Hardware Router Charts - Page 2

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Mr Higgins,

thank you for a very informative article. I would like to know what would be the benefit of moving from these "home" $100 routers to a Cisco one either an 800 series or 1800 series. I understand that the Cisco routers have more memory.

To understand my case, I now have a 1mBit connection and I would upgrade to an 8Mbit one when it becomes available (I live in Nicosia, Cyprus, Europe). I use to have a Netgear wgt624 and had problems with it, as everyday it would drop the internet connection and I had to reboot both the router and the modem. I now changed to a 3Com Officeconnect Wirelss G Cable/DSL router and everything is better but again perfect. The connection drops evry 3-4 days. I have to say I am heavy Bit Torrent - Emule user and have one PC on my network dedicated on this. My network connects over 20 devices, 10 of the PCs and various other gear: printers, satellite decoders, pvrs, audio servers, e.t.c.


Would a Cisco router offer better performance for me? What are the other benefits if I change to a Cisco router?

Thank you.

Charris,

I suspect that limited memory is one of the key factors that causes problems with consumer routers (although there is plenty of buggy code out there too). More memory is one of the reasons that open source routers like IPCop, Smoothwall, etc. seem to work better for the people who have posted to this thread.

The name Cisco on the router won't necessarily eliminate your connection drop problems depending on the model you choose. Before you go spending big money, you might instead try installing one of the open source routers instead to try your memory theory.

BTW, a connection drop every 3-4 days, while annoying, isn't that bad considering what you're doing with that connection!

Interesting question. We haven't done much with reviewing "business class routers" other than the Sonicwalls sometime ago, mainly because they're expensive. They're probably worth a look again.

The trend is toward "UTM" (Unified Threat Management) that combines content filtering, antivirus, anti-spam and intrusion detection services. You'll find, however, that most of these extra features are subscription based and aren't cheap.

There's a relatively new open source router project that I'm going to look into at Interop next week. http://www.vyatta.com/. Supposed to be an open source "enterprise level" router.

Tom,

Do you have any reports on where you compare the Atheros based products, like the AR5004 or AR5005 family..
Cisco's Aironet 1200 used to be based on the Atheros chip set, does the Cisco 1200 have the Super G features of the Atheros chip set?

thanks,
Wayne R.

The idea is in the queue. But it will be awhile until we get to them. This is why I'm looking for networking reviewers/writers!

Yes. Planning to look at some router distros.

Interesting idea on the LAN party. What are the key criteria for a router with LAN parties?

Someone else may have commented on it, but some "advanced" features would be nice to have documented in addition to some of the ones shown (like VPN tunnels). Specifically, I'm looking to see the number of forwarded ports/port ranges that can be configured. My current router has a fixed number of available port ranges (and can't be specific for udp/tcp/other), and I'm using them all at the moment.

I'm in the market for a new router that has more options, preferrably the ability to support unlimited entries with more granular control.

Good idea on adding the # of forwarded ports supported to the charts.

Getting the correct VPN info is difficult and less likely to be added soon.

I have to agree with megamojo, however. If you're looking for more
than 32 or so forwarded ports sets, then you'll have to go with a router distro. The biz-class routers might have more in this area, also, which I'll see once I get a few in.

I totally agree with you. PC routers are not for everyone. I think it would be interesting to compare their power consumption with that of appliance routers and see which one is cheaper over the long term. As for having a dual-home PC available, I'm not quite sure what you mean by that term. These PC routers are usually built from old hardware that can be had for free or very cheap and they are single purpose machines, they just happen to live in a computer case instead of a pretty plastic box from linksys/dlink/etc.

Oh, i do now that term, i was just thinking in the wrong context. I'm quite familiar with it after being on resnet at school and cable internet (less restrictions, so we were willing to pay for it) at the same time and making everything work happily. The routing table is your friend. I would have to agree with you about the physical space issue. PC routers are very low on the WAF scale (wife appreciation factor, a term i think coined by the htpc folks). They do make motherboards with dual onboard nics and an integrated processor aimed at people wanting to make routers; they were linked at the beginning of this thread or maybe the one about modems, but they're way too expensive imo.

Edit.
Yeah, it was in the thread on the p2p article.

May I suggest some options then ? I like those "system on a board" routers:

* http://www.soekris.com: 48xx series
* http://www.pcengines.ch/wrap.htm
* http://www.routerboard.com: 100 & 500 series

to name a few. And you can run whatever you want on them.

Guys, I've read all the replies here and I must say it's a an interesting read.

I do have a question though

(be gentle, I know absolutely nothing about routers!)

I have a really bog standard internet ppoe connection, 2mb download with 192kb upload (yep it's that bad here!).

Through this connection I have a DLink DI-604 with which my wife's pc and mine go online.

We both play online games and do the odd download, is this router causing any speed problems at the moment?

I would like to upgrade my connection in the next couple of months to 16mb download and 1mb upload, if the router is not creating problems for us, will it with this new connection?

Sorry that this is such a silly question but as I said before, I know nothing about routers and didn't even know that there was such a difference between them all.

Would be great to hear any comments and suggestions.

Cheers,

Siggsy

Not a silly question at all. The router chart shows 3 Mbps upload and 14 Mbps download, but that data was taken on an original DI-604 back in 2002. Newer vintage DI-604's (Rev E especially) will probably be somewhat faster.

The router should not be interfering with your current connection, but might limit the new one. You can always do some throughput testing using one of the online speed tests both with and without the router. If the with-router test is slower, then it's time for a replacement.


Thanks very much for your quick reply. Yep that's made me feel a whole lot better. Hearing the other problems that people were having with p2p got me worried a little as most gamers will know, ping counts as well as download speed for patches and other stuff.

Thanks again

We will be adding a new chart to the router charts soon that will provide some info on # of concurrent connections supported.

This will be a tremendous resource. I think lots of people are looking for reliable info on max connections performance of different routers. It seems like almost half of all router complaints these days are about problems with P2P. :x

Tom - a lot of people often mention to get an older PC and setup one of the various firewall linux distros.

Would be nice to see an older PC (Celeron 400 or something) with 128mb of ram and see how it fares against all these commercial routers in terms of throughput and # of connections!

Ditto on presenting result for a linux router. I just set up a IP Cop router to take the place of my Netgear RP614v2.

I had an old compaq deskpro 2000 (pentium 166 with ~180mb of ram) laying around, collecting dust. CPU usage is maxing out at around 10%, I'm pretty sure I'm maxing out my cable connection.

It would be nice to have at least one system as a reference... Of course more different setups would be better.

Sorry, should listen more and speak less, my mother was right

I tried to search the thread, before my post, but... couldn't figure out how to search just this thread. I'm glad to see that results are coming. It sounds like your setup is getting a better workout than mine.

The first post in this thread asks if we encoutered 'any suprises' in the Router Charts. I am writing to say there is a rather Big Surprise in the new Maximum Simultaneous Connection data. I really appreciate the Router Charts project as a whole and especially the addition of this measure. But some of the results reported in that graph absoutely defy user experiences with several of the models you tested. These experiences have been reported extensively for example in the forums at dslreports but I will summarize my own here.

The Chart ranks the following three routers in terms of max connections: Belkin Pre-N F5D8230 > Linksys WRT54GX > Zyxel X-550. My router trial history actually went in this very sequence, from Belkin to Linksys to Zyxel, but for the precise reason that I came to the EXACT OPPOSITE conclusion about the connection handling of these three models.

I first bought the Belkin F5D8230-4 (version 1002 which is actually better than the v.2000) and it was truly pathetic at handling P2P and some other applications. Like many other users, I found the router would seize up and close all connections upon exeeding a rather low threshold of max open connections. In P2P applications you could have as few as 150 max connections specifed and still choke your Belkin Pre-N. The only way to recover from this state of router spasm is to power the unit off and on.

When I researched the problem online I discovered the Belkin forum at dslreports where I found long threads full of rants about this poor connection handling. One 'solution' people found was to flash the Belkin with Linksys WRT54GX bios since for the most part (?) these models have the same internals. Using a slightly modified bios I successfully flashed and operated my Belkin with Linksys bios resulting in a major improvement in connection handling. It seems likely therefore that the Belkin model's problem is the router code (problems also do not occur when the Belkin Pre-N is used as an Access Point only). But it seems Belkin has no intention of updating their bios.

The Belkin unit I now had masquerading as a Linksys was a definite improvement but still could jam up when enough demand for connections was placed on it (more like 200-300?). I could have lived with this but instead decided to try the Zyxel X-550 which many users were reporting great success with. I am glad I did. I have found that the Zyxel handles far, far more simultaneous open connections and I have yet to bring it to its knees. I have heard by the way that the X-550 has similar/same internals to the D-Link DGL-4300 and the Trendnet TEW-611BRP.

I would love to hear more about the methodology used for the Max Connections test in the Router Charts and suggest you look into this a little more. On the specific measure of max connection, I can assure you that sustained testing and practical experience will lead you also to conclude what many other users have concluded: Zyxel X-550 > Linksys WRT54GX > Belkin Pre-N F5D8230.

Thanks for the clarification of your method.

I can understand why using a P2P application that allows you to set max connections would be too imprecise for your router connection tests, because it would introduce too many uncontrolled variables. But I encourage you to try such an application (and experiment with other bencharks) on the routers you test. If you do I think you will find that the benchmark you used, however controlled and precise, is not predictive of the actual performance of routers in connection handling.

I am not talking about subtle differences here either. I am suggesting that in practice the Belkin, for example, cannot handle even 50% of the connection demands that the Zyxel can. Anyway, best of luck in developing the Router Charts. I will keep following their updates.

The test technique uses TCP/IP tranfers of 1,000,000 Byte files, continuously repeated. So there is nothing specific for P2P or any other TCP/IP based application.

An FTP transfer uses only a single session, regardless of the length of file.

Coold you include more 3Com models (3CRGPOE10075-US, 3CRWE454G75). And some from 2Wire. This because most ISP include this models in the service.

Thanks

3Com hasn't been doing much in the consumer / SOHO router market. We'll look into 2Wire, but we can only test models with Ethernet WAN, not DSL interfaces

Hello All. The chart was last updated in June. When can we expect the next one to come out? Or could someone point me to some new test results somewhere else? I'd like to replace my old SMC soon. Thanks.

Actually, since June, we've added the results of the Cheap Router Roundup article in July and the Belkin N1 in September.

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