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Cheap ADSL Holds Up 802.11n Router Design
sholto writes "Ever wondered why you can't find the perfect 802.11n router? You know, the one with dual band, great range, USB print server and storage? Australian ISPs used to give away modem routers to consumers with expensive ADSL plans, but competition has forced them to drop the plans' prices so low they can't subsidize the boxes any more. D-Link Australia says R&D into N routers is now becalmed in a Catch-22."
DDWRT helps but the hardware on the market is just garbage. And it's NOT because it's made of commodity components, but because it's poorly engineered. Best example of this is the horrific power/thermal management on newer Linksys products. Ethernet _switch_ traffic alone is enough to make the whole system overheat and crash no matter what firmware you're running. A competent engineer could have made it work right for the same BOM. I used to make wireless devices and our biggest category of support problems was crappy wireless routers either spontaneously rebooting, or needing to be rebooted. I just can't believe we are still at the same state of reliability as the 802.11b days - actually it seems worse now.
PS I don't mean to pick on Linksys, it's just that they're the ones I'm most familiar with. Overall the fails seemed to be in proportion to market share although every one had its particular problems.
Is it really the ISPs fault? Most people I know bought there own router and connected it to the modem supplied by their ISP. I'm still on my old Linksys WRT54G with Tomato on it because its the best thing out there. I'd buy a new 802.11n router in a heart beat if it supported gigabit lan and wan, dual band, external antenna(s), OpenWRT support, and a USB port or two would be nice but not really needed. I really don't think its to much to ask but last I looked no company makes one.
Why in the world would you want an ADSL2+ modem (or any modem or media adapter other than ethernet or USB) built in to your router?
That's rather like wanting a boat trailer built in to your automobile. They work just fine as separate components, thank you, and putting them together will not foster competition or improve performance.
Because I currently have three boxes sitting in the corner of my living room taking up space, causing a cable mess, wasting electricity, and just generally being annoying.
Putting them all in the one device makes perfect sense for me, when they are all essentially components of the same system.
That's like saying "Why would I want an email client, twitter client, ipod, *and* telephone in the same device"
Because it's a home, not a datacenter.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
If only it had built in ADSL it'd be the real deal. But as it is, I'm back up to having two boxes. I'm not saying that's a total deal breaker, but it certainly means it's not perfect. Belkin do models that cover all of this assuming you don't mind external USB storage. Also, Time Capsule 2Tb is £388.00 from the UK Apple store. Oucheroo. You'd be under £250 if you bought the top Belkin model and a 2Tb USB disk.
jh
Not in Australia there isn't. There's ADSL, and there's only one single ADSL standard (well, two if you consider ADSL/ADSL2+). and there's Cable. (and dialup modems/satellite if you want to be picky, and lets face it, who doesn't!). No one's really investing in cable anymore, since the infrastructure for ADSL already exists, and just requires exchange upgrades and back-haul upgrades, instead of in-street wiring of cable and back-haul upgrades.
That's several million homes in Australia who all get an adsl modem from their ISP, and if the isp recommends a wireless router/adsl modem, then they're pushing a path that allows them to invest in R&D on newer features. They all still offer the simple ADSL modem, but there's plenty of room for people with multiple computers (something a large fraction if not the majority of australian households now have) to warrant the availability and simplicity of a modem/router pre-configured by the ISP to just work when you plug it in.
The proprietary software to configure the AP is a pain, but it runs just fine with Wine on Ubuntu 10.04 (one caveat, it didn't show up on a network scan, I had to specify it's IP manually). I have mine in bridged mode off of a Cisco ASA5505 and it works much better than anything I've tried. I can certainly attest to its reliability. It's worth the extra cash to not have to reboot your AP every week (Like my WRT54G running Tomato).
The odd thing is, I already have the router that both you, and the article describe...
It has:
Simultaneous dual band
Ability to broadcast a guest network as well as my secured ones 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz ones
Gigabit ethernet switch
Range good enough to get from one corner of my house to the other far corner, and probably more.
USB print server
Ability to add storage
Ability to act as a backup server
Doesn't overhead
Hasn't crashed since it started running several months ago
Hasn't ever dropped a connection
Hasn't ever had compatibility issues with random 3rd party hardware/software
What is it? Oddly... it's an Airport Extreme
I've gone through so many bad experiences with D-Link equipment over the years that I will never buy any equipment from D-Link ever again. I will go out of my way to get people I know to replace these craptacular pieces of shit every chance I get.
I've had D-Link PCMCIA cards, routers, modems, etc and every single one of them is an overheating piece of garbage. It's like no one in the company has ever heard of heat management.
OTOH, I set up an Airport Extreme Base Station at my parents' house last year. It has all of the features Sholto says you can't find (Dual band-N, great range, USB print and storage, etc) and does it without needing to be reset every ten fucking days. Care to venture a guess the uptime this AEBS, D-Link? 16 MONTHS. I'm usually pleasantly surprised when D-Link crap can make it 16 days without needing a reset.
I suppose I have to give the old Linksys WRT-54 units their props.
You're the second to recommend an Apple product.
You're the second to accuse anyone of not liking it to be an automatic Apple hater.
You're the second to whom I will now reply Apple doesn't sell a product with a built in ADSL2 modem, which incidentally makes your lovely product recommendation completely off topic.
I will completely agree with you on your last point though. I too for a while ran a Linux machine as a NAT gateway, router, firewall, file server, wireless router, etc, but over the years features have gotten too much for it. I long for the days of my ancient old Linksys ADSL modem router with builtin wireless, PSTN to VoIP bridge, and USB print server. Now I have 4 boxes doing that job.
Yea, sure, so when one component fails, you're stuck without ANY connectivity of any sort while you wait for the replacement for the entire kit.
Or you could get REALLY short cables, stack the units properly for airflow, and if something fails, you're less likely to have to wait upon a service technician to deliver something to you, as you can likely run to a store and pick up the replacement within hours instead of days.
Plus, blinking lights, man! Blinking lights!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Of course, in my new house design I actually have a comm closet - wouldn't necessarily put the wireless router in there, but I sure as heck would put the cable/DSL modem in there and use an ethernet run to any wireless routers. Hmmm... at that point might as well use POE and those thin wireless APs. But that's a commercial solution and a LOT more expensive than a consumer integrated unit.
You can roll your own PoE, just run half-duplex connections to your kit (1/2 and 3/6 pairs, IIRC) and use the other wires in the bundle to carry power. Don't make the mistake of trying to run AC power down the line, most anything like that which runs on AC will also run on DC, although it usually only works with one tip polarity because such small crap devices often have half-wave rectifiers. A couple jacks and wall plates will cost you $10 at the home despot. Do yourself a favor and get odd-colored jacks to denote half duplex. If you just install some other kind of power jack in the wall (buy jacks and plugs at radio shack) for the power to come out of, you can't even harm a device by plugging it in.
I get internet access from a local WISP. They installed a bridge/AP in a metal box on the antenna mast. The PoE injector is in my living room closet along with my primary AP/router. (WRT54G with DD-WRT.) Then I have a cable run to the entertainment system hooked up to another AP, as well as to the Xbox (about to be removed as it has died), Xbox 360, Wii, and a PC. This is the AP that I hammer when I want to transfer files, so that my lady can still get access. I don't know if it's a problem with 802.11G or a problem with DD-WRT but if I have a file transfer going I get dropouts, and my two APs are on different channels with no others visible in the area since I live in the boonies.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You're the second to whom I will now reply Apple doesn't sell a product with a built in ADSL2 modem, which incidentally makes your lovely product recommendation completely off topic.
In all fairness, for those of us not familiar with the Aussie broadband market, there was virtually no way to know that only ADSL modem-routers are under discussion, at least from reading the summary. It asks:
Ever wondered why you can't find the perfect 802.11n router?
It then lists off a handful of features, conspicuously missing the "is also an ADSL modem" feature. My assumption based on the summary was that previously, knowing the Aussie ISP(s?) would subsidize large numbers of modem-routers provided a virtually guaranteed market, and so it was less risky for router manufacturers to invest in R&D for modem-routers (which would then allow them to cheaply cross over into the normal router market simply by removing the ADSL modem functionality). Nothing in the summary contradicts this; in fact, except for the parenthetical, it is a paraphrase of the 3rd sentence of the summary, the only one which mentions ADSL modem-routers.
In short, these comments are not off-topic to the summary. The fact that they are presumably off-topic to the article is largely the fault of the summary, not the comment poster, unless you want to blame them for not RTFA (good luck with that, by the way!).