Low Cost Routers with 100Mbps WAN Ports?

Ed asks: "I am getting ready to move into a dorm at Kent State, and they have a 100Mbps port in the room. They allow routers, and switches to connect more than 1 PC, however every router I see at the consumer level has a 10Mbps WAN port. I would really prefer not to waste having a 100BaseTX port on a 10Mbps router. Does anyone make a semi-low cost router with a 100Mbps WAN port?"

Comments

Re:It won't make any difference

[ivan256]

Maybe he wants 100Mbps connectivity to the other machines on campus.

Security?

[karnal]

Are you worrying about security on the Lan at Kent State? I'm just curious -- there would be no real reason to have one (firewall/nat/etc) other than to keep people from messing with your computers. Is it a requirement for a 1/1 address per port in the dorm?

I would say that there are probably some pretty high end stuff you could do this with, but like me, you probably don't have the money (and wouldn't invest the money) on such a solution. Most of the commercial (read: home use) cable routers/firewalls use only 10mbps (not sure if it's even full duplex) because you're never going to hit that wall.... by the time we do, you'll have to buy new equipment anyways.

I would think that a nicely equipped machine (p200 or better?) would be able to pass 100mbps full duplex quite nicely. Granted, you'd have to install linux, but I have found a nifty little diskette that can actually get you running with your own nat box in little to no time --> check out www.bbiagent.net.

Make sure you have 2 network cards that are supported, set up your network settings on the page, and whammo! You get an image of a diskette for your specific machine! I honestly think it's a world above the retail-available boxes, because of the 0-$ invested (other than old equipment...) Also, once you use this as your router, you can drop the Hard Drive/CDROM off of the machine alltogether, since it's all on the floppy! Makes for a very quiet machine (I have mine running on a pentium 200, and I barely notice the machine is on!)

Hopefully this helped....

10mBit is enough ...

[NWT]

You can get 750-900 kb/sec with your 10mBit router, i think this is fast enough to download all the stuff you want. Unless you want to install a server farm behing the router, a 100mBit router is really to expensive for private use...

If you want a 100mBit wan-router, you sghoul consider the cisco 17xx series, i think that should be whats you're looking for ... i've no idea what this costs, but i'm sure its a fine sum.

Perhaps you could use an old pc with 2x100mBit cards and Linux/*BSD as a router, that would be a more cheap solution, besides you could host stuff on it!

Re:It won't make any difference

[disappear]

If you can demonstrate that your bandwidth to the Internet is greater than about 800 KB/s, I will personally give you a cookie.

Can I have one? I'm no longer working at UMBC, but they have an Internet^2 connection, and so their bandwidth to other I^2 sites is limited by the 100Mbps port on the desktop.

(Hint: there are a number of I^2 sites; I don't know if the questioner is on one, but if he is then there's good reason to want a 100Mbps uplink...)

Cheaper solution still

[biglig2]

If you're running multiple machines off the router, then a cheap solution is to just drop another 100Mb card into one of your machines and let it route. Note that this is not a really secure solution -much safer to have a stand-alone box. But if cost is a bigger factor than security...