Router Suggestions

Breagen · Post by **Breagen** » February 16, 2005, 6:35 pm

I just ordered DSL service for my house earlier today but I still need to pick out a router because I'm going to be setting the DSL up for wireless use. However living in the country I'm going to need really good transmission distance because I have computer's in different buildings.

Assuming interference isn't a issue (the closest house is 1/4 mile or so away) what would people reccomend in terms of a wireless standard or also specific routers to look for?

Fash · Post by **Fash** » February 16, 2005, 6:43 pm

imho..

this is one of them budget driven decisions...

ya go to best buy, you find the most expensive router you are willing to buy, and you go home happy.

I personally have a Microsoft Broadband router, which gives me incredible reception through 3 floors of the house.

noel · Post by **noel** » February 16, 2005, 6:56 pm

I would say, buy the best Linksys, Netgear, D-link, Microsoft, or Belkin router you can afford. I say that the order of preference would be as listed. I would also recommend, if you're planning on having a wireless network, getting a router that supports 802.11g, and is at a minimum backward compatible to 802.11b.

I would also add that as was discussed in this thread, you should do the following immediately after getting it out of the box:

1. Change the administrator password.
2. Change the SSID (if it has wireless).
3. Add a WEP key, or other authentication to your wireless.
4. Set the SSID to be 'non-broadcast'.
5. If you REALLY want to secure it, set up MAC authentication as well.

With the current crop of hardware available, I wouldn't recommend spending more than $70.

Remember if you want to use the vendor's ultra-high-speed (108Mbps+) option, you'll have to purchase NICs from that vendor as well.

Glossary:
MAC - Media Access Control. MAC addresses are unique to each network device and work at Layer 2 on the OSI model.
NIC - Network Interface Card
SSID - Service Set Identifier. An SSID is the public name of a wireless network.
WEP - Wired Equivalent Privacy

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » February 16, 2005, 7:03 pm

1000+ feet apart you're probably stuck with 802.11a, don't think b or g will go that far without a directional (pringles) antena.

Power lines and such in between the router and the station(s) can mess you up as well.

Do everything Noel said, and change the WEP password every 30 days if anyone lives within reception distance. Cracking WEP is trivial. I don't agree with it but my nephew's been getting free broadband for 2 years courtesy of 4-5 neighbors with wireless.

noel · Post by **noel** » February 16, 2005, 7:08 pm

Aabidano wrote:1000+ feet apart you're probably stuck with 802.11a, don't think b or g will go that far without a directional (pringles) antena.

You are correct. 802.11a is better for distance, but B/G are better at penetrating walls and whatnot due to the lower frequency (802.11a is 5Ghz; 802.11b/g are 2.4Ghz).

Generally speaking b/g will cover the area in most single family homes.

Aslanna · Post by **Aslanna** » February 16, 2005, 7:10 pm

Find out what technology they used in The Core to transmit through hundreds of miles of rock and use that.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » February 16, 2005, 7:26 pm

Belkin's Pre-N Wireless is the router for you!

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118666,00.asp

It's got the range, it got the speed, and it's sexy looking.

Soreali · Post by **Soreali** » February 16, 2005, 7:31 pm

noel · Post by **noel** » February 16, 2005, 7:48 pm

Winnow wrote:Belkin's Pre-N Wireless is the router for you!

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,118666,00.asp

It's got the range, it got the speed, and it's sexy looking.

Lol.

Actually, I just reread the leading post. I'm going to have to agree with Winnow. There's nothing really that's a 'standard' that will meet your needs. So you might as well use the Belkin product.

Either way, let us know how it goes. The alternative is 802.11a with directional antennae.

BTW, what you're looking for really isn't a router, it's a wireless solution. You're probably going to end up looking at a non-consumer solution if Belkin's MIMO solution doesn't work for you.

Either way, GL!

Kelshara · Post by **Kelshara** » February 16, 2005, 8:06 pm

Winnow wrote:It's got the range, it got the speed, and it's sexy looking.

That thing is fugly!

Breagen · Post by **Breagen** » February 16, 2005, 9:44 pm

Thanks for the suggestions so far. To clarify the 1/4 mile was to my nearest neighbor, I'm only needing to transmit at about 100-200 feet but through a couple walls.

I saw that new pre-N router from what I could tell you need a special card as well and they only seem to have them for laptops not desktops. After looking at a few sites I'm thinking about either a Netgear WGT624 or a D-Link DI-624. The main reason is from the tests I saw they both seem to work at over 200 feet which is perfect for what I'm looking for.

noel · Post by **noel** » February 16, 2005, 9:48 pm

A few comments...

I'm certain that Belkin has a desktop MIMO/Pre-N NIC. You're correct in that you'll need NICs from the exact vendor that support whatever specific standard that vendor is pushing.

Even if the vendor or reviewer says the range is 200ft, that's generally best case, and your mileage will vary.

Out of curiosity, are you receiving, or providing connectivity to your neighbor who is 1/4 mile away? Where did the 1/4 mile thing come from if you're not concerned with that?

Wireless is kind of at a weird place right now. Basically wireless networking at present is analogous to a gigantic wave that is building size and force, and is about to crash heavily on the beach, completely covering everything. There are so many new standards, competing standards, and technologies being developed to push wireless to market and make it not only competitive, but a truly viable alternative to wired networking. While it's not there yet, it's very close, and as such now is NOT a good time to invest in a really expensive wireless solution (purely my opinion).

Within a year from now, I'd expect to see additional coverage, speed, reliability and security, as well as more and more common wireless MANs (metropolitan area networking). We're talking about exponential increases in all of the various wireless technologies. Most interesting to me will be what affect that has on ISPs (if you can get your connectivity from your local city, why would you need an ISP?).

Breagen · Post by **Breagen** » February 16, 2005, 10:33 pm

I was just giving the 1/4 mile as to why I'm not concerned with getting interference from other devices/houses because I have a friend who lives in town and had to stop using his wireless because he had so many conflicting devices in the area.

As to the real world transmission range I wouldn't trust any of the companies specs but the figures I got were from a C-net review that showed the dropoff in speed as the distance increased but the two I listed still had over 5mbps at 225 feet.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 3, 2005, 4:00 am

I was searching around for a new wireless router as mine is an ancient 11Mbps D-Link 614+ and the new laptop I'm getting has the Atheros Super AG 802.11a/b/g up to 108 Mbps (up to 60Mbps realized)

The major issue I had and don't understand why no one else was bitching about this is that all the top wireless routers don't have gigabit 10/100/1000 as part of their wired LAN feature set.

I found one!

D-Link 108G Gaming Router DGL-4300

http://www.gamingillustrated.com/dgl4300.php

This thing has both the highest level 802.11g+ 108Mbps capability and also 4 gigabit LAN ports so you're speedy both by land and wireless.

It also has Gamefuel Technology which basically gives priority to game packets over FTP, file transfers, p2p, etc. What that means in the real world is that you can download pr0n off newsgroups at full speed and this router will give priority to the much smaller game packets being sent so your game won't lag. You'r pr0n download will have a minor hiccup which is insignificant compared to lag caused by a hiccup in your game.

The Gamefuel Tech seems kinda nice but I'm mostly stoked on the gigabit/108Mbps combo that nothing else has out there on the market.

Newegg has it for 142.00. I can't see anyone buying something else atm if you want to future proof yourself and have gigabit along with the high end wireless speeds...especially if you're a gamer.

The only small knock on it is that XBox doesn't support one of it's features in dynamic fragmentation although even then, the Gamefuel helps lower the lag due to high traffic...and that only specifically effects X-Box.

Neato. It will be mine by Friday.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » March 3, 2005, 8:20 am

Winnow wrote:The major issue I had and don't understand why no one else was bitching about this is that all the top wireless routers don't have gigabit 10/100/1000 as part of their wired LAN feature set.

For the house it doesn't matter that much IMO. Dumping files from computer to computer my IDE drives are slower than my 100Mb switch. And I've only got a 1.5Mb\s internet connection.

Spending extra cash for gig ethernet on desktops always seemed kind of silly to me, unless you're running diskless clients or something along those lines.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 3, 2005, 1:32 pm

Aabidano wrote: Spending extra cash for gig ethernet on desktops always seemed kind of silly to me, unless you're running diskless clients or something along those lines.

You have a point. The average user is not going to benefit from gigabit.

PCI needs to be upgraded from 32 to 64bit. I think 32 is limited to 500-700Mbps.

All I know is that when I'm transferring GB+ files internally between two HDs, it's faster than over 100Mbps lan. If gigabit helps speed that up, even if not to 1000MBps, I'll be happy. I hope XBox 2 has gigabit as well. Transferring those huge games takes awhile over 100Mbps.

The new laptop I'm gettng tomorrow has the 108Mps wireless (can't get that max speed but can get up to 60Mbps) and also gigabit ethernet. I just want to get files back and forth between my PC HD's and my Laptop as fast as possible while hooked up to gigabit or wirelessly.

Time is precious, money isn't!

cid · Post by **cid** » March 3, 2005, 1:50 pm

Noel,

When did you get so network savy? I alway though you was a code monkey.

I am impressed!

noel · Post by **noel** » March 3, 2005, 2:50 pm

Me? I've never coded anything of consequence in my life!

I'm a network engineer by profession.

cid · Post by **cid** » March 3, 2005, 2:52 pm

Well shit I never knew that. I thought like a year ago you were doing something else, not networking.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » March 3, 2005, 2:55 pm

I'd be willing to bet your PC-PC bottleneck is on the bus, not the network.

*Edit

PCI needs to be upgraded from 32 to 64bit.

That happened 6 (ish) years ago

I've never seen it used on x86 platforms though.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 3, 2005, 3:02 pm

Aabidano wrote:I'd be willing to bet your PC-PC bottleneck is on the bus, not the network.

I'll get back to you on that one after timing some 4GB file xfers. I know how long it's been taking me currently so I should know pretty quick after getting it if it helps.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 3, 2005, 3:45 pm

Winnow wrote:
Aabidano wrote: Spending extra cash for gig ethernet on desktops always seemed kind of silly to me, unless you're running diskless clients or something along those lines.
You have a point. The average user is not going to benefit from gigabit.

PCI needs to be upgraded from 32 to 64bit. I think 32 is limited to 500-700Mbps.

All I know is that when I'm transferring GB+ files internally between two HDs, it's faster than over 100Mbps lan. If gigabit helps speed that up, even if not to 1000MBps, I'll be happy. I hope XBox 2 has gigabit as well. Transferring those huge games takes awhile over 100Mbps.

The new laptop I'm gettng tomorrow has the 108Mps wireless (can't get that max speed but can get up to 60Mbps) and also gigabit ethernet. I just want to get files back and forth between my PC HD's and my Laptop as fast as possible while hooked up to gigabit or wirelessly.

Time is precious, money isn't!

Even a U320 SCSI drive is only rated about 340Mbps, and we all know the top end output is unlikely... when you start talking IDE/SATA though, you need a hardware RAID card to even saturate 100Mpbs (common transfer rates between a couple of machines on a 100Mbit network are around 33Mbit..)

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » March 3, 2005, 4:56 pm

if you want to test how a B network will do in your house, all you need is a 2.4 GHz cordless phone.

however far away you can talk on that from the cradle is an indicator of what the range of a B network is.

now the NIC i have for my wife's laptop greatly exceeds the range i just described, but it is a nice ghetto estimator.

my wife's B card can surf at reasonably high speeds 200+ feet through 3-4 walls. It is a Dell Truemobile (Cisco Orinoco Gold) card, and probably costs about $10 now on Ebay. it fucking rocks. has capability to plug a directional antenna in, so you can probably reasonably expect to double that range if you are really a dork.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 3, 2005, 5:07 pm

I'm just reading up on some reviews before I get to test it out this weekend. Seems like other people see significant increases over 100/lan. How are these people cutting the time their file transfer in half when you guys say it won't make a difference?

Synthetic benchmarks from SiSoft Sandra showed a maximum transfer rate of 14MB/s -- about twice that of the 100Mbps networking components. A real-world test involving multiple copying of a 1.4GB file (big enough to defeat the RAM cache) and averaging the times highlighted few product differences. For the record, the average time taken to transfer the file dropped from 226 seconds at 100Mbps to 106 seconds at 1000Mbps.

On the wired side of the network, the gigabit certainly performed well. My file transfers have been cut by more than half the time. The best part is the price, for ~$150 you can get a gigabit switch and 2 gigabit NICs and have one heck of a fast network. For the small fee that D-Link wants, it's almost worth doing just to finally shut up the one whiner at the LAN party always complaining about lag. I have no doubt that as my network continues to grow, this D-Link equipment will grow. It's extremely easy to setup and install and carefree from then on except for a firmware update every now and then.

Just upgrade mine to GigaLan. 700 MB usually takes 2 mins over the 100 switch, now takes 20 sec. Now that's one new tech actually works!

I've seen people mention about a 30% increase over 100/lan.

I will be sure to report my results!

noel · Post by **noel** » March 3, 2005, 5:44 pm

Winnow wrote:I'm just reading up on some reviews before I get to test it out this weekend. Seems like other people see significant increases over 100/lan. How are these people cutting the time their file transfer in half when you guys say it won't make a difference?

Without a PCI-Express based NIC, you're not going to see much improvement, and as has been stated already, the disk subsystem is going to be your bottleneck.

Once you get your PCs running purely on a RAMDISK, then it might be interesting, but until that time, 100Mbps is an extremely poor investment for the home network in terms of price/performance.

Synthetic benchmarks from SiSoft Sandra showed a maximum transfer rate of 14MB/s -- about twice that of the 100Mbps networking components. A real-world test involving multiple copying of a 1.4GB file (big enough to defeat the RAM cache) and averaging the times highlighted few product differences. For the record, the average time taken to transfer the file dropped from 226 seconds at 100Mbps to 106 seconds at 1000Mbps.

Real Gbps network gear and NICs would reduce the transfer time by a factor of 10. You'd likely see it max out around 850ish Mbps (due to the overhead from TCP/IP and the inter packet gap).

For the small fee that D-Link wants, it's almost worth doing just to finally shut up the one whiner at the LAN party always complaining about lag.

That's fucking laughable. There is no chance in HELL that the cause of lag at the LAN party is the network. Even if the network is 10Mbps, it's not the cause of the lag. Whatever fag wrote that should kick off the slow PCs at the LAN party, or upgrade/dedicate his goddamn server and shut the fuck up about the network. It's pretty clear whoever wrote that has no clue how anything works. Just for writing that in an actual review, he should be fired.

Ransure · Post by **Ransure** » March 3, 2005, 6:13 pm

noel wrote:Me? I've never coded anything of consequence in my life!

I'm a network engineer by profession.

No, hes just a plain old monkey... no code for him...

noel · Post by **noel** » March 3, 2005, 6:58 pm

The theoretical maximum TCP throughput on GigE without using jumbo frames:

(1500-20-20-12)/(1500+14+4+7+1+12)*1000000000/1000000 = 941.482 Mbps

The theoretical maximum UDP throughput on GigE without using jumbo frames:

(1500-20-8)/(1500+14+4+7+1+12)*1000000000/1000000 = 957.087 Mbps

If we take the Theoretical maximum TCP throughput (the lowest), we see that:

=941.482 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]
=941482 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]
=117.685 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]
=117685.25 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]

In an earlier post, you quoted:

Synthetic benchmarks from SiSoft Sandra showed a maximum transfer rate of 14MB/s -- about twice that of the 100Mbps networking components. A real-world test involving multiple copying of a 1.4GB file (big enough to defeat the RAM cache) and averaging the times highlighted few product differences. For the record, the average time taken to transfer the file dropped from 226 seconds at 100Mbps to 106 seconds at 1000Mbps.

By comparison:
=112 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]
=112000 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]
=14 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]
=14000 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]

So you're going to pay additional money for a device that's going to net you an additional ~30Mbps over switched Ethernet, when it should be getting you an additional ~700Mbps?

I just think the technology for Gigabit Ethernet in the home, from the switch to the NIC to the disk subsystem all has a long way to go before you'll get any meaningful results. Therefore, I think it's worth waiting to purchase the gear. By the time the technology has matured for the average consumer, it will be faster (approaching the real speeds of 1Gbps Ethernet) and far less expensive for the switch/NIC.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 3, 2005, 7:07 pm

The bottom line is if my transfer rates improve by 30% or by up to half, I'm going to be happy.

I could care less about all the numbers being thrown around here if in a real world large file transfer, I get the job done 30% faster.

I'll go home tonight and time the transfer of a 4gb file using 100/Mbps. This weekend I'll use the new gigabit router and time it. This should be extremely easy to determine if it helps or not.

Stalker Vacio · Post by **Stalker Vacio** » March 3, 2005, 7:28 pm

I'd suggest a Netgear WGU624

http://www.netgear.com/products/details/WGU624.php

but I'm confident your reception wouldn't be great so I'd also recommend 1-2 Access Points depending on reception

http://www.netgear.com/products/consume ... ess_hm.php

noel · Post by **noel** » March 3, 2005, 7:34 pm

Winnow wrote:The bottom line is if my transfer rates improve by 30% or by up to half, I'm going to be happy.

I could care less about all the numbers being thrown around here if in a real world large file transfer, I get the job done 30% faster.

I'll go home tonight and time the transfer of a 4gb file using 100/Mbps. This weekend I'll use the new gigabit router and time it. This should be extremely easy to determine if it helps or not.

If you have an FTP server available, use windows command-line FTP to do your transfer and at the end of it, it will give you a time and I think KB/sec. There are obviously graphical programs that will do this as well.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 3, 2005, 7:40 pm

Firefox will show windows shares like ftp and give you data rates as it goes, stop watch is enough for a 4Gb file though.. and small stuff is prone to read/write caching skews anyway.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 3, 2005, 7:49 pm

Zaelath wrote:stop watch is enough for a 4Gb file though.. and small stuff is prone to read/write caching skews anyway.

Please advise on what I should use!

http://bodytronics.com/shop/index.cgi?code=3&cat=8

noel · Post by **noel** » March 3, 2005, 8:19 pm

Zaelath wrote:Firefox will show windows shares like ftp and give you data rates as it goes, stop watch is enough for a 4Gb file though.. and small stuff is prone to read/write caching skews anyway.

In my line of work, we don't ever use a stopwatch. Too many variables for that. Also the nice thing about a software solution is that it not only gives you a time, but also a data rate, which is all I really care about. Once I know the data rate, I can calculate just about any file xfer.

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 4, 2005, 12:51 am

Winnow wrote:
Zaelath wrote:stop watch is enough for a 4Gb file though.. and small stuff is prone to read/write caching skews anyway.
Please advise on what I should use!

http://bodytronics.com/shop/index.cgi?code=3&cat=8

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 4, 2005, 12:58 am

noel wrote:
Zaelath wrote:Firefox will show windows shares like ftp and give you data rates as it goes, stop watch is enough for a 4Gb file though.. and small stuff is prone to read/write caching skews anyway.
In my line of work, we don't ever use a stopwatch. Too many variables for that. Also the nice thing about a software solution is that it not only gives you a time, but also a data rate, which is all I really care about. Once I know the data rate, I can calculate just about any file xfer.

Well yes, but we're not really talking about performance tuning.. and if we were a data set of "1x 4Gb file transfer" wouldn't be big enough anyway =)

Data rates will vary a lot on file size, disk caching, etc, just don't know if fiddling about setting up an ftp server is worth it in Winnow's case. To each their own; I just don't like to over-engineer if I can avoid it.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » March 4, 2005, 4:26 am

I think people are getting caught up in the 10 X's as fast as 100/lan hoopla. A 30 percent or 2X's performance increase is well worth it for me. It's not like gigabit costs that much more than 100/lan anymore. The router I'm buying is spendy but a normal gigabit router is cheap. There's just no combo giga/108Mbps wireless router out there to get besides this one that I saw. I'm sure they'll start popping up fast now that this one is out and be cheaper.

Gigabit is important to me but the main reason I bought the 108G Router was to match it up with the Aetheros Super AG wireless card in the new laptop. As everyone knows, the 108Mbps speeds require you to match up brands or at least chipsets.

I do like the Gamefuel feature as well. One day I will frag one of you and it will be due to the extra milliseconds less lag time and widescreen monitor I was using!

Zaelath · Post by **Zaelath** » March 11, 2005, 9:06 am

Curious. Did you get the l33t speed increase?

Sumdaor · Post by **Sumdaor** » March 11, 2005, 10:55 am

Tis the season the tax man giveth back to some