[BC] The wrong way to deal with tech budgets

[Dana Puopolo]

The absolute MINIMUM I would do for anything over a dozen computers is buy a
Linksys WRT-54GL and put third party firmware on it (Tomato or DD-WRT). Then
you can overclock the CPU to about 260 mHz and get reasonable performance. It
also has G wireless. Netgear also makes a good candidate for DD-WRT-the
WNDR3300. It's also a dual band N wireless router. It sells for about 80
dollars, and can sometimes be found refurbished online for under 40 dollars.
Another decent router was made by D-Link, their wired DI-604. The later ones
(V2 and newer)had an ARM-9 processor, which is pretty powerful-and they could
handle several dozen computers well. Alas, they are no longer in
production-and their replacement is cheapened junk-so I buy them wherever I
can for clients. I bought one a few weeks ago at a thrift store for 2 dollars,
and it works fine. 

Another surprisingly decent router I found comes within the new Comcast DOCSYS
3 cable modems. Comcast will give you the passwords upon request-and I
configured mine to my needs in a few minutes. It comes with 4 LAN ports-two
100 bT and two 1000 bT. I put a 1000 bT card in our server and plugged it into
one of the 1000 bT ports in the modem, then plugged the single 1000 bT port of
my 48 port switch into the modem's other fast port. Everyone noticed an
immediate speed increase when I replaced our older BEFSR41 router (not
installed by me) with this combination.

It's not the bandwidth that's the problem, it's the fact that the router has
to ROUTE packets to so many computers. Keeping track of that routing table
gets to be CPU intensive with a lot of computers on the network-and the cheap
router just can't keep up-so it begins dropping packets. 

-D

From: radiowavesokc at gmail.com

Dana:

Do you have a list of recommended routers that a person should use? I'm
getting tired of lousy routers, even for residential use. I'd like to find
something that will work for years correctly, and provide no breakup issues in
streaming (if the connection is acceptable of course).

Thanks!

O