Decent ~£50 ADSL router?

[InvaderGIR]

Right, the Linksys at my parent's place is slowly breaking so we're looking at replacing it.

We need wireless (everything in the house uses G) and 4x100mb network ports, ideally some decent GUI to manage traffic a bit but that isn't essential.

I have no clue about routers really, especially when it comes to ADSL, I'm a cable person.

Any help with this would be great as it gets annoying when the net drops for no reason and we have to factory reset the router and readd all the details.

 

[stockhausen]

I would be inclined to pay a bit more than £50 to be honest and I would go for Linksys again, maybe the £60(ish) WAG120N?

As to having to "readd all the details", I think that you should be able to backup the configuration file and simply restore it if required [Administration] => [Config Management]


Incidentally, if you want a decent device - go Vigor!

 

[InvaderGIR]

The thing is, it's on a 2mb line and doesn't get used all that heavily so I can't see much need for spending more. In fact my cable router cost about £50 3 years ago, that's a Linksys WRT54GL or whatever they are, which is a brilliant piece of kit.

I did look at the WAG120N...but I have no need or use for N and ADSL2+ or whatever it's called is wasted on a rubbish line about 10 miles from the exchange. The house will only ever be able to get 2mb I expect.

Using a backup still requires re adding all the information (just in one file rather than adding lots of bits), point is it crashes and kills the internet and has to be completely reset and set up again so is obviously on it's death bed.

 

[stockhausen]

Fair comment . . . in which case, you can certainly get something like the Netgear DG834G for about £30 new and you can probably pick up something old but even better for a lot less than £50 on fleabay where a user is having to upgrade to ADSL2+ for speeds greater than 8Mbps.

I only suggested the Linksys WAG120N for a degree of future-proofing but I agree that in your particular case, it probably isn't worth the extra

 

[InvaderGIR]

Yeah, if it were getting it for my own house I'd certainly spend the extra, even with the distance from the exchange, for future proofing, but as it's for use my mum (hardly uses a computer), sister (uses iPlayer only) and brother (plays games and downloads stuff) and then occasionally me for web browsing I can't see a need for the future proofing really.

We actually have a DG834G from ebay sat on the side...but it appears to be dead. Tried plugging it in and it just goes through the check lights, then resets and does it again. Seems this house is good for killing routers. The DG834G was working fine a couple months ago in my place as a secondary AP linked to my WRT54GL.

How much in the way of QoS shaping does it have? I have Tomato installed on the WRT54GL and I can shape traffic as I require...which is handy as brother gets massive pings when playing online games and sister is using iPlayer as iPlayer seems to use as much internet as possible so he'd like to limit it a bit.