Need a router for extreme usage!

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hey guys, having moved into a student house with 6 of us sharing we have been using the WAG160N router which worked flawlessly for me over the summer alone (maxing it out with torrents while playing a game would create no lag or near to no lag, whilst limiting it slightly resulted in zero lag at all on top of normal non-torrent usage.

However, since sharing 6 of us all randomly torrenting and/or playing games the latency even under not that heavy usage can be 300-600ms in wow for example.

I've heard a lot of good things about the Dreytek's and read a review saying that the "TrendNet TEW-631BRP" is good on performance under heavy usage. Does anyone have experience with either the dreyteks or this other one? And if you have another router to recommend that has QoS or just simply handles a lot of usage well please do.

Thanks!

ps: budget is around £120 i think, but of course would like to keep it nearer the £80 mark, if the dreytek/trendnet are shown to be as good as people say I will pay £120 for them

edit: also Sitecom WL-308 XR 300Mbps Wireless N Gigabit Gaming Route caught my eye but seems it could be gimicky and poorly performing just because of who they are marketing towards (i think they are marketing towards people who think they "need" gaming in the name of a product to do gaming.
 
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wij

wij

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DrayTek do make good routers, and they have some nice QoS features that you could use but tbqfh if someone is maxing out the connection (in particular the upstream) there's not a lot that a "better" router is going to do for you.

Why not just ask people to do their downloading overnight, you could use scheduled firewall rules in the router to enforce this (probably not on a Netgear but a WRT54GL with Tomato can do this, as can the more expensive DrayTeks).
 
Soldato
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I've had my Draytek 2710n for a few days now. So far, going very well. The interface is not the most logical but spend a few hours and you'll have it cracked. I've enjoyed setting up the security/filtering side of things, as my last routers, never had these features. So now I've applied some IM/P2P/Web Filters (i.e. Chat, hacking, Gambling, etc) and also some bandwidth settings based on IP. All seems to work great!

Oh, and also set up the SysMon and Email notification. The Draytek tool which you get from their website shows you loads of useful stuff. Blocked websites, firewall alerts, usage, router and ISP stats. Really really usefull stuff.

:D
 
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DrayTek do make good routers, and they have some nice QoS features that you could use but tbqfh if someone is maxing out the connection (in particular the upstream) there's not a lot that a "better" router is going to do for you.

Why not just ask people to do their downloading overnight, you could use scheduled firewall rules in the router to enforce this (probably not on a Netgear but a WRT54GL with Tomato can do this, as can the more expensive DrayTeks).

unfortunately its not due to the line being "maxed" out, its due to the router not being able to handle the amount of connections i think, seems when we have 2-4 wireless and 3+ wired connected (1 of which may be torrenting and 2 may be gaming) it just seems to die under the pressure, i mean, it doesnt disconnect or crash (probably due to firmware fixes as it used to overheat all the time) but we will get poor latencies even over the network. I don't know what else it could be as the LAN/WAN seem fine when not much is going on

as said before using the same router at home it could easily cope with my torrent usage at the same time as gaming with sub 50ms pings (maxing out the line near enough leaving 5% overhead perhaps using the limiters on utorrent. whereas on this network 50% overhead bandwidth can be avaliable but due to the sheer amount of connections/work its doing we will get 100+ ms pings on the LAN and 300-600ms in gaming online
 
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too bad ocuk are out of the dreytek i was thinking about getting ^^ thanks for the replies so far guys keep em coming, leaning towards the dreytek for sure though, figured i can always sell it after the switch to vDSL (comes to my area next year sometime)
 
Don
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WRT54GL with Tomato.

and build a central server to put everyone's media on it, and use that as a managed torrent box, use QOS and all should be fine.

things like youtube and 4od/iplayer are the killers, I put everything I had on the central server, which meant we didn't even need 4od/iplayer :)
 
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