Decent Cable Wireless Router Recommendation

[Clements]

Hi guys,

I'm a bit out of the loop as to which Wireless Router would be best for me, what with the new standards that have come in recently.

I am currently living in a house share that will house myself and 5 others, so I'm going to need a router that is:

a) reliable. The house is well insulated, so I'll need decent penetration. I don't want to reset it all the time etc.
b) decent range. The house is pretty wide due to an extension being built onto it, so it will need to have good range to cover the whole house.
c) supports plenty of devices. There will be plenty of people using it.
d) must be cable compatible. The ISP is Virgin Media (this is in the UK), which is cable. (I don't want to crudge an ASDL router if I can avoid it.)
e) going to need to support wireless N standard at least.
f) not outrageously expensive. I don't mind paying in the £70-£100 range if I know it is going to work pretty well.

The router we have currently is a cheap netgear router that can't even cope with 2 people, let alone when the other 4 move in. The wireless signal is so weak from my room that it is slower than dial-up by the time it gets to me. Right now I'm plugging myself into it via LAN cable, which is not ideal.

I've had a good look myself and still not sure which to get. I've heard good things about D-Link routers. Other than that, not sure.

Thanks for the help.

[Deathlike2]

The only best suggestion I can make is that you make sure that the router is DD-WRT capable (go to DD-WRT's website to verify) just in case the default router firmware sucks ass.

Alternatively, you could just get a wireless Access Point that connects to a working router... you then have to make sure the AP doesn't suck.

[Clements]

Sounds good. I've been doing some research into boosting WiFi signal and managed to boost it considerably using a program inSSIDer to detect which channels neighbouring WiFi signals are operating on, changing the security type to a better method, and moving the router further away from a cordless phone, which will be a great stop gap for now. Still, its likely the current router may not be able to cope with the extra load when the others move in.

At the moment, I have my eye on the Linksys WRT320N or D-Link DIR-655. The former is dual band which may be handy, while the latter is a reliable award-winning single band router. I'm undecided though.

[Deathlike2]

I've used netstumbler before, but the AP detection tools for wireless connections are pretty cool. Channels 1 and 11 are usually recommender over the default of 6. Of course actual testing is needed.

Dualband is ONLY useful if you have clients that have dualband adapters. More often than not, that is not the case as most products sold are usually of the 2.4GHz variety. The 5GHz variety is more useful if you are within a limited range unfortunately. The marketing speak fails at it... sure it's an unused range, but it's limited since the original 802.11a stuff.

Of course, if you can find a damn good deal on dualband USB adapters (like under $20-40 USD) for each guy, then a dualband router is not bad an option. Sometimes these USB dualband adapters can be had for like $10... but whether or not it is ideal long term is unknown.

In my brief experience with wireless, Intel wireless NICs in laptops are like incredible in like range.... and once I was lent a USB 802.11b Linksys adapter.. it had awesome range on it. Unfortunately, I had originally acquired one of their more recent USB dualband adapters, to find out its range kinda sucked ass and the USB stand attachment sucked ass.... oh well. Range+bandwidth really depends on the hardware you get. The Intel one that I finally got for a laptop (it was a mini-PCI one for a Dell, it also happened to be dualban) and it was incredible in bandwidth and range.

[kode54]

OpenWrt may be supported by a larger number of routers. And although it requires a bit more work to set up, many things it has are better with default settings than Tomato, and probably also DD-WRT.

For instance, the QoS scripts module provided in its package repository has perfectly adequate default settings, except that you still need to manually set the up/down speed limits it enforces globally.

Although maybe one thing has put me off of it, that some process running on it, possibly related to the QoS packet matching, is causing random processes to be terminated for running out of memory. So a good idea would be to buy something that has adequate memory for all you wish to install.

I still refuse to touch DD-WRT again, though. Last time I tried it, it was still quite a mess of the original Linksys router software, and had annoying misfeatures like defaulting TCP connection timeout to only 10 minutes, and defaulting UDP to the same thing. So the TCP would drop my IRC and IM connections randomly, while overflowing the connection tracker with all the UDP connections from the collective of BitTorrent clients on my network. Also that business of charging money for features the author probably had very little to do with writing, since he leeches off of other open source projects. Bleh.

[odditude]

Dualband is ONLY useful if you have clients that have dualband adapters. More often than not, that is not the case as most products sold are usually of the 2.4GHz variety. The 5GHz variety is more useful if you are within a limited range unfortunately. The marketing speak fails at it... sure it's an unused range, but it's limited since the original 802.11a stuff.

have to disagree with you here - n on 5ghz has much better penetration and less outside interference (hello, microwave and cordless phone which used to wreak havoc on my sister-in-law's kitchen pc).

---

if you have an android phone, there's a nifty app called wifi analyzer which can show where you'll hit the least interference.

[Deathlike2]

Dualband is ONLY useful if you have clients that have dualband adapters. More often than not, that is not the case as most products sold are usually of the 2.4GHz variety. The 5GHz variety is more useful if you are within a limited range unfortunately. The marketing speak fails at it... sure it's an unused range, but it's limited since the original 802.11a stuff.

have to disagree with you here - n on 5ghz has much better penetration and less outside interference (hello, microwave and cordless phone which used to wreak havoc on my sister-in-law's kitchen pc).

I don't have a dualband router to seriously test it. I'm going by my primary understanding about 802.11a. I'm hopeful this change is dramatic as the marketing makes it out to be. All I have is the crappy Verizon router that they gave me that has a crappy wireless that requires me to reconfigure (have to do it like daily) it in order to get it working properly.

Nevertheless, it will cost some upfront $$$ to improve the infrastructure for each device that needs a dualband adapter...

Don't get me going on wireless gaming...

[funkyass]

Tomato is good firmware.

[Clements]

I think I'm going to go for the D-Link DIR-655. The wireless traffic in this area is relatively low and restricted to channels 1 and 6, so I should be okay using 2.4GHz. This may restrict my firmware options, but it seems to be my best bet for loading multiple devices.

[lordmissus]

lol

[Clements]

Yep, its most likely the same cheapo Netgear wireless G router from Virgin. Its alright for plugging into with an Ethernet cable and in a small house, but the wireless reception isn't great everywhere in our house (essentially a modern built brick semi that has been extended to have 6 bedrooms, three bathrooms etc), resulting in very slow speed and sometimes complete drop-outs, even after configuring it correctly to account for the neighbouring area etc. The router from over the road (a D-Link) broadcasts the same signal strength as the router we have in the house on average. This is with our router configured to a channel that none of the neighbours broadcasts on.

Seeing as there will be 6 people (mostly postgrads, some Masters, some PhD) in the house who all will be using the internet in the evening at the same time, and I alone have up to 6 Wi-Fi enabled devices in my room, plus another when my partner comes over, I'm going to need something beefier than that for sure. Also means I can't run cables all around the house or leave my computers where the router is, due to it being a house share and I don't won't my shit stolen.

[Deathlike2]

If the router is poorly functioning... you can certainly still replace it with another.

If it's just a range issue... consider getting a Wireless AP to extend the range of the router's signal. Although, the sad thing of it is that they can cost as much as a cheap router.

[lordmissus]

lol