Recommend a wirless Router

[charlesr]

I asked Neil the same question. He said he's using this which is the best of a band bunch. Pricey though.... I'm tempted. All the ones under £80 I've bought recently have been poo apart from an ancient 3Com G which has worked perfectly for a couple of months but now has started reseting for no reason.

[Ian(not Ian)]

I use this one, and it's jolly good on wireless, and has 4 free cable ports. Luvly.

http://www.misco.co.uk/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=292230&CatId=0

[hudson]

Thanks for the replies. I think paying up to around 100 quid is what I'm prepared to pay. As I'm not very clued up in this field. Can anyone tell me when improvements I can find in these more expensive routers?

[smouty]

Can anyone tell me when improvements I can find in these more expensive routers?

The main one for me is regular firmware updates. I have a Draytek router and it may be a bit overkill for most people but the level of control for applications and traffic in the firewall is impressive.
It also has SIP for voice and a VPN endpoint for dialling in to your home network.
I bought it from dabs for 1/10 of the retail price as it was returned but worked fine for me

[charlesr]

Thanks for the replies. I think paying up to around 100 quid is what I'm prepared to pay. As I'm not very clued up in this field. Can anyone tell me when improvements I can find in these more expensive routers?

I think that the cheaper N band ones will revert to G if anything on your network is G, so pointless. I think. Just trying to find some docs.

[charlesr]

Hmm. I might have made that up. Anyone else able to comment on that?

This appears to back me up, but I don't trust yahoo answers.

A few other places are backing this up too: "Be advised that if your network is n and your pc is n but you have another pc thats only g, your network will operate at the speed of the slowest wireless and in this case your entire network will revert down to g unless you disconnect your g PC"

So for most people who have g laptops and 360 (and for me, squeezeboxes), N Routers are a big waste of money.

[Strolls]

I think that the cheaper N band ones will revert to G if anything on your network is G, so pointless. I think. Just trying to find some docs.

This used to be my understanding, too, but I was recently corrected by a poster to hardforum.com (which is an excellent geek site).

AInowUI 802.11n will run at about 600 Mbit/s if only 802.11n clients are connected to an 802.11n router. It uses 4 channels to do this, and if you connect an 802.11g client, then one of the channels will drop down to 802.11g speeds (and that channel will be unused for 802.11n), so the 802.11n will slow, but not all the way down to 802.11g speeds (I'd guess down to maybe about 300 Mbit/s).

So these are really fantastic speeds for wireless - they're faster even than the 100 Mbit/s wired ethernet that even many geeks will be perfectly happy with. IMO 100 Mbit/s is essential if you start copying large files around the place - a 700meg CD image will copy in a minute or two, whereas it would take perhaps 20 minutes on 802.11g wireless.

So I would seriously consider 802.11n myself, however I don't know that I'd recommend it to friends and customers. 802.11g is really mature, it just works, it's easy and ubiquitous, and it's still plenty faster than your internet connection. 802.11g isn't going to slow you down for gaming, surfing the web or even streaming hi-def movies across your home network to your media centre. The only advantages of 802.11n over 802.11g are range (and many people don't need that) and if you're actually moving these large files around the home network, which many people don't do. In many cases I would still prefer 802.11g and a secondary access-point running in WDS mode as an extender. This is now quite proven and mature technology.

Stroller.

[charlesr]

apart from an ancient 3Com G which has worked perfectly for a couple of months but now has started reseting for no reason.

Just realised that BT Openreach have been mucking around in my road recently and seem to have gone now. Lo and behold, it's stable as a rock.