Need a router for a 12-user network

[Orcinus Orca]

Greetings form a new member,

I was given the responsibility of buying a new router for a student housing co-op. The house has a shared internet connection for 12 residents, and some of them (predictably) are heavy internet users. The current router is an ancient BEFSR41V3, which is becoming less and less stable and probably also a banwith bottleneck.

The house is wired with ethernet, so fast and and stable wired network performance the top priority. Good wifi is a bonus, but I can always put in an access point. The router must stay in the basment ( masonary walls and a metal door). I doubt any consumer router will have the capability to provide good wifi coverage. I have spent the last two weeks looking at options (so may of them ), and Apple Airport Extreme and Asus RT-N66U seem to stand out from the crowd.

Apple

Pro
-have a reputation to be stable and reliable

Con
- Lacks QoS. I am quite sure I will need it to control the Bit Torrent bandwith. There are almost certainly a few downloader in the house.

-most residents, including the person admistrating the router, don't use Apple products. I know Airport works wthe Windows, but surly it's more optimized for Macs.

Asus
Pro
- Very capable hardware

-Support custom firmware

-Have QoS ( and a very good one if I go with Tomato)

Con
-Buggy official firmware

-Custom firmware is making progress, but there is no fix for the 64KB MVRAM issue in sight.

Now I just can't make a decision. I would really appreciate some guidance. I'd also welcome any alternative suggestion within $260.

 

[thiggins]

Don't waste your money buying an expensive wireless router. It won't penetrate the concrete walls and metal door.

You definitely want something that allows you to throttle up and downlink bandwidth by user (IP or MAC address). You will be fighting a losing battle trying to control BitTorrent by using priority or port-based QoS. It is too adaptable.

If you like Tomato, get a router that supports it and that has slightly more bandwidth than your Internet connection.

 

[Orcinus Orca]

Thank you for responding. I have been looking at ethernet only router. The only palatable solution seems to be building one with pfsense. Otherwise I 'd have to buy a Cisco VPN router. I am very much tempted by pfsense, but the trouble is that I don't have any ready to use hardware laying around, and I don't have time to shop around for parts and then biuld something from scratch. I have looked at Alix Box from NetGate. I don't feel like I am getting a good value for the hardware. Even the unassembled kits cost $200.

http://store.netgate.com/ALIX2D3-2D13-Kit-Silver-Unassembled-P175.aspx

Maybe I am just clueless about market price of hardwares. Are there any other possiblitie I haven't considered? I am open to all suggestions.

 

[Mark Uhde]

I'd use pfSense and multiple wireless AP's. With concrete walls, sticking to the 2.4GHz band probably isn't a bad idea. I'd look at the EnGenius EAP350's. I'd probably put three of them in, to ensure strong signal. Site survey, and if appropriate use channels 1, 6, and 11. They're ceiling-mount and hide nicely, and the whole setup will happily handle your traffic and pfSense offers a lot of traffic shaping flexibility.

 

[Orcinus Orca]

I have refined my list of candidates in accordance with suggestions from thiggins.

Presently, the internet connection is around 30Mb/s, but this new router will stay for at least 3-4 years, and I need to plan for the future a bit. Due to the number of users and torrent traffic, it's more important that this router needs to gracefully handle a good number of simultaneous connections.

So far I found three readily deployable solutions under $250.

1. Asus RT-N16 running Tomato.
The review on Small Net Builder shows the routing performance, especially the number of simultaneous connections is pretty low on stock firmware. Is tomato going to make a big difference?

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/wire...16-gigabit-n-router-reviewed?showall=&start=4


2. Alix pfsense box from Netgate
I guess the performance should be just enough for now. I'd be more comfortable with 1GHz cpu and gigabit NIC. Unfortunately anything with higher specs alway jump to $500 range. I also have to del with the hassle of shipping from Texas to Canada

http://store.netgate.com/Netgate-m1n1wall-2D3-2D13-Black-P216C83.aspx


3. Cisco RV180
Performance seems good. The VPN feature is wasted. I can't quite tell from the SNB review how good the traffic management is. the QoS is only for uplink traffic.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/secu...co-rv180-vpn-router-reviewed?showall=&start=2

 

[Mark Uhde]

Or you can BUILD a pfSense box. A little more power hungry but a much better value for the money.

 

[Orcinus Orca]

Or you can BUILD a pfSense box. A little more power hungry but a much better value for the money.

I would have done so by now if I have spare parts. It would take me weeks to buy decent new parts, wait for them to ship, build it, and then test it. I need something that I can deploy quickly.

 

[Mark Uhde]

I would have done so by now if I have spare parts. It would take me weeks to buy decent new parts, wait for them to ship, build it, and then test it. I need something that I can deploy quickly.

No it wouldn't. Newegg - Via PV530 board (picking it since it's cheap and has two slots, I haven't ran pfSense on it but it should be far better than that AMD Geode, if far from the fastest board around), two Intel NICs (one for PCI Express, one for PCI), a decent case with power supply (Apex MicroATX, the $40 one, is pretty good), some RAM, a 3.5" SATA drive (I like Seagate, any size will do for this - or you could go SSD - the smallest you can get - and run the embedded pfSense), and a UPS to keep power losses to a minimum. Boom, you've got a box. 3-day shipping, or less if you wanna pay, put it all together in about ten minutes, install pfSense as quickly as on the embedded appliance, and go.

There's nothing about doing your own build that will add any time vs. buying any other router out there if you pick an all-in-one motherboard. Literally, the whole system will snap together in less time than it takes to fry an egg.