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Home Router For High-Speed Connection?
soulprivate writes "My cable company has recently begun to offer Internet access plans with speeds over 30 Mbps (60, 80 and 100 Mbps). However my D-link router is unable to go beyond 30 Mbps if I use NAT; it reaches 60-70 Mbps only if NAT is disabled. Is there any recommendation for a brand/model of residential router that is able to get more than 70 Mbps with NAT enabled? I have been looking for benchmarks or comparisons, to no avail. Does anyone know one? What are your experiences at home?"
... and use pfsense. My Intel CPU mini-itx board, with processor and ram was $100 and it works better than any consumer grade, BestBuy special router.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Like most technology, they assume it's never going to be used to its potential. Take my laptop -- only when I actively cool it or balance it precariously several inches off the desk can I max out both cores. Try that with it sitting on its little rubber feet, and it overheats and throttles itself to 800 mhz. Try that when using the video card for anything stressful at all, and it shuts off.
Anyway, more on-topic, I've had a Linksys router (WRT54G) crash repeatedly when I attempt to run BitTorrent through it to a 100 mbit fiber connection. The solution was to replace it with a Linux box, and let the Linksys router only handle the wireless.
It's the same mentality that they've used to sell you 100 mbits -- works great if you just want to browse faster, maybe watch the occasional YouTube video. Sucks if you want to actually use it -- BitTorrent, maybe a Freenet node, or just transferring files between two machines connected to 100 mbit Internet -- before you know it, they're throttling it and bitching that you're a "bandwidth hog". In other words, they wanted to sell you 100 mbits because it sounds faster than 30 mbits, not because they expect people to actually need it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, the Cisco ASA 5505 is not that expensive anymore. Does 150Mbps according to Cisco.
Even alcohol can bend the room...
Gigabit refers only to the speed of the router's ethernet ports. Assuming that the router isn't total trash, that should make a genuine difference(vs. a 100Mb router) for network activity that allows the router to act more or less as a dumb switch(file transfers between PCs on the LAN, say). If the router actually has to do much routing, it will likely be hamstrung by its rather weedy little CPU.
The fact that you can get a ~200MHz MIPS or ARM SBC with multiple LAN ports and a wireless card for $50 is quite impressive in the historical sense; but it is still pretty wimpy.
Try thinking outside the box. Maybe he wish to run his own web server. Maybe he wants to use VNC or similar to his office. Maybe he wants to link his friends computers together so they can all access eachother's file storage. There are millions of uses for a fast network connection, unless you subscribe to the cable-tv-internet that the media companies would like you to have. That is, passive receiver of pre-filtered information.
c++;