Looking into getting a new router.

[rcha101]

Cisco

Hi,

After doing a lot of evaluation of consumer grade SOHO routers and APs myself I would strongly suggest looking at the 85x or 87x products from Cisco. I have found all the consumer stuff to be flaky, limited or under performing. You can usually find the Cisco stuff on eBay at reasonable prices the only problem is it takes a bit of networking knowledge to configure though the documentation online is very good. What I would then recommend is that you then connect an airport extreme or time capsule to this router and use this for wired and wireless connectivity, usb sharing etc.

At my place I have a Cisco 877 terminating my DSL (no cable at this address, for cable check out the 871s), NATing inbound and outbound traffic, firewalling, providing DHCP and updating my dyndns IP. I have a time capsule 500 gb connected to this which sits under my TV and provides connections for my apple tv (wired) and wireless for the laptops and iphones. The added bonus of the setup is I can VPN from my iphone to home and access any web gui device - I use this to check on my torrents (bittorrent web gui) when I'm out and about.

 

[HBOC]

I wouldn't discount an entire manufacturer due to one product. That's just silly. Linksys makes some decent equipment.

I've had 4 Linksys routers in the past, and the only one that was worth a S%$^t was the WGA54G gaming router. I had the WUSB11 (??little USB bridge type router), WRT54G with DDWRT and now the WRT160N. Maybe i am in the minority, but even on the DDWRT forums people talk of how "great" this model is.

I admit, I didn't like the idea of paying $160 for a router, but with all the headache that i have had with Linksys, (D-link I haven't had that great of luck with either) it WAS/IS worth it.

The irony is that my girlfriends' Dell XPS connected to the AE INSTANTLY!!! The D-link USB wifi adapter, wouldn't work at all. Now on their defense, it could've been the Linksys. It took some work for the Linksys to work with it as well, but could've been due to Win XP..? We are upgrading to WIN7 soon. Wish it was a new iMac

 

[ascender]

I've been having some problems recently with Netgear and new Apple kit when trying to setup a wired connection. So far not got to the bottom of it, but I don't have any such problems with AEBS or TC.

 

[jzuena]

There are a few things that i do need for my router to do, and I haven't had much of a chance to play with an airport box before, so i have no idea how configurable they are.

• Port forwarding
• mac address cloning
• dhcp reservation
• dual ssid (1 per band)
• dyndns client

i've talked to engineers from apple and they've told me that the airport didn't do mac address cloning, although this was last year that i spoke with them, i'm not sure if they've enabled this feature or not.

You may have already bought one and know this now, but if not...

Unfortunately, even as of 7.5 MAC address cloning is not supported. Port forwarding works fine, although my old D-Link allowed me to allow only specific WAN addresses to port forward, which the AEBS doesn't do. DHCP reservations work fine, using dual SSIDs works fine, and there is no DDNS client built in. I just use a DDNS client on a Linux box inside my network (ddclient) and it works fine with ZoneEdit who hold my DNS records. I bought a D-Link 8 port gigabit switch from NewEgg for $45 with a $15 rebate, so 3 ports vs 4 doesn't matter for me.

One gripe that almost had me return the AEBS was that I was getting horrible throughput. I did some troubleshooting and found that Ethernet speed auto-negotiation was not working correctly between the AEBS and my cable modem. Even when I hardcoded the AEBS to 100/full, things didn't get better. I finally threw an old 5-port 10/100 switch between the AEBS and the cable modem and now it is running rock solid. The AEBS also allowed me to run a 6to4 IPv6 tunnel directly (which DD-WRT also does) so I don't have to bother with Teredo tunnels since there is no NAT involved.

I came down to either the AEBS or the WRT610N and without knowing if I would get a v2 that doesn't support DD-WRT and the multiple reviews that said the wireless link drops, I didn't want to take the risk and got the AEBS. Once I figured out the auto-negotiation issue (which to be fair might be the fault of my 5+ year old cable modem) it has worked fine.