I’m looking for a broadband router that isn’t disposable.
The ideal candidate will have eight ports and a lifespan of better than a year. It’s been seeming like Linksys products have really gone bad in quality over the years, judging by the comments about them I’ve seen on Amazon. Unfortunately, there’s no great love for D-Link or Netgear either. Seems like the D-Link power supplies go bad quickly, and Linksys boxes just start going randomly wonky.
My current Linksys isn’t quite a year old, and it’s starting to have issues. It replaced one that was almost two years old that just suddenly died.
What’s left that doesn’t have a Cisco price tag? (And Cisco doesn’t appear to have an 8-port broadband router!)
Does anyone make the broadband part of the box (eg: DHCP, port forwarding and NAT) as a stand-alone unit that can be plugged into a network switch or router?
I’d be interested in this as well… from most of the recent reviews, it looks like when my router finally croaks (Linksys WRT54G) I’d be better off hitting eBay or other places that carry the older models. Either that or using an old case to build a small *nix box that’ll perform the same functions.
As an aside, have you tried changing the firmware to something other than Linksys? I swapped to using Tomato on mine simply because I liked the menus and administration features better and found that with it I was able to tweak it to be a bit more stable under heavy load.
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Popping in different firmware is an idea, but it’s still the hardware that’s sketchy. No amount of HyperWRT or Tomato will fix bad hardware.
I’d thought of using a linux box - I’ve got one of those micro PCs that’s about the size of a “student” dictionary, but that would wind up being Yet One More Runnng PC in the house, and if I bolt it to the wall in the garage with the rest of the network gear, how will its lifespan be? (Assuming I can even add an Ethernet port to it.)
Ah, hardware flaky not firmware flaky. Yup, new firmware can’t do much about that, unless it just so happens to be more fault-tolerant with that particular flakiness issue. Highly unlikely.
You may wind up getting the best of the 4-port ones that are out there currently, and daisy-chaining them to get the amount of ports you need: I have been looking at a Linksys WRT54GL, mostly because I can put something like Tomato on it.
Not sure if they offer what you are looking for, but my hotbrick router seems to be a solid piece of equipment…the steel case doesn’t look very sexy, just functional.
You can get eight-port LAN routers or one-port LAN routers, but you can plug a switch into any router and get more ports. You can get a Cisco PIX 501 for $375 so I’m assuming that’s out of your price range. Maybe a Netgear FVS338, or a Sonicwall TZ-150 with a switch.
I definitely support getting a Linux box to handle the routing. I’ve been using Smoothwall for the last five years or so, and Coyote Linux (floppy based, on a 486) prior to that. There are plenty of fun tricks you can do with them. I’m running a modified version with updated VPN package, to connect to another one I set up at my in-laws’ place (running on an old laptop, which takes some customization). That way I can manage their network remotely.
For wireless, I use whatever happens to be cheap, as they are definitely throwaway parts. I buy a wireless router, but I turn DHCP off and don’t use the WAN port. Currently I have a refurbished Netgear 801.11g router ($20), and my in-laws’ have a CompUSA 801.11g router ($16) that was set up in the manner described. Previously we both had D-Links, but both died after 2-3 years of constant use.
If you really want a decent hardware router for under $100, get one w/o wireless, and chain it to a gigabit switch. All of the wifi routers I’ve seen get flaky after a month or so of constant use; I forget the brand I use at home, but I only use it for wifi, and until the latests firmware update it started dropping connection after 2mo. of use.
My router at home is my Linux server, as it does provide for more advanced tricks as Aestivalis alludes to. Somewhere I have an SMC router that’s just a basic hardware router free after rebate just a year ago, so they are being made.
I went with the apple WiFi as I have had one of ALL of the cheapies and got tired of dealing with them. I’ve had it 8 months so far and no issues, we’ll see if it lasts longer.
I have had a D-Link DI 614+ for over 3 years now, and it has given me no problems. Keep it in an area that it not full of dust, and I think most routers should do a decent job. I don’t view them as disposable at all.
Mine was only 40 bucks (and it’s got wireless) after the rebate, too.
Take a look at Netopia. I had one (R910) that was very reliable. It didn’t have the random crashes, lockups, and weirdness that I encountered with the brands sold at the local big box stores.
More than likley what happens is that the idiots who couldn’t hook up a toaster buy a router because the box says “it’s easy to set up” and are confused by the three different cords.
Or, the fact that there are many different types of broadband configurations, and some people will call the helpdesk and not know which kind they havem and so they are not as helpful as they could be if they had all the information. Stuff like that happens, and then they go and complain on Amazon or Epinions because they can’t get that “simple technology” to work.
I don’t think so. I have a box full of flakey routers that I pulled from service because they couldn’t run for a week without locking up or requiring a reset. The common denominator is buggy firmware.