Blogs Router reboot

[Edit/for 1st post]
I've seen downloads as high as 365MB/sec...

 

This

my brand new D-Link kept disconnecting for no apparent reason. I installed DD-WRT two years ago and it has been up ever since. The only times I rebooted it was because I had to move it around in my room.


Rock stable

 

I've got an ancient WRT54G with a dodgy dipole antenna (occasionally falls of if you look at it funny), running Tomato. Works perfectly stably, uptime is about 30 days (since it was unplugged to move it to another shelf). Switching away from the default firmware to Tomato/DD-WRT/etc is a lot cheaper than going out and buying an enterprise Cisco or a Draytech.

 

This isn't the case with the majority of ISP's now.

The BT hub3 is a solid piece of kit, so much so they now use it for business customers.

I have a 60Mb virgin connection and they gave me their SuperHub which is based on a netgear router. It has 4gig ethernet ports, support for the 5Ghz wireless N.. The new R36 firmware has made it even more up to date with the addition of OBSS and Greenfield options for wireless. The router has never faltered. It also supports PPTP,IPSec and multicast passthrough for VPN setups.

For an off the shelf netgear router with the same spec I would probably be expected to pay between £80-100.

Seems like more of a plug for the WD router to be honest.

 

I honestly don't know why you would say that. What do you base this on?

I've had Virgin since BB was available to me back in 2001 or 2002 (so long ago!). I've never once had to have an engineer out for BB trouble. Sure for TV issue mainly related to the old style TV boxes, but never for BB. I can also count on one had the amount of times my BB has went down. And it's never for any longer than a few hours.

They've given free speed upgrades to customers every couple of years. I was on a 30Mb connection. My upload was then tripled for no reason, then virgin rolled our their double speed for free, giving me 60Mb. And it's rock solid. I get 7.2Mb speeds when downloading movies or installing games from steam.

I'm a BT employee and can get BB for free. I tried it, was terrible and went right back to Virgin. All of my friends would rather have virgin over any other ISP too.

 

You could get a Routerboard (http://routerboard.com/) or you could get something like a Cisco 837, 877 or w/e the latest model in the 8xx range is. I had an 837 that had an uptime of 3 years in my house.

 

My router (Netgear cable router from Virgin, 14 months old) hasn't failed or dropped connection once. I do, however, have it in an open ventilated area so it doesn't cook, and switch it off at the mains all the time it's not being used, so it's running about 4 hours a day on average and gets switched on/off twice a day.

 

Oh and I second popcornuk1983's views on Virgin. They're fine...not perfect by any means, but better than BT (I too am a BT employee, and wouldn't touch their/our BB or Vision products!)

 

Most Routers suck. I end up fixing 3-4 a week, along with the associated Torture on the phone to "Tech Support" that I have to go through on the Customers behalf.

I personally get around it by Using a Draytek 2800, with a Linksys WRT54GS running DD-WRT Micro for Wireless duties. Solid as a rock.

 

I appreciate that your experiences may be different, but the majority think otherwise.

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/virgin-broadband-c14742.html
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/review/reviews/10/reviews.html?sortReviews=mostUseful
http://newsrelief.co.uk/virgin-media-are-crap-rubbish-hopeless-pathetic/


The truth is, it all depends on what type of internet user you are. But if you're looking for a virtually 100% stable connection, no fluctuation, no throttling, no traffic shaping, no packet monitoring, no port blocking, good customer service and you don't want your personal details being sold on to third parties, then you should probably be looking elsewhere. Perhaps saying Virgin is the worst ISP is an exaggeration, but it isn't far off.

Everyone's standards are different.

 

May as well be a PC gamer when it comes to PSN ports. Nearly every game wants different ports.

Anyhoo, If you mess about with these horrible cheap Dlink's, Netgears, Linksys and B*lkin routers you're going to have a bad time.

Draytek here, and 100% no issues.

 

Seems this calls in for some clarification. Buffalo ships the router with two different firmware, Europe & America gets the DD-WRT one (they call it Professional Firmware in their documentation), while Asia gets their dumbed down User-Friendly firmware. The router is delivered with both on a disc in case user wants to switch, and they can both be downloaded from Buffalo's site.

Also, naturally I fiddled with the settings (so not factory configured) but antenna power output seems hardcapped for some reason in DD-WRT. I get better wifi signal strenght from most of my immediate neighbours than 1 meter away from my router, no matter how high I set the antenna gain.

User-friendly firmware solves the signal strength issue somewhat, I get adequate signal strenght everywhere on my house, but introduces occasional freezing of the router. Also, it lacks several of the DD-WRT's features I'd like to have.

 

I beg to differ
533mhz down clocked to 480mhz

Router station Pro 680mhz

And I have no doubt that some of the higher end Cisco, etc stuff has even faster CPU's

 

I can relate to this, got a Thompson POS router from BE (you'd expect better from a company that primarily markets themselves to gamers/power users) - it got used for about 25 minutes then shelved, a router shouldn't timeout inside it's own configuration pages FFS, so slow!

Swapped it out for my trusty Billion and never looked back, not had to reset it for over a year

 

Yeah, the Thomson I mentioned in an earlier post was a BE router too. The firmware it shipped with was proper flakey, but after updating the firmware and disabling the wifi it never crashed on me again.

Had it 3 years, but never liked it - as you say, webadmin screens were tortuously slow. I kept with it as it sync'd with the exchange faster than my original Draytek.

I've now bounced back to Zen (FTTC) and back on a Draytek (2920 with the HG612 hacked to see line stats) - was very surprised when BE asked for their router back! (so don't bin it, or you'll get knocked for £35)

 

Here is something interesting. I used to work at an Australian ISP.

We handed out Open networks modems and routers (625/625w's). The company went under and we swapped to dlinks/ Linksys/ Belkin but nothing would last respectible more than 12 to 24 months. Not only that they would always need to be power cycled. So a few years went by roughly 8 years of being in circulation with no dramas and never been heard of before we saw mass failures across the board of the Open's they had hit there life span.

After owning one myself i can say they where the very best and more reliable modem Ive seen to date.

Currently i am using an Techinocolour gateway (its been flashed and locked with an ISP's firmware) that modem is holding up good. I havent had an issues within 3months, How ever It has really bad QoS configured and Torrents take priority over HTTP. There is no option in the GUI to change this due to the ISP firmware. Telnet into it to find out that i cannot change the QoS settings because the administrator account has been locked down and i need root access.

ISP wont give me root access because they like to flash the firmware of a night time when there is a new release.. Work up on morning and all my DHCP didnt work? Why because it hands out 192.168.1.X addresses but uses a 10.0.0.138 gateway. Apart from static IP this modem is pretty much cactus and if i currently had a working replacement id replace it.

My point being knowing what i know now, I wish i had of stock piled batches of band new open modems.

 

I use an old desktop pc i had lying around and put vmware on it, among others, i put smoothwall on it, never looked back since!