Help me buy a new Wireless Router, as mine just pisses me off...

[swarga]

Found this in case any one else was looking...

NETGEAR RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router WNDR3700 Wireless router - EN, Fast EN, Gigabit EN, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n (draft 2.0)

Hope this one works out better than your first "experiment."

[STiMULi]

Found this in case any one else was looking...

NETGEAR RangeMax Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router WNDR3700 Wireless router - EN, Fast EN, Gigabit EN, IEEE 802.11b, IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11g, IEEE 802.11n (draft 2.0)

Hope this one works out better than your first "experiment."

RT N16 is fine and it is 10 better that the WRV200/300 (whichever one I had) It screams.

Next week Tomato goes on it. I just hope that it passes some RIP stuff for the lab.

[voyager7]

I learned a great deal from Linksys/Cisco after buying that POS.

When you unpack the box there is an invisible middle finger that comes with it that has the power to change the speed of time. The more phone calls you make to tech support as to why this is broken and why that is rebooting or is uncommunicative, the bigger the finger gets and the slower time passes

Holding nothing back I see.

I was not making fun of you in the other post.
If you never ask you will never get it.
I'll check with my soon to be son in-law this is his field.

[voyager7]

I'll check with my soon to be son in-law this is his field.

Here is his response.

I'm Having a hard time finding routers within that price range that meet all the criteria you listed. It might be necessary to go to a commercial grade router which will run some big money, not to mention a lot of knowledge to setup correctly and administer. Here is what I've come up with so far:

Newegg.com - Cisco Small Business WRVS4400N Draft IEEE802.11n, IEEE802.11g, IEEE802.11b, IEEE802.3, IEEE802.3u, 802.1X (security authentication), 802.11i - Ready (security WPA2), 802.11e - Ready (wireless QoS), IPv4 (RFC79

This router has the external antenna, not sure if your gain panel with hook into it but I suspect it will. This one does not support multiple SSID's but it supports all the standards you listed as well as MAC filtering, logging and built in URL restriction and other security features.



Newegg.com - NETGEAR WNDR3700-100NAS IEEE 802.11n Draft 2.0 Rangemax Simultaneous Dual Band Wireless Gigabit Router - Premium Edition

This one looks most promising to me. It supports all the standards supports at least 2 SSID's. It however does not have an external antenna.

There was no mention of MAC filtering but I believe that could be handled by a hardware or software firewall or at least some other piece of equipment. This one will also allow a USB storage device to be connected to it.



I had a look at the cisco website to see what they offered and to be honest found myself a little overwhelmed with the technical jargin.

One other thing you listed that concerns me is the 800-1000 simultaneous port connections. Small business and residential routers may not be able to handle that kind of traffic without noticeable lag and slowdowns, of course I am only guessing when I make that statement so please forgive me if you know that I'm wrong about that.

[The Chariot]

Been a while, but does ZyWALL have anything these days which fits the bill?

[mikedotd]

I am looking for a very good & very reliable wireless router that will manage 800-1000+ simultaneous port connections (I don't mean computer connections)

Just as an aside, the number of protocol ports is irrelevant. You could have 10,000 open connections with no traffic going between them and any router could handle it. All that matters is the amount of traffic.

This isn't quite right. At least as important as the total throughput is the session state table, which tracks each TCP/IP connection between you and the internet, and handles things such as NAT (network address translation), which allows you to have multiple IP's (rfc1918 space) behind your generally assigned 1 "external" WAN IP.

While the number of sessions a SOHO router can handle has dramatically increased over the years, it's still the number 1 limitation. There's only so much memory in those cheap routers; while their interfaces have more than sufficient buffer space to handle the throughput of 100Mb/s (while most US broadband is limited to 50Mb/s), the can only track so many connections simultaneously.

[swarga]

I am looking for a very good & very reliable wireless router that will manage 800-1000+ simultaneous port connections (I don't mean computer connections)

Just as an aside, the number of protocol ports is irrelevant. You could have 10,000 open connections with no traffic going between them and any router could handle it. All that matters is the amount of traffic.

This isn't quite right. At least as important as the total throughput is the session state table, which tracks each TCP/IP connection between you and the internet, and handles things such as NAT (network address translation), which allows you to have multiple IP's (rfc1918 space) behind your generally assigned 1 "external" WAN IP.

Well NAT is a different story. However, a plain router doesn't need to store any per-connection state information, and hence the memory limitation does not apply. As each packet comes in, the destination address is examined, the routing table is consulted, and the packet is forwarded out the appropriate interface.

[STiMULi]

I'll check with my soon to be son in-law this is his field.

Here is his response.

I'm Having a hard time finding routers within that price range that meet all the criteria you listed. It might be necessary to go to a commercial grade router which will run some big money, not to mention a lot of knowledge to setup correctly and administer. Here is what I've come up with so far:

Newegg.com - Cisco Small Business WRVS4400N Draft IEEE802.11n, IEEE802.11g, IEEE802.11b, IEEE802.3, IEEE802.3u, 802.1X (security authentication), 802.11i - Ready (security WPA2), 802.11e - Ready (wireless QoS), IPv4 (RFC79

This router has the external antenna, not sure if your gain panel with hook into it but I suspect it will. This one does not support multiple SSID's but it supports all the standards you listed as well as MAC filtering, logging and built in URL restriction and other security features.



Newegg.com - NETGEAR WNDR3700-100NAS IEEE 802.11n Draft 2.0 Rangemax Simultaneous Dual Band Wireless Gigabit Router - Premium Edition

This one looks most promising to me. It supports all the standards supports at least 2 SSID's. It however does not have an external antenna.

There was no mention of MAC filtering but I believe that could be handled by a hardware or software firewall or at least some other piece of equipment. This one will also allow a USB storage device to be connected to it.



I had a look at the cisco website to see what they offered and to be honest found myself a little overwhelmed with the technical jargin.

One other thing you listed that concerns me is the 800-1000 simultaneous port connections. Small business and residential routers may not be able to handle that kind of traffic without noticeable lag and slowdowns, of course I am only guessing when I make that statement so please forgive me if you know that I'm wrong about that.

Sorry it took so long to reply but the company has had me on the road for a while.

Thanks for the research. I had decided not to trust anymore linksys SOHO stuff even if they have the "CISCO" name on it. I thought I had been making a good decision before and since my last purchase I found that the name CISCO on a plastic router is less than it used to be.

This is one of the reviews I read about it.

NOT GOOD

Reviewed By: rwarton on 3/5/2009 Tech Level: high - Ownership: more than 1 year Pros: Features if they workedCons: This has to be the worse wireless router. Linksys (Cisco) should be ashamed. I don't know where to start, the wireless in now just unusable unless you want to unplug it everyday. The VPN is worthless, and now the router after one year is locking up complete all the time. Maybe I just got one of the bad ones, but from what I'm reading in the forums it sure seems like allot of bad ones were made.Other Thoughts: With me being a professional network engineer, my suggestion is don't even think of buying this model of router unless you willing to gamble.

I have decided to keep the ASUS (IT REALLY DOES ROCK) and then back it up with the WRV200 I just took out of service. Because of the extensive QOS, security and Logging in the ASUS I will be using the old unit as my guest router. I will still be able to use the VPN and the B/W controls of the older router via the DDNS of the ASUS.

I will update more as I go. Right now I could not be happier with the operation and flexibility. Tomato will go on next week with the ASUS overlay if I am not working again. What makes it rock so much is hardware wise it is on the bleeding edge and since the S/W and F/W are open source it will probably remain on the bleeding edge there as well.

Big thanks to TOMEI again.

I want to say that I have seen speeds with this ASUS in both the wired and wireless environments that I have not seen before with my DLINKS or the (metal case) CISCO or the Linksys routers.

In one case I was DLing 1.8 mBYTES (speed) of Torrent material and was still able to get 20 MBITS of browser speed testing. This is not to say that I was getting 35+ MBITS from my connection it is more to state that the CPU could manage the DLing of that content and still support the speed testing and internal video streaming within the home. Like I said mind blowing....

[kpatz]

Well NAT is a different story. However, a plain router doesn't need to store any per-connection state information, and hence the memory limitation does not apply....

Most if not all consumer routers nowadays have state-aware NAT built-in. Hence a connection table.

For Linux gurus, think of iptables vs. the old ipchains. One is state-aware, the other isn't.

[STiMULi]

Well NAT is a different story. However, a plain router doesn't need to store any per-connection state information, and hence the memory limitation does not apply....

Most if not all consumer routers nowadays have state-aware NAT built-in. Hence a connection table.

It has been a long time since I have seen an Enterprise Router that didn't have NAT and PAT.