Recommend me a new Router

Don't go with Comcast. Their network is over congested, has a 250 GB cap, throttle bittorent and break net neutrality. FIOS on the other hand, as far as I know, does none of these things.

Thanks for the tip. I'll be back in the Seattle area, so hopefully FIOS will be available wherever I end up. I used Comcast before, but didn't have any issues with them. I can't imagine needed 250GB, but I'll go the FIOS route if it is available to avoid the congestion.

For what it's worth, I don't have any issues with Comcast and they don't throttle bittorrent. The 250 GB cap really only sucks in theory. It's a soft cap that just gives them an established line in the sand if there are complaints from people in your area. I've broken it several times and never heard anything from Comcast. That's not to say I wouldn't go with FiOS if it was an option for me just for the better bandwidth cost.

IMAGE(http://www.speedtest.net/result/1956260914.png)

Whats the current "best" dual band (2.4/5ghz) N router that supports DD-WRT in a very very stable fashion? I got nowhere trying to figure it out on my own.

So far I am loving my Asus RT-N66U-- streaming music/video from my Wireless N PC to the 360/PS3 while playing BF3 with a ping of 20ms or less is great! I was having issues with connecting to the 5GHz channel, but rebooted the router (doable from the web UI settings menu) and everything has been smooth sailing since then-- no dropped connections, fast download speeds, uninterrupted streaming 720p Game of Thrones (from wireless PC to PS3). As far as installing DD-WRT, I haven't tried it (yet), but I'm leaning towards it-- just that for any purposes I can think of using it for, the stock firmware already seems to cover well.

Symbiotic wrote:

I'm moving back to the States in a few months and will most likely be signing up with Comcast or Verizon (FIOS). If I go the Comcast route, rather than renting a modem from them, I was thinking about buying one of the newer Motorola Surfboard gateways. Can anyone recommend (or not recommend) those vs. a separate modem/router combo? My needs are very simple, FWIW...

I've got the SB 6120 that I bought from Amazon. Works great. There's now also a SB 6121. Not sure what the difference is, but when I bought it wasn't fully Comcast certified. Looking now, it's actually a higher certified device than my 6120 (whatever that means).

Edwin, I'm not sure why you think Comcast is over saturated. My speeds continue to be very good on the non-DOCSIS 3 speed account. I do agree I'd go FIOS if I had the option due to higher potential speeds and no cap, but I've really not had any problems with Comcast in years.

WipEout wrote:

So far I am loving my Asus RT-N66U-- streaming music/video from my Wireless N PC to the 360/PS3 while playing BF3 with a ping of 20ms or less is great! I was having issues with connecting to the 5GHz channel, but rebooted the router (doable from the web UI settings menu) and everything has been smooth sailing since then-- no dropped connections, fast download speeds, uninterrupted streaming 720p Game of Thrones (from wireless PC to PS3). As far as installing DD-WRT, I haven't tried it (yet), but I'm leaning towards it-- just that for any purposes I can think of using it for, the stock firmware already seems to cover well.

I was thinking about that model.. but the forum thread on it listed numerous issues once flashing to DD-WRT and losing the 5ghz channel.

Comcast is different in different areas. If they're in an area where they have competition, they tend to be really sharp about their net quality, but their network can be very, very bad in places where they know you don't have other options.

Malor wrote:

Comcast is different in different areas. If they're in an area where they have competition, they tend to be really sharp about their net quality, but their network can be very, very bad in places where they know you don't have other options.

In Nashville the only competition comes from basically DSL level service. DSL specifically and Uverse, which is DSL with the head end pushed to the neighborhood, then combined with your TV service on that that more limited POTS wire.

I'm in the same boat. My only other option is Qwest DSL and I don't know where they are now but when we moved here several years ago they only offered up to 5/1.

Symbiotic wrote:

I'm moving back to the States in a few months and will most likely be signing up with Comcast or Verizon (FIOS). If I go the Comcast route, rather than renting a modem from them, I was thinking about buying one of the newer Motorola Surfboard gateways. Can anyone recommend (or not recommend) those vs. a separate modem/router combo? My needs are very simple, FWIW...

I have a Surfboard (SBG6580) that was provided by Time Warner Cable, and the wifi performance and stability (or, rather, extreme lack thereof) were the driving force behind my purchase of the TP-Link router I posted about earlier in the thread.

*Legion* wrote:
Symbiotic wrote:

I'm moving back to the States in a few months and will most likely be signing up with Comcast or Verizon (FIOS). If I go the Comcast route, rather than renting a modem from them, I was thinking about buying one of the newer Motorola Surfboard gateways. Can anyone recommend (or not recommend) those vs. a separate modem/router combo? My needs are very simple, FWIW...

I have a Surfboard (SBG6580) that was provided by Time Warner Cable, and the wifi performance and stability (or, rather, extreme lack thereof) were the driving force behind my purchase of the TP-Link router I posted about earlier in the thread.

I bought a refurb Motorola modem (SB5101 - DOCSIS 2.0) for use with Comcast off of ebay. I think it cost me about $35. It's an older one, but you have to pay Comcast through the teeth to get a service that takes advantage of the newer models (DOCSIS 3.0). I don't, so I didn't need one.

Yeah, the only option for me is Comcast. I wish we had FIOS here. The 250 GB cap is definitely soft. I use around 400 GB a month and they haven't given me crap for it yet. (no torrents)

Ugh, since we were talking about Comcast, they just decided to change their 250 GB soft cap to a 300 GB hard cap. Looks like I'm gonna have to start using the internet less.

I am dissapoint.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Ugh, since we were talking about Comcast, they just decided to change their 250 GB soft cap to a 300 GB hard cap. Looks like I'm gonna have to start using the internet less.

I am dissapoint.

They're talking about two setups as possible pricing models, one being extra chunks of data charged as you use them ($10 for 50GB over), or tiered caps by the type of plan you have. I'd lean toward the second option, but would have to see how they structure pricing.

I generally end up right about 200-250GB right now.

MannishBoy wrote:

They're talking about two setups as possible pricing models, one being extra chunks of data charged as you use them ($10 for 50GB over), or tiered caps by the type of plan you have. I'd lean toward the second option, but would have to see how they structure pricing.

I generally end up right about 200-250GB right now.

I just checked, and in the last 3 months I've been at 254, 119, and 201. I guess I would probably be okay at 300. I just need to make sure I don't do anything ridiculous as I know I've gone way over 300 GB before redownloading a lot of Steam games.. I consider $10 for 50 GB whenever you go over 300 GB to be hard cap. I'm interested to see how the tiered caps would work. I can't imagine them being reasonable, however. I'd totally be interested in a straight up $10 per 50 GB plan. I'd start saving money half the time!

It looks like they're saying both for the higher tiers. Meaning you get some value >300 for having a premium package and then $10/50GB over that. I hope they go with that plan. The fact it still has the same 250 GB cap is one of the reasons I haven't stepped up to the 50/10 plan.

Although on review it looks like I've hit 275 GB the last two months and I'm on target for about the same this month so I guess I wouldn't have overage penalties that could offset the tier upgrade difference.

Symbiotic wrote:

Edwin, I'm not sure why you think Comcast is over saturated. My speeds continue to be very good on the non-DOCSIS 3 speed account. I do agree I'd go FIOS if I had the option due to higher potential speeds and no cap, but I've really not had any problems with Comcast in years.

I don't think, I know. Our apartment complex only has two choices, Comcast and Frontier, which is using the older and slower ADSL than Comcast's DCOSIS 3. That means between the hours of 4 PM - 11 PM the broadband just slows to a crawl. The same thing happened in Florida when Adelphia cable went bankrupt and Comcast bought them. They over provisioned too many households with not enough bandwidth allocated to the area.

I blow the 250 GB cap, by double with Netflix alone. I've had two coworkers get disconnected and are no longer allowed to have Comcast accounts. More here.

Like Malor said, this is a very local problem and not all areas have it.

I am also using the Motorola SB 6121.

Basically, Comcast is every bit as evil as they think they can get away with. Giving them money is a bad idea.

I has a sad heart

I've tried every alternative to Comcast in my area and no one can provide the services promised. AT&T promised U-Verse, I sign up, then get the modem and am told they can't even provide the base-level DSL to my area; Cricket sucked, I live 2 blocks from their antenna and couldn't get 1Mbps, let alone the whopping 6Mbps promised. All that, and I had to order Comcast's service while in the middle of a lawsuit with them (was struck by a Comcast service guy because he was texting and driving at the same time). Until AT&T can get their fiber laid out in my area (they've been saying "soon" for the last two years), I'm stuck dealing with the devil.

Netgear WNDR4000 appears to be able to get DD-WRT but damn if I can't figure out where to actually download the right firmware

DD-WRT has become a mess. They've been releasing new builds of the same beta release for years now, different routers require different builds, a lot of features don't work, some brick your router when you try to enable them, their wiki and download pages will often point you to different builds and their forums have just become an impossible mess to navigate and search. I really like this firmware but they really need to get organised and get a non-beta release out for everything.

Bleh...will stick with stock then and just reboot every few days

TheGameguru wrote:

Bleh...will stick with stock then and just reboot every few days

Again, I have the E4200, stock firmware, and I never have to do that. I reboot once a month for peace of mind.

bandit0013 wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Bleh...will stick with stock then and just reboot every few days

Again, I have the E4200, stock firmware, and I never have to do that. I reboot once a month for peace of mind.

Why reboot every few days? Just curious.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
bandit0013 wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Bleh...will stick with stock then and just reboot every few days

Again, I have the E4200, stock firmware, and I never have to do that. I reboot once a month for peace of mind.

Why reboot every few days? Just curious.

Im sure its not every few days.. just feels like it.. lol But the usual nonsense.. stops working with wifi on my laptops.. so I need to reboot it.

TheGameguru wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
bandit0013 wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

Bleh...will stick with stock then and just reboot every few days

Again, I have the E4200, stock firmware, and I never have to do that. I reboot once a month for peace of mind.

Why reboot every few days? Just curious.

Im sure its not every few days.. just feels like it.. lol But the usual nonsense.. stops working with wifi on my laptops.. so I need to reboot it.

Haaaaha... that's what I thought you were talking about. Well, in case you were curious. I have not had to reset my Asus router since I initially set it up with Asus's firmware, which is AWESOME. It actually shows in the firmware how long it's been running since a restart. I always have had to reset other routers frequently. It's definitely the prettiest firmware around. There are a few weird things about it, but it works very well. I thought I would eventually put DD-WRT on it, but I'll have to see a really good reason to do that. The default firmware is pretty cool.

I've got an e4200 that I can't remember the last time I rebooted it. I haven't updated to the latest firmware yet, though.

Since many websites have enabled IPv6 this week, I was looking in to setting up my router to use IPv6 (the RT-N66U has native IPv6). However, when I go into the options, I'm a bit confused as to what I should do. The options under IPv6 are:

Basic Config - Connection Type

  • Disable
  • Native
  • Native with DHCP
  • Tunnel 6to4
  • Tunnel 6in4
  • Tunnel 6rd

Auto Configuration Setting - Enable Router Advertisement?

  • Enable
  • Disable

I really don't know much about it because I haven't done any research yet. I figured I'd ask here first in case anyone has a quick answer.

Edit: I should mention that the default settings are "Disable" on the first and "Enable" on the second.

I haven't done this for myself yet, but I've been sort of looking into it.

The best way to do IPv6 is if your provider supports it. If you ask, they should assign you a /64 network out of their address space. Those numbers will remain yours for as long as you're on that provider. This means that you have 64 bits for devices on your own network -- enough, in other words, for four billion complete 32-bit Internets, in your cupboard or something. Not enough for an IP address for every atom in your house, but you could probably directly address most or all of the bacteria.

If your provider can't do IPv6 yet, you can get an IPv6 allocation from a 'tunnel broker', like he.net, which will do it for free. A tunnel broker will build a tunnel of IPv6-over-IPv4 for you. That is, if you send an IPv6 packet somewhere, your router will encapsulate it in IPv4, and send it to your broker. Your broker will then unpack it, and send it in IPv6-native form to the website. Then it'll package up and return any replies.

This works fine, but current network stacks will usually choose the fastest of IPv4 or IPv6, so if you're going through a broker, that will usually be slower, and it won't get used very much.

Also be aware that this changes your security profile very substantially. Suddenly, every device in your home has a globally-routable IP, instead of hiding behind a NAT router. So you need IPv6 firewall rules, usually in a separate 'stack' on the firewall. If you have a slow device (I'm not familiar with your model), this can slow down your packet-forward speed somewhat. And, of course, your router has to support IPv6 firewalling, and I don't know if most consumer routers come with sane defaults.

I have a DLink DIR-655. It's been a nice upgrade from an older Belkin, but lately not so much. I have the following devices and connection types for over a year now:

* Wireless
- MBP
- Thinkpad
- PS
- Wii
- iPhone * 2
- HP printer

* Wired
- iMac

It hasn't always perfectly handled all our potential traffic. It's never been uncommon to see "Disconnected from access point" while watching Netflix via the PS3, even if playback isn't actually noticeably affected most of the time. Recently, however, the router has begun rebooting several times a day. It happens with higher probability when streaming to the PS3, but even in the absence of that traffic it will occasionally reboot. All devices save the Wii are on the first floor at most 20 feet from the router, and the Wii is positioned almost directly above it (so closer albeit through the floor).

I would like to wire up the existing RJ-45 jack in the living room to get the PS3 on a wired connection, which should help, but this is an old house and it's going to take some effort. Of course, the router still has to handle the traffic, but at least we'd get better speed than 802.11b/g. I might also consider wiring the Thinkpad (in the same room) and the jack in the Wii room, since neither support 802.11n. This would allow the router to run 802.11n for the MBP and iPhones.

The Cisco e4200 looks decent, and the V1 (if it's still available) supports DD-WRT if I so choose. My primary concern is stability, though. I've looked at the ASUS RT-N56U and it comes highly rated from NewEgg. Their RT-N66U seems to get more love, but it's also more expensive

WipEout, are you still in-love with your RT-66U? Anyone have any other recommendations, or perhaps tips to getting the DIR-655 working better? QoS to the PS3, maybe?