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Networking Hardware

Home Router For High-Speed Connection? 376

soulprivate writes "My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT; it reaches 60-70 Mbps only if NAT is disabled. Is there any recommendation for a brand/model of residential router that is able to get more than 70 Mbps with NAT enabled? I have been looking for benchmarks or comparisons, to no avail. Does anyone know one? What are your experiences at home?"
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Home Router For High-Speed Connection?

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  • The reason I would expect most brand-name ones to is the public embarrassment if they were caught out like that.

    Now everyone is going to check their routers and if the Belkins and Linksys-by-Cisco and others are all super-slow when NAT is on it's going to cause some major embarrassments for the industry.

    I expect you either have an inferior manufacturing run, an inferior model, or an inferior brand.

    • by SanityInAnarchy ( 655584 ) <ninja@slaphack.com> on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:09PM (#30248956) Journal

      Like most technology, they assume it's never going to be used to its potential. Take my laptop -- only when I actively cool it or balance it precariously several inches off the desk can I max out both cores. Try that with it sitting on its little rubber feet, and it overheats and throttles itself to 800 mhz. Try that when using the video card for anything stressful at all, and it shuts off.

      Anyway, more on-topic, I've had a Linksys router (WRT54G) crash repeatedly when I attempt to run BitTorrent through it to a 100 mbit fiber connection. The solution was to replace it with a Linux box, and let the Linksys router only handle the wireless.

      It's the same mentality that they've used to sell you 100 mbits -- works great if you just want to browse faster, maybe watch the occasional YouTube video. Sucks if you want to actually use it -- BitTorrent, maybe a Freenet node, or just transferring files between two machines connected to 100 mbit Internet -- before you know it, they're throttling it and bitching that you're a "bandwidth hog". In other words, they wanted to sell you 100 mbits because it sounds faster than 30 mbits, not because they expect people to actually need it.

      • Ip COP? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by danknight ( 570145 )
        I have 25/25 FiOS with the actiontec router. The Actiontec would often lock up after heavy BitTorrent sessions. (something about memory leaks in the routing tables i heard) Anyway I had the internet connetion switched from Moca (cable output) to ethernet and I run it through an old pentium 200 with 3 nics running ipcop 1.4.21 a 24 port switch and hung the router on after for wireless and Moca for the stbs. It has yet to crash, been up for over 2 years and I get full bandwith on nat on the clients . and over
    • by pipatron ( 966506 ) <pipatron@gmail.com> on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:10PM (#30248960) Homepage

      Thanks for the advice! Too bad it's incorrect and you apparently just wrote something to see your name here. There's no reason for the brand-name ones or any one (they all buy and rebrand from the same Chinese OEM developers anyway) to maintain speeds faster than the fastest broadband connections on the market. This has been cheap and easy so far, since the market in this case suck at delivering fast speeds.

      It's common knowledge among those of us that have 100/100 at home that those routers just can't keep up. They usually also lack RAM to track enough connections to saturate the bandwidth with torrent downloads or similar.

      I'd set up openwrt or distro-of-your-choice (m0n0wall was nice last time I looked at these things) on a small and silent PC with two network cards, mini-itx or such. That would give you the prestanda and flexibility you want.

      • I'd set up openwrt or distro-of-your-choice (m0n0wall was nice last time I looked at these things) on a small and silent PC with two network cards, mini-itx or such. That would give you the prestanda and flexibility you want.

        I tested m0n0wall on a 2GHz CPU with 512MB of RAM and it couldn't run faster than 30Mbps symmetric (using gigabit NICs). See my other post [slashdot.org] for more information.

        I'm sure with a faster CPU and more RAM you could do better, but I'd guess that 50Mbps would be about the limit without spending more than $200. At that point, you might as well get dedicated hardware, as the extra featues (built-in switch, etc.) are something you'd likely need to pay for anyway.

    • I expect you either have an inferior manufacturing run, an inferior model, or an inferior brand.

      There are basically no cheap home routers than can handle a 50/20Mbps link at full speed when NAT is involved.

      I've tested both dedicated appliance hardware and software (either running on an actual PC or some micro system, like the Soekris) by hooking up the test router between two gigabit NICs and using netcat to send the output from /dev/urandom to /dev/null on the other machine (to avoid timing any hard drive speeds).

      The Netgear FVS338 [newegg.com] is what I settled on after verifying that it could handle 50Mbps symm

  • I have one of these, flashed to DD-WRT. Gigabit router, QOS, and awesome.
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Reece400 ( 584378 )
      I installed DDWrt on my Linksys and noticed a speed decrease, although it's completely worth it as I no longer have to reboot it daily...
      • by Tyr_7BE ( 461429 )

        Interesting. I installed DD-WRT on my wrt54g and I noticed a dramatic speed increase. Running vendor's firmware, samba transfers in my house over the wifi would cap out at about 1.3 megs/sec. After changing only the router firmware, I can often pull in 2.2 megs/sec. I noticed similar speedups with my cable connection.

    • I'm using a WRT-3XXN with dd-wrt (not at home and can't remember the model exactly). 1 10/100 uplink, 4 10/100/1000 switched and b/g/n wireless. I've been able to saturate both the wired and wireless on the LAN but I only have 15Mbps DLS so I haven't maxed the WAN port but even with maxing out my DSL at 15Mbps via bittorrent the load average on the thing is like 0.02 with gobs of free memory so I would guess one of these would be fine.

      The easier thing to do would be to look at the DD-WRT hardware page ( htt [dd-wrt.com]

  • First of all...wow...you lucky bastard...wish i had that problem.

    Second of all, shouldn't a gigabit router give you what you need? Or am I completely off-base here and missing something...?

    • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:13PM (#30249010) Journal
      Gigabit refers only to the speed of the router's ethernet ports. Assuming that the router isn't total trash, that should make a genuine difference(vs. a 100Mb router) for network activity that allows the router to act more or less as a dumb switch(file transfers between PCs on the LAN, say). If the router actually has to do much routing, it will likely be hamstrung by its rather weedy little CPU.

      The fact that you can get a ~200MHz MIPS or ARM SBC with multiple LAN ports and a wireless card for $50 is quite impressive in the historical sense; but it is still pretty wimpy.
  • Chart (Score:5, Informative)

    by ximenes ( 10 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @04:53PM (#30248744)

    My ISP links to http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/ [smallnetbuilder.com] which has throughput numbers for common home routers.

    The long and short of it is that a lot of these devices have pretty poor performance, and can get away with it because they're used on 1.5mbps lines. However, there are some out there that are decent.

    Of course, there's the build-it-yourself approach with m0n0wall or pfSense or something else. With a spare PC laying around you'll likely get reasonable performance, although electricity usage is quite a bit higher than an appliance.

    • by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      Hey, looks like you hit the nail on the head. The data on the Linksys WRT54G (all the way at the bottom!) looks pretty much right on with what I'm seeing on my home router.

      The homebrew approach has plenty of other potential benefits worth mentioning... You could set up a transparent proxy... which could help speed things up even more (after all, the /rest/ of the internet may still bottleneck), or let you prank your roommates / leechers, or merely help you find who's using up all your bandwidth (hah, good

    • Re:Chart (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Nerdfest ( 867930 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:20PM (#30249088)
      How about using an old laptop, or a low-end refurb netbook. Either should have the processing power required, has low power consumption, and can run other services (media server) if required.
  • by TheRealMindChild ( 743925 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @04:54PM (#30248750) Homepage Journal
    ... and use pfsense [pfsense.com]. My Intel CPU mini-itx board, with processor and ram was $100 and it works better than any consumer grade, BestBuy special router.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by legoburner ( 702695 )
      Agreed, mini itx is one of the best ways to do this. Fanless has a long, stable lifespan and using a portable hard drive will keep operating power usage down close to a dedicated router so it does not work out that much more expensive. You can run a transparent proxy, secure remote access, transparent tunneling/VPNs, gather statistics, etc.
  • WRT-160NL (Score:4, Informative)

    by extintor ( 826864 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @04:55PM (#30248774) Homepage

    I have a 100/10 mbit (fiber, no modems etc) line at home and use a Linksys WRT-160NL. When I do heavy file transfer (downloading, mainly from big FTPs like universities and such) the speed is around 90 mbits (~9.5 Mb/sec).
    I highly recommend it. And if you're extra geeky, I know that there's a OpenWRT port being worked on, but it's not finished yet.

  • Linux PC (Score:5, Informative)

    by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) * on Friday November 27, 2009 @04:56PM (#30248790) Homepage

    The replies you've got so far seem to think that just because a router has gigabit ports that it can do NAT at gigabit speeds, which of course you've already figured out is nonsense.

    For a standalone firewall box you might need to look at something like a Cisco ASA. Not cheap but they will at least specify the actual NAT throughput for whatever model you pick.

    The other way to go is to roll your own on a decent PC with Linux which will get you a few hundred Mbps easily. For example a Mac Mini or FitPC will be fast enough.

    • Re:Linux PC (Score:5, Informative)

      by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmythe@nospam.jwsmythe.com> on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:10PM (#30248962) Homepage Journal

          I second your opinion on using a PC. He may still run into a PPS rate limitation with the router though. It depends on how they bring the connection in. A friend of mine has a business FIOS line (20Mb/20Mb) and a /25 of static IP's, and I specified at install time that they had to bring it in by CAT5. They'll either install CAT5 or coax. I yanked their router off as soon as they finished the install, and put a Catalyst 2924 on. The speed was ok (but not great) with their router. It was exactly as advertised through the 2924.

          For a NAT environment, a decent PC with Linux and iptables would be fine. It would obviously need decent interfaces (nope, that old 10baseT card won't do it), but it doesn't need lots of memory or even CPU power. A handy spare 1Ghz machine with 256Mb RAM is overkill, but easily available in most of our homes. :) The best part is, it's free. No need to waste money on new equipment, if you already have it sitting in your garage gathering dust.

          I don't recommend exceeding 80% capacity on the interfaces. If they do offer 100Mb/s, it's time to upgrade to GigE interfaces. Again, that's pretty easy to do these days. You'll start running into problems at the PCI bus after a while, but that's over 100Mb/s.

          Even in testing the 20Mb/s connection a couple years ago, I just started downloading ISO's. From any one source, I ran into their limitations, so I pulled one copy from a bunch of mirrors, and was able to saturate the connection to flatline at 28Mb/s (wheee). Their advertising was wrong, but I won't complain when they're wrong in my favor.

      • You'll start running into problems at the PCI bus after a while, but that's over 100Mb/s.

        So stick it on PCI Express [dabs.com]

      • Re:Linux PC (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Natales ( 182136 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @08:33PM (#30251226)

        Yet another interesting alternative is to run your router on a VM. In my case, I also needed to have a file server, an Asterisk server, a web server, virtual desktop, etc, it made sense for me to also run the router on a VM. I built an i7 box with 12GB of RAM and 2x1TB disks for about 900 bucks, installed the free ESXi 4U1 and separate NIC cards for each interface and a virtual DMZ. The box is a rocket, and I now that covers all my needs with a single computer in the house.

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      The replies you've got so far seem to think that just because a router has gigabit ports that it can do NAT at gigabit speeds, which of course you've already figured out is nonsense.

      True, but there's a number of routers [smallnetbuilder.com] that do have pretty impressive performance - I think the ones pushing 200+Mbps are lying during the test, but a number of not-so-cheap home routers do perfectly fine. (These aren't the $20 specials, but they're half decent, and most are under $200 on sale).

      You won't be doing NAT at GigE spee

  • I have an old Dell PowerEdge 350 that I used for quite some time as my home router/Asterisk box. Just recently retired it - replaced it with a VMWare ESXi 4.0 box with a single VM running my router/Asterisk instance. Works like a charm too.

    Find someone who has an old rack mount server for sale (eBay is your friend, so is CraigsList), install a Linux Distro of your choice and unless you are trying to run a BGP instance with a full view, you should be fine.

  • Are you seeing the performance degradation over a wired network, or over wireless? Of course, I don't think I've ever even seen more than 54Mbps over a wireless connection on my own, to the router that is, so I it may not even matter, really.
  • Get one with gig-e ports as they have more power

  • by majortom1981 ( 949402 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @04:58PM (#30248818)
    Like another user stated use pfsense. We had this problem at work. We are a library and just got 100/100 fiber service. Couldnt afford to buy some $10,000 router and our $1000 router couldnt handle the speeds. Downloaded pfsense and put it on an old server and get full 100/100 speed. Its open source , has snort and everything. ITs free to use and they have a pay for support option as well.
    • by didde ( 685567 ) * on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:14PM (#30249030) Homepage
      Absolutely true. Pfsense is awesome!

      The challenge is keeping your "old server" hardware alive without having staff supporting/monitoring it.

      Sure, good HW can keep churning for quite some time, but sooner or later the HD will die. Or the PSU will grow tired. Maybe a fan will die and leave the system overheated? When compared to a brand spanking new dedicated unit I believe one can get away with less human monitoring. Of course, as always, YMMV.

      Then again, should you have the resources available, pfsense or m0n0wall are the bomb. Seriously.
  • by ErikTheRed ( 162431 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:01PM (#30248846) Homepage

    I thought everyone on Slashdot built their own firewalls using Linux and / or OpenBSD. WTF? I guess they'll give an account to just about anyone these days.

    • > I thought everyone on Slashdot built their own firewalls using Linux and/or
      > OpenBSD.

      Well, why not? It only takes about fifteen minutes and will handle his traffic with ease on a five-year-old commodity pc.

      > I guess they'll give an account to just about anyone these days.

      They have to pay the bills somehow.

      • by pla ( 258480 )
        Well, why not? It only takes about fifteen minutes and will handle his traffic with ease on a five-year-old commodity pc.

        Even if you buy hardware just for the purpose, you still save a fortune compared to getting a "real" router from the likes of Cisco (and yes, Cisco (et al) have "low"-end routers in the $150-$300 range - I've had the "pleasure" of using them, and can't recommend them for anything more important than holding down papers in a light breeze).

        You only save money with a dedicated router at
        • > You only save money with a dedicated router at the very bottom of the
          > barrel*. If you have a crappy 15MBit residential broadband connection, the
          > $19.95 Linksys special will do you just fine.

          But so will an old Aptiva salvaged from the dumpster.

    • *shrugs* it's easier and cheaper to just buy an off-the-shelf router/nat box, and for most of us, we'll never see the performance drop. I've got a pretty decent Belkin unit that has no issues at all sharing/managing my 25mbit cable connection.

      I *have* built my own router using Linux in the past. It's just not worth the headache when commodity hardware is cheaper and will do the job adequately. Besides, I only have one playbox at my disposal right now, and I use it for other purposes. Namely, it's a small ho

    • I used to... then one day I realize my time was worth more. So, unless I'm tapped for money I'll just buy an off the shelf solution. I have a linksys in my home office, running *gasp* linksys firmware. I don't have the problem the original poster does, because I'm limited to 1.5Mb right now.
  • by steveha ( 103154 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:01PM (#30248848) Homepage

    You could do what I do: use a compact computer with two NICs (motherboard NIC plus a PCI 3Com NIC) as the firewall. Run Devil-Linux [devil-linux.org] from a read-only device. Then, the inside of your firewall can be a gigabit switch. Devil-Linux is pretty easy to configure, although perhaps not quite as easy as a consumer firewall/router with a good web-based GUI. You can boot Devil-Linux from a CD drive, with a write-protected floppy holding your settings; you can roll a custom CD with the settings burned onto it; or you can use a write-protected USB flash drive for everything. No hard drive is needed.

    Pro: Fastest possible throughput and lowest latency; excellent security.
    Con: Will consume more electricity at idle than a consumer firewall/router box.

    steveha

  • Pick anything (Score:3, Informative)

    by Zedrick ( 764028 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:03PM (#30248868)
    Anything should do. I guess your d-link is a few years years old? I worked for D-link support (yes, yuck) around 5 years ago when people started getting 100/100 at home, and we got plenty of complaints about specifications vs reality. But that wasn't a problem with the "new" models back then, and I can't imagine any home router for sale now that can't handle 100Mb with NATing and Firewalling etc.

    Don't worry about speed, look at the price, support (do you have to a broken unit to china or can you get it replaced in the store?) and features instead.

    Or even better: bring up an old computer with two NICs from the basement, install Linux or FreeBSD and add a cheap switch. That beats any home router in price and features!
    • Or even better: bring up an old computer with two NICs from the basement, install Linux or FreeBSD and add a cheap switch. That beats any home router in price and features!

      At the cost of power draw and maintenance.

      (I went that path for awhile, then got one of those Mini-firewall deals and ran M0n0wall on it).

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:03PM (#30248870)

    http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/
    I found this a few months ago... seems what you are asking for.

  • I ran into similar problems, except at 10 megabits most consumer level routers/firewalls tip over well before 10 megabits (several thousand outgoing NAT connections and they die, several hundred and they usually start crawling, plus none had real VPN capabilities). Honestly, your choices are basically: re-purpose an old PC with OpenBSD or Linux (I like OpenBSD because you can set it and forget it), or spend some serious cash on a properly firewall/router/NAT box (an old PC is $1-200 and will give you infini
    • DD-WRT on a WRT54GL is actually quite good. I've got a 12Mbit cable connection and I routinely have 20+ torrents open and seeding and it just doesn't hiccup, something like 6 or 7 different machines. Right now I have 285 active IP connections between all my machines right now, and I've seen 2+MB/s downloads which is approaching what a 12Mbit service can provide. Inexpensive and it works pretty well.
  • Mikrotik (Score:3, Informative)

    by Obliterous ( 466068 ) <shawn,somers&gmail,com> on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:07PM (#30248932) Homepage Journal

    Mikrotik Routers, despite some bad press, are good. They are inexpensive, can be build with commodity hardware, and easily handle that level of traffic.

    hardware specs on mine: 2.4Ghz P-IV, 512MB Rambus RAM, 1 * T100 Ethernet port (motherboard)connected to modem, 5 * 10/100/1000 ports (NICs) connected to home network and one 802.11g wifi NIC (operating as a hotspot), 1 256MB flash card in IDE adapter.

    FIOS connection gives me 60*5 with one IP, and regularly sustains that with as many as four separate machines running BT at any given time, 2 public game servers, as well as various other uses. 60+ firewall rules, full NAT with 20+ port forwarding rules, it runs like a champ.

    http://www.mikrotik.com/ [mikrotik.com]

    If you already have the hardware laying around doing nothing, go ahead and give them a look.

    • Re:Mikrotik (Score:4, Informative)

      by zn0k ( 1082797 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:56PM (#30249494)

      Or buy one of the lower end RouterBoards. A 450G would be a fairly good fit for this situation and comes in at under $150 with a case and a power supply.

    • A 2.4GHz P4? Have you ever calculated how much per year you're paying to power that sucker? You could buy a great Cisco router that'd probably be cheaper overall if you kept it for more than a year.
  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:08PM (#30248938) Journal
    Pretty much any home router in a box that you can buy is going to be rubbish. To be fair, it is pretty impressive what you can get for $30-$50; but intense price sensitivity and competition have pretty much leveled the home router field. You can either get the (impressive for the money; but not good enough) basic model, or you can go cry.

    The Ciscos and Junipers of the world will probably cut it(with the distinctly possible exception of older used ones. If you get something from the era where routing a 10Mb lan into a T1 line was Real Serious Stuff, bittorrent over a 30Mb line is going to make it cry expensive enterprise tears); but they are expensive, even used, and many of their features are probably overkill for home applications.

    Your best bet might be to run m0n0wall [m0n0.ch] or pfsense [pfsense.com]. Depending on your tolerance for fan noise, you can either get a basic intel atom board for ~$80 or an embedded x86 board from soekris [soekris.com] or pcengines [pcengines.ch] or similar.

    That combination will be pretty featureful, quite a bit more powerful than your basic home box, and cheaper than any business box that isn't seriously antiquated.
  • I Beg To Differ (Score:4, Informative)

    by didde ( 685567 ) * on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:09PM (#30248952) Homepage
    I'm on an unmetered 100 Mbps line, bursting up to 300 Mbps from time to time. Just like you, I had a tough time finding consumer-grade hardware able to keep up with speeds > 30-50 Mbps. After going through most of what's on offer here in the EU, short of DIY routers, I ended up with D-Link's "Wireless N Gigabit router DIR-655". Believe it or not, but I have actually seen throughput close to 150 Mbps (using NAT) on the WAN while on this network.

    Of course, YMMW, but my search ended with this piece of hardware.Of course, it's priced slightly higher than the average router, but IMHO it's worth it.

    On a side note: I personally, had no luck what so ever using Linksys offerings, including the WRT54*. Most "premium" hardware platforms in the consumer sphere only offer throughput close to 30-40 or even 50 Mbps while on NAT.

    Good luck. And enjoy the speeds you have been blessed with, son.
    • Good luck. And enjoy the speeds you have been blessed with, son.

      (Pours drink on floor)
      This one is for the homies still on dial-up.

  • Cisco (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gluffis ( 876685 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:13PM (#30248994) Homepage Journal

    Well, the Cisco ASA 5505 is not that expensive anymore. Does 150Mbps according to Cisco.

    • by Darkk ( 1296127 )

      Still pricey for average home user. They're around $340 to $400. Seems cheaper to find an old PC and throw something like IPCop or PfSense.

    • by zn0k ( 1082797 )

      The 150Mbps stands when multiple interfaces are used simultaneously. ASA5505s have 100Mbps interfaces.

  • http://www.actiontec.com/products/product.php?pid=189 [actiontec.com]

    This may be what you're looking for. Offers 10/100 WAN ethernet interface, NAT, the whole she-bang.

    You can find them used on eBay for under $40 shipped. I personally used a pair to utilize a coax line in my office for hard-wiring my desktop as my wireless was being spotty. Through put is better than 802.11g and ping times are in the 3ms range.

    • +1

      Verizon gave us this with our FIOS service; it has no problems keeping up and has been rock solid stable.

  • I've had fantastic luck with m0n0wall on a Soekris Net5501 box - The hardware was basically built for routing, switching and firewalling and m0n0wall is a great distribution.

    Hit www.soekris.com for info on the products. (I have no financial connection whatsoever, just a satisfied customer)

  • by Sloppy ( 14984 ) on Friday November 27, 2009 @05:47PM (#30249392) Homepage Journal

    My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT

    I don't have an answer to your problem (other than "get a computer"), but you have my deepest sympathies. It is so hard to hear of my fellow human being having such horrific adversities inflicted upon them, and I cannot help but wonder: could this misfortune fall upon me some day?

    I can only hope that you overcome the terrible burden of a 100 Mpbs internet connection thrust upon you and your residence, and somehow, god-willing, find a reason to keep on living, in order to set an example for others who may some day suffer the same fate. No matter how dark and hopeless things look right now, don't give up! If you can survive this calamity, maybe I can overcome my own problems as well.

    Bless you, my friend, and good luck!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      I can only hope that you overcome the terrible burden of a 100 Mpbs internet connection thrust upon you and your residence, and somehow, god-willing, find a reason to keep on living

      Yeah, especially since he's going to hit his monthly cap in less than five minutes and get his account cancelled.

  • +1 for pfSense (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mvip ( 1060000 )
    I've given up hope on those cheap routers. Sure, DD-WRT and Tomato are decent products, but they don't come close to a box with pfSense [pfsense.com]. Just pick up the smallest, cheapest and least power consuming ITX box you can find and install pfSense on it. You can control it all from the web browser. Best of all, it's based on FreeBSD.
  • I'm flat out getting EIGHT megabits a second in this webforsaken country below the equator (guess which one!... Australia...).

  • I'm looking at the NetGear RangeMax WNDR3700 Dual Band Wireless-N Gigabit Router. Haven't tested it yet and like to know how it performs. I got 50mbits at home as well, going up to 80mbits this year and I want Wireless-N at high speeds (2 meters distance, ethernet ports WILL break if you plug it in daily).

  • Go buy the cheapest 1U Hacom box here [hacom.net]
    It's even cheaper if you get the box bare-bones and get the memory, CF card, etc... from newegg.
    Then go load pfSense [pfsense.com] on the flash card and turn it on.

    The setup is easy and you get more of a commercial-grade firewall than a home firewall. It'll handle gigabit speed easily.

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