Is a router just a router? Should i upgrade?

[zeegy]

Hi there all,

I would be the first to admit that I’m a fairly heavy internet user, I’m using an old fauithfull, aka as a Netgear DG834GT, this then plugs into a gigabit managed switch meaning that my data transfers within the network are not really hindered by its 100Mbps Ethernet port.

Am on a BT ADSL2+ Service (nothing good LLU wise in my area), with a connection of around 18Mbps.

My old faithfull only supports 108Mbs wifi, which 2bh is more than enough for me, I think every node that connects to this only relies on 54Mbps technology anyway

Nothing bugs me more than playing online however, the other half coming home and stealing my nets causing me lags and eratic pings during gaming – usually something as trivial as social media sites causes havoc against my FPS gaming.

P2p is a nightmare too it seems, as it crashes my router from time to time. Which gives me a huge ear-bending when facebook or similar isn’t working on my better halfs laptop, desktop, smartphone etc.

My question is this though, would upgrading my router manage my pnp better? (ie reduce the crashes etc) Could my pings in game improve during milti-node tasks?

Or am I better playing with the QOS settings on my current router to ensure that the imperative stuff gets right of way on my home network?

 

[esK`]

I don't think that out of the box a DG834GT supports QoS, Maybe it does with the DGteam firmware but I'm not sure. You could look down the routes of a Billion 7800n as that is one of the top routers available at this time. That has QoS and it supports ADSL2+ and FTTC when that arrives in Dorset ( Weymouth myself so still praying on it's arrival ) The 7800n should be able to manage the connection for you and hopefully increase the stability, so the mrs will be off you're back!

 

[Azuse05]

It crashes because the default time-out values are far too high (for the ram available at least) - the main reason most now come with 64Mb minimum. Iirc you could telnet in and reduce them but the qos is basic to non-existent on those things.

Short answer is yes. Long answer is good qos means tomato and good amount of ram for buffering which basically means RT-N16 (replaced the WRT54GL as the go to router a couple year back) or greater with the RT-66u* at the top of the tree. N16 is the best value, but the wifi is 2.4GHz which isn't a big deal really. Just keep the DG834GT, use it as a modem as any decent cable router will function with fttc when it arrives.

There's a list of compatible routers here. Any router supporting tomato is boradcom based and thus will almost certainly support dd-wrt if that's your thing, but in either case try to avoid any router listed a V* as they tend to be discontinued or difficult to find (thus more expensive the the N16 which tend to have more ram/flash anyway). Detailed reading for qos here and pretty much everything else (and more detail here).

N.B. The new tomato builds have added a number of improvements not listed there like gui for connection limits (not needed unless you've got a lot of users), packet counting applied to inbound data, multiple (bridgable) vlans of both lan and wlan including multiple ssids, ip monitering etc.

*actually has an internal microSD slot which can be useful if you like keeping large detailed logs, but a usb flashdrive in the back is easier

 

[KIA]

Reduce the amount of torrent connections.