incredibly easy to set up and has a ton of actually useful features. One of the routers at the moment handles up to around 30-40 users at a time from a 20mbps satellite connection.
I work for a Satellite ISP and during the "bad times" where money was short, instead of upgrading cisco hardware to meet requirements for new features, protocols or whatever needed to be done, there was this genius bio-chemist guy who was also a contributor for many SIP projects who used to patch up the network with mikrotik stuff. We are talking literally going out and in through a mikrotik just to do one thing to save us some $. So they are obviously good products. Although it also meant that when normalcy was restored and the guy had moved on to greener pastures, there were several "wtf???" moments that happened here as colleagues tried to reverse engineer our networking, which to be quite frank, was beyond most any of us here where I work. To this day, that guys way around problems remain legendary. Obviously given the budget, it would have been totally different.
+1 for Mikrotik/ Routerboard. I love my RB450G, it is absolutely flawless (I also have a half dozen in the field). Configuration can be a bit confusing on Mikrotik if you are not a network engineer, but once you have it set up right, it is bulletproof. I also have several RB493Gs in the field with dual and triple radios, love them too. If you're into networking hardware... their new Cloud Core stuff is droolworthy. 36 core 1.2GHz CPU and 4GB of RAM in a router for under $1000! http://cloudcorerouter.com/Cloud_Core_Router_CCR1036_12G_4S.php It is also worth noting this beast. 1.6W of power (not sure how they got over the 1W FCC limit...): http://routerboard.com/R2SHPn
I think this is what I'm using for my wireless. 4 gig ethernet LAN ports and a single gig WAN port? 2.4ghz N 300mbps? If so it is ok. Not really used it for the wired side of things just wifi and it does the job, range is not always the best though. Would like to move over to some 5ghz kit but that would mean replacing the tiny wifi dongle on my Pi first. If your budget could have streached I'd have recommended the Draytek unit linked to above.
Are Draytek good? I've heard nothing but scorn about them at my job. Everything from poor UI to being confused products on the cusp of being good but falling short due to a strange market space being occupied i.e. demographic was wrong. Not smack talking here, just regurgitating things I've heard to source more opinion.
The UI is very complicated, but it is approaching enterprise level on features. The Vigor 2820 at my work has rock solid reliability, I would recommend Vigor for larger networks that require a host of features.
This is the thing. I think the problems we had with them here is that for what was required they seemed like high end SMB products bordering on being better. In the end, mikrotik was the go to company for what was required. But I believe some of there stuff was in the same boat.
I've a draytek 120 and it is rock solid. Where other routers have fallen down and given rubbish speeds the draytek has been faultless. I see your point about complexity and can agree I can not fault their kits performance.
Billion BiPac 7800 would have been a great choice. 7800N for added wireless. I've used them a few times now, never had any problems. Netgear on the other hand...
120 is just an adsl modem isn't it? I have Draytek 2830Vn and a 2850N, I like them alot, very powerful bits of kit for the home user but at a quite a price premium. my 2850 been up 37 days atm, it's not longer because I accidentally knocked the power out 37 days ago,
Since people are throwing around manufacturers I'm not familiar with... who do people use for Switches? I use Mikrotik routing and ZyXEL switches... but I have a hard time recommending ZyXEL switches to my business clients due to quality/stability issues so I end up back with Cisco/ Cisco Small Business. For basic "dumb" gigabit switches I have been satisfied with Rosewill, despite them being an el-cheapo brand owned by Newegg. I have RC-415 and RC-416's out there in the real world (and in house, my home theatre console has an RC-416 linked to my PC, XBox, Access Point, Wii... no issues in the past two years)
