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Wireless Router Option?


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Im tyring to choose a new Wireless router for home use and am was just wondering what everyone out there recommends?

I have a Wii(wireless), Xbox 360(wired), PC and a notebook.

I have been looking at D-LINK 615 but have had a numerous amount of mixed reviews.

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I have a D-Link DIR-615 rev C1. It is horrible at stock. I am using the DD-WRT firmware and it is much better. If you are looking for the N speed, use DD-WRT's guide on it, but know you won't get a full speed if you are supporting G or B devices, such as the Wii.

I currently have 1 PC, 2 notebooks (on and off) and a PS3 on wireless. PS3 is G speed, so my router is running at 2.4GHz even for the N clients. My PC is hard-wired.

However, I can't really recommend any D-Link products. I hated mine for forever until I found the custom firmware. I can't complain tho, I got mine for $40 on clearance! You get what you pay for.

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I have a D-Link DIR-615 rev C1. It is horrible at stock. I am using the DD-WRT firmware and it is much better. If you are looking for the N speed, use DD-WRT's guide on it, but know you won't get a full speed if you are supporting G or B devices, such as the Wii.

I currently have 1 PC, 2 notebooks (on and off) and a PS3 on wireless. PS3 is G speed, so my router is running at 2.4GHz even for the N clients. My PC is hard-wired.

However, I can't really recommend any D-Link products. I hated mine for forever until I found the custom firmware. I can't complain tho, I got mine for $40 on clearance! You get what you pay for.

So what it be good quality network to handle the Wii?

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The Wii should be fine. My PS3 works fine on the wireless, however I am going to research how to use N on the PS3. The fact that I am using mixed mode is causing some problems for Wireless N clients. Now if someone were to make some managed N routers that would be awesome.

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managed N routers

What do you mean? A wireless N router running DD-WRT will do just about every "managed" feature I can possibly think of through its GUI (very advanced stuff might need to be done from the CLI though).

You can access it via telnet, SSH and a web interface. It does VLANs (and you can pick each port's speed and duplex mode), SNMP (syslog too), you can do port mirroring (using iptables), it supports 802.1X auth, you can setup some fancy QOS rules, it supports STP, link aggregation is pretty much pointless on a typical router with only 4 ports but it's still supported (along with other fancy stuff) and TONS more.

You get full access to everything, you can mount shares using samba, you can add SD cards (simple mods, useful in several ways), you can increase wifi power (and decent models let you change antennas too), you can tweak the routing tables to your heart's content, there's a fancy DHCP server (actually, 2 of them, and you can use it for PXE and such), TONS of wifi options (including some to setup hotspots) -- more than you'll ever care for, it does bandwidth graphing, some builds have OpenVPN built-in, there's filtering (for P2P, keywords, URLs, etc), access policies and radio scheduling, cron jobs, you can do prerouting towards a squid install, it has fairly extensive IPv6 support (you can run radvd and 6to4 on there, setup a tunnel, etc), there's a decent dynamic DNS client, some have USB ports you can use, you can run several other apps on it, there's the nice wiviz scanner, etc.

I honestly don't know what else you could ask for.

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managed N routers

What do you mean? I honestly don't know what else you could ask for.

I was using the wrong terminology. I was thinking about how Link Aggregation works on our managed switches, but the correct term (and such things do exist) is Dual Band wireless, which will allow for separate N and G bands that do not interfere with each other. I'm still kinda green on wireless tech, mostly because I don't trust it yet.

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It all depends on the router - for example, an Apple Airport and some higher-end netgear and linksys/cisco's do this already, although I don't think any of them will run DD-WRT or one of it's variants ;).

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It all depends on the router - for example, an Apple Airport and some higher-end netgear and linksys/cisco's do this already, although I don't think any of them will run DD-WRT or one of it's variants ;).

DD-WRT is for lame routers. If I drop some good dimes on a router I would expect it to work properly without using hacks. :w00t:

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DD-WRT is for lame routers. If I drop some good dimes on a router I would expect it to work properly without using hacks. :w00t:

It very much depends what you mean by "lame router". The firmware on every single consumer router (Linksys/D-Link/Netgear/etc) I've ever seen is REALLY lame compared to DD-WRT. It sounds like you're trying to say Linux sucks at routing (definitely not what I'd call a "hack"), where it's pretty much the very thing it's best at IMO (BSD is good there too). Under $500 I'd pick DD-WRT over pretty much anything else hands down (if you tried it you'd understand too). And even if you offered me a fancy $1000+ Cisco or Juniper router, I'm still not sure it would be a better pick in a LOT of cases.

Yes, the fancy router would have a faster switching fabric (fancy backplane, custom ASICs, etc) in case you're running an ISP, and IOS/JUNOS have some advanced features that Linux may not have but those typically won't be useful on a home LAN (yet lack plenty of useful ones) and require very advanced networking knowledge (like a CCNE) to setup and configure properly. For a home user, there's very little to gain from using these, nevermind the exorbitant costs and training required. The cheapest pre-built thing I'd consider to replace DD-WRT would be a $950+ Cisco 1811. And even then, DD-WRT Pro on a plain old x86 system (with good NICs and Wifi NICs) would probably be cheaper and better in every single way or just about.

BTW, DD-WRT also supports some dual band units, mind you a lot of those suck (crappy built-in antennas and what not). A lot of them also only use a single radio for both bands ("non-simultaneous" dual-band). And there's a LOT of wifi N models that don't support the 5GHz band at all.

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Ah, well by "lame" I am referring to buying a standard consumer router off the shelf at the electronics store. I would never expect a stock D-Link or Linksys router to even compare properly to enterprise class hardware. And yes, DD-WRT definately made my $40 D-Link router not be lame anymore, even so I had to look up a bunch of stuff online to figure out what all those new settings were for! :w00t:

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