Router for heavy traffic

I would move to a 8 port bussiness class router like Netgear FVS338 or there newer gigaport. Then add a seperate AP and/or printer, room for expansion.

Router with builtin wireless add a lot of heat to the units. seperating the 2 gives you better performace, not sharing resources with the router function.

I would say get a cisco 3750 because I have absolutely no experience with these other consumer brands. Also like blue said, separate out the wireless function.

Not many people have $2000+ to shell out on a home router  

A buisness class router from netgear would be fine. Get one that does not have wireless in it and the more you pay the more you get   I would at least get the FVS338.

If he wants gig speed he will need to mover all the way up to the 538 model.

I have the 338 model and it has some serious firmware problem. So far I have been on 2 beta versions for it. They fix one thing and break another. Problems include renewing lease times >1day (mine is 4day), send log does not work. The basic things that most need.

awbarb, Why do you want to use UPnP?

Do you want people to install software and patches with out your knowledge? Major security problem.

I guess nobody else thinks the connection is the problem? I'm sure a cheap router will probably die under 4 BT streams, but your connection is going to go to hell in terms of latency and any type of useability.

What I would (and did) do is get a PC running a software router and plug it into whatever type of switch and/or access point you want. This way you have a real CPU and not some 50 MHz integrated chip. My router is a 2.2 GHz celeron with 512mb of RAM. I know it's overkill, but it could probably handle 10 BT streams plus 20 VPN tunnels without breaking a sweat.

Making a PC a router is definatly the way to go for extremely heavy traffic. I have a little VIA Epia Eden system setup to be my router. 1ghz w/ 1gb of ram, draws less power than my previous routers and doesn't melt when I run bittorrent. It is about the size of a mac mini so it is easy to tuck away   I'm sure this thing could easily handle dozens of bittorrent downloads with hundreds of simultaneous connections.

For most instances though one of thoes buisness class netgears should do the trick. They have 133+mhz processors in them so they arn't all that bad for just doing router functions. When a PC is your router it tends to do much more than just route. It will inevitably become a webserver, mail server, game server, etc.

If you want to talk SFF, a Soekris or Routerboard is the way to go. They're smaller than a lot of regular routers, kinda pricey though. Especially if you're comparing them to something like Linksys. Against Cisco however, quite attractively priced.

Is making a pc a router good for people who games, in other words I understand it has a high throughput, but does it also add significant latency? Thanks

Making a pc into a router is good for heavy traffic load. Games put some load on routers but P2P apps like bittorrent put much more.
Having a pc as your router will not increase your latency at all. A home router from staples is a computer too, it is just a much smaller and less powerful one.

Well, it also depends on the computer and what you have it doing. If you have a decent PC (read: Pentium 3+ with at least 64MB of RAM and PCI NICs) and it's just doing NAT then it will work fine. But if you go the PC route, you open up a whole slew of extra options that you don't normally get with the off the shelf routers. So if you take your same P3 PC and start enabling things like VPN, packet inspection, traffic shaping, etc then it can start to slow down.

For instance, consider that a Cisco PIX 515 is a several thousand dollar firewall. If you open it up, it's basically a PC. Motherboard with an Intel processor, regular RAM and a couple PCI slots. A Linksys router is a very slimmed down PC, based on an embedded chip with RAM soldered to the board and flash memory instead of a hard drive. But the simple answer is that a PC-router doesn't add any latency.

Hello Folks,

I have a question, hope you guys got some thoughts.

I run a small international school network (about 70 users) and I just bought a Linksys WRT350N Gigabit router for the campus. I am finding that this is failing almost every 24 hours. I have updated the firmware to the newest possible. I am basically wondering, is it possible that since this is a home router, it just cannot handle this much traffic? The school has no problem droping some money on a business class router. I just dont know if that is possible.

Secondly, I heard somewhere that it is better to seperate out the wireless function? So use a wired router, then just have access points, so that the router can just worry about routing.

Third, I have thought about running a pc as a router in lieu of a expensive router. How hard is it to install/configure? Is it even worth it?

Thanks for your time,

Tark