Looking for a fairly fast small business/home router

[Cloud200]

Hi,
I am looking for something fairly specific and not really sure what would be best for my needs and desires.

I just got a 300/65 connection from my service provider and am now looking for a nice firewall/router to go along with it. In the house there are about 50 network devices and depending on how many people are over I think I ought to be safe and get something that can handle 100. I can be technical and deal with things like command line interfaces but I would much rather leave that for work and hobby play, dealing with something simple at home that "just works".

If its any help the kind of interface I love is one like the tomato firmware.
I hate with a passion the sonicwall interface.

some nice things would be:
decent QOS options
DHCP with reservations
able to forward at least 50 ports with different source/destination ports.
time based port blocking (for parental control. No reason for a 14 year old to be playing xbox live at 2AM on a weekday)
pretty graphs and charts


now for the hard part
I would like it if something like this exists for less than $250. Am I deluding myself here with that kind of cost restriction? Reliability for this is paramount as I would be relying on being able to access my network remotely throughout the day with nobody home to reset the router.



Thank you for taking the time to look through this request and respond

 

[dgtlman]

Hi,
I am looking for something fairly specific and not really sure what would be best for my needs and desires.

I just got a 300/65 connection from my service provider and am now looking for a nice firewall/router to go along with it. In the house there are about 50 network devices and depending on how many people are over I think I ought to be safe and get something that can handle 100. I can be technical and deal with things like command line interfaces but I would much rather leave that for work and hobby play, dealing with something simple at home that "just works".

If its any help the kind of interface I love is one like the tomato firmware.
I hate with a passion the sonicwall interface.

some nice things would be:
decent QOS options
DHCP with reservations
able to forward at least 50 ports with different source/destination ports.
time based port blocking (for parental control. No reason for a 14 year old to be playing xbox live at 2AM on a weekday)
pretty graphs and charts


now for the hard part
I would like it if something like this exists for less than $250. Am I deluding myself here with that kind of cost restriction? Reliability for this is paramount as I would be relying on being able to access my network remotely throughout the day with nobody home to reset the router.



Thank you for taking the time to look through this request and respond

Thanks for posting this. I am in the same boat... well minus the 14 year old playing xbox.... ours is 9 and fortunitly the 2am things hasn't started yet.

Not to hijack the thread, but maybe listing some routers that are a little higher would be helpful. Never know when you find one on sale or ebay.

 

[stevech]

" 300/65 connection from my service provider"
Wow. Where do you live?? That would cost a small fortune/month where I live.

Managing those speeds for 50+ users of which many will be simultaneously active... would take a High End SOHO wired-only (no WiFi) router. Where I live, a fast connection like that would come with a suitable router from the ISP, such as a Metro Ethernet service provider, and that router's upkeep would be in the service agreement.

If you MUST purchase/sustain your own router, I'd get a high end $500 class router from Juniper or maybe ZyXel, or a used Cisco. Then add WiFi access points where they're needed.

 

[Cloud200]

The connection is from verizon FIOS in NYC:
http://www22.verizon.com/home/fios-fastest-internet/#plans


They give an actiontec MI424WR-GEN3I router with the connection.
it has:
ARM926EJ-Sid(wt) rev 1 (v5l) CPU
128MB of system RAM

It seems decent enough at first but once i start hammering it . . . it either makes my connection very laggy or locks up. Im 99% sure its the router since I had both a core i7 desktop with the live version of pfsense on it and a Cisco 2901 from work just to see what it was like. No issues whatsoever for a week on each. Called up verizon and got a replacement unit. The new one performs exactly the same as the old one.


Right now after reading through a ton of articles I see a few options:

Build a cheap PC and load pfsense or some other linux distro on it and use it as a router.
A new smb router like a TP-Link TL-ER6120, Dlink DSR-500, etc.
A UTM firewall like a Checkpoint, Watchguard or Fortinet etc. (as long as its not like a sonicwall!)

One other issue seems to be once I turn on the SMB router or UTM firewall's extra functions the speed will go to hell. unless I spend $$$$ . . .


so far the most cost effective solutions seems to be pfsense on something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128585

=/

If anyone has any suggestions I ought to be able to purchase something and return it if it doesn't work. Honestly I'm just not really sure where to start and buying 10 routers and testing them out one by one for a week each is wayyyy more time than I have. That and I might as well start up my own blog at that point reviewing routers

Thanks again for reading and replying

 

[Flak]

That gigabyte you linked would not be very good in terms of using it as a firewall/router/gateway. Mainly because both nics are realtek. Realtek nics are notoriously horrible when used with say Untangle or pfSense or any of those kind of distros. They eat cpu cycles, tend to drop with extremely heavy traffic and in general are just bad (at least with these distros, they obviously tend to work fine in windows).

If you do plan on going with a distro to use as a firewall/router/gateway, your best bet would be to go hardware nic like intel or broadcom. However, even a software based Intel or Broadcom would run circles around realtek/marvell nics.


This is from testing in various forms on my part and from reading various forums... and keep in mind, my testing was on only a 100/30 line. I could only imagine it being even worse for you on a 300/65 connection.

 

[Cloud200]

That gigabyte you linked would not be very good in terms of using it as a firewall/router/gateway. Mainly because both nics are realtek. Realtek nics are notoriously horrible when used with say Untangle or pfSense or any of those kind of distros. They eat cpu cycles, tend to drop with extremely heavy traffic and in general are just bad (at least with these distros, they obviously tend to work fine in windows).

If you do plan on going with a distro to use as a firewall/router/gateway, your best bet would be to go hardware nic like intel or broadcom. However, even a software based Intel or Broadcom would run circles around realtek/marvell nics.


This is from testing in various forms on my part and from reading various forums... and keep in mind, my testing was on only a 100/30 line. I could only imagine it being even worse for you on a 300/65 connection.

Thank you for alerting me to this. I searched up on realtek + pfsense in google . . . not many good things to be said.

I found this instead:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856205007
It has dual broadcom 57788 chips for NICs
That, plus a 2GB stick of RAM, and a $50 SSD ought to be enough. no?

total cost: $130+$20+$50 = $200

Other than that, would the Atom CPU be too slow for the connection? That was my original concern about embedded x86 chips.

If the Atom chip is fine, but the NICs on the board linked are no good, any recommendations to a decent low power, low cost board that either had dual Intel NICs or a single Intel NIC and a pci-e slot?

Thanks again!