Recommend me a new Router

Malor wrote:

When I last went shopping for a cheap switch to extend my network, I settled on the "NetGear ProSafe Gigabit Desktop Switch". At least per the specs, it was basically perfect, gigabit-class, able to switch at full wire speed with minimum-size packets, with full support of jumbo frames. (an esoteric feature, not one that regular folks would care about.) It's a 'dumb' switch, with no programmability or web admin crap, and that was precisely what I wanted.

...

Category 5e wire can officially run 100 meters in any given hop. (ie, a little over 300 feet.) There's some complex rules about how many switches you can have in a line, but there's a simple rule of thumb: never have a chain longer than three. If you do that, things will always work perfectly. You can sometimes go further, but the rules get weird. Three is always safe.

If I remember correctly, the bandwidth for Cat 5e and Cat 6 are pretty much the same, but Cat 6 cable is stiffer because of added shielding. Either way, you want one of these rather than plain old Cat 5.

As for switches... yep. Mine is actually managed, but I haven't bothered. Letting it run as a dumb switch is just fine. I hit this point recently where I had like 3 4-port routers chained together in my living room and so picked up a 16-port switch that now acts as the "hub" for my home. Everything just plugs into that, and so all my other devices just have a single cable out to the switch. Here's a photo of the setup:

IMAGE(https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1504/24619084391_e3417448f8_z.jpg)

And yes, I know that it's a rat's nest of wires. I really need to do something about that.

I'm sitting by the pool, but mentally racing home to commune with my bag of zip ties.

If I remember correctly, the bandwidth for Cat 5e and Cat 6 are pretty much the same, but Cat 6 cable is stiffer because of added shielding.

Cat6 can be used for 10GbE signaling, which isn't true of Cat5e. It's only good for shorter runs, though, about 50 meters. If you need both 10 gig and long runs, Cat6a will go the full 100.

But Cat6 is thicker than 5e, and 6a is thicker still. I find them awkward to work with. If you're not going past gigabit, 5e is easier.

I tend to think optical's a better choice past gigabit, anyway. 10 gig on copper is awkward. It uses a lot of power, and the cables are relatively hard to work with. This is because it's so close to the limits of what copper can do. With optical, the limit is more the quality of the devices on both ends.

Plus, you get the nice electrical isolation; if you're in lightning country, having your network running over fiber adds a fair bit of safety.

LouZiffer wrote:

I'm sitting by the pool, but mentally racing home to commune with my bag of zip ties.

Zip ties are evil. Get you some Velcro Cable Ties. That bag of 100 nets me over 200 ties because I usually cut them in either half or thirds because the regular length is way longer than I need most of the time. We go through them pretty quick at work, but I have been working off of a single bag of them for about 4 years now at home (and I have even given away a couple of the rolls).

Rykin wrote:

Zip ties are evil.

Truth!

I converted to the velcro style ties not long ago myself.

Rykin wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:

I'm sitting by the pool, but mentally racing home to commune with my bag of zip ties.

Zip ties are evil. Get you some Velcro Cable Ties. That bag of 100 nets me over 200 ties because I usually cut them in either half or thirds because the regular length is way longer than I need most of the time. We go through them pretty quick at work, but I have been working off of a single bag of them for about 4 years now at home (and I have even given away a couple of the rolls).

An ages old debate, and it goes on to this day.

I prefer cheap, smooth, and tight vs expensive, furry, and loose.

Spoiler:

Take THAT, context!

LouZiffer wrote:
Rykin wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:

I'm sitting by the pool, but mentally racing home to commune with my bag of zip ties.

Zip ties are evil. Get you some Velcro Cable Ties. That bag of 100 nets me over 200 ties because I usually cut them in either half or thirds because the regular length is way longer than I need most of the time. We go through them pretty quick at work, but I have been working off of a single bag of them for about 4 years now at home (and I have even given away a couple of the rolls).

An ages old debate, and it goes on to this day.

I prefer cheap, smooth, and tight vs expensive, furry, and loose.

Spoiler:

Take THAT, context!

I think that in the long run zip ties are more expensive since they can't be reused and I can get the velcro ones pretty tight but I have been using them for over 6 years now as a regular part of my job where I am apparently the keeper of the velcro and NEC remotes:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/ttbyfzy.jpg)

Local DSL is crap, so I just signed up for Comcast (shudder..) and they told me DOCSIS 3.1 is coming to the Minneapolis/St.Paul market and I should just rent a modem until the 3.1's are available in a few months.

Did I get duped? Is it better to get a surfboard arris one and just upgrade eventually to 3.1 at a later date? Probably only sticking with their 150 Mbps anyway regardless for the time being.

Skippy1997 wrote:

Local DSL is crap, so I just signed up for Comcast (shudder..) and they told me DOCSIS 3.1 is coming to the Minneapolis/St.Paul market and I should just rent a modem until the 3.1's are available in a few months.

Did I get duped? Is it better to get a surfboard arris one and just upgrade eventually to 3.1 at a later date? Probably only sticking with their 150 Mbps anyway regardless for the time being.

When I was renting my modem from COMCAST, it was "only" $6 a month or something like that. Shelling out $60 now for a 3.0 modem, and then another $100+ later for a 3.1 modem does sound a little silly.

If you get a 3.0 modem now, it just means you won't get a speed boost when they turn on 3.1 later, but I would also expect a 3.1 modem would be backwards compatible - but they're not even on the market yet. Additionally, the packages from COMCAST that will have the higher speeds and require DOCSIS 3.1 will (allegedly) be in the neighborhood for $150+ a month.

If you're certain that you'll upgrade to a plan that will need a 3.1 modem, I'd go the full rental route, and then pick up a 3.1 modem when they're available at retail. Otherwise, I'd grab a 3.0 modem and deal with upgrading hardware when you decide to upgrade plans.

Thanks McIrish, I was leaning towards getting the 3.0 like you said, any plan that will utilize 3.1 will be a bit cost prohibitive to what we use in data currently.

I ended up going to Microcenter at lunch, because I'm lazy and don't want to run a cable, I bought a TPLink docsis 3.0 cable modem that was on sale for $10 off and an TPLink 8 port switch that was $5 off and a 5 pack of 7 foot cat5e cables. Now I just need a coax splitter so I can run cable to the modem and the cable tv box.

Commcast sucks, so had to have them activate the modem. No problem, got it done. Oh wait, now my main modem that my phone is connected to doesn't work. Have to call them back. What the first guy neglected to tell me is hey, guess what, you can only have one main modem. So the new modem, hopefully I can return and run an ethernet cable from the computer or the tv upstairs. Also, hopefully Microcenter will return opened modem. Sigh, that's what I get for being lazy and not wanting to string more cable

Trying to help a friend out with some networking issues. He has been having issues with his network being slow and eventually grinding to a halt. Resetting his router will fix it for a day or so but then eventually it happens again. He recently replaced his router with an ASUS RT-AC3100 thinking that his RT-N66U was going out but the new router is having the same issue. We did a quick guesstimation of how many devices he has on his network and are looking at high 20's to low 30's at least (multiple computers, a media center receiver in every room with a TV, many gaming consoles, security cameras plus door sensors, and home automation components).

His setup has the RT-AC3100 connected to the modem with 3 unmanaged switches and an older wifi router (providing wifi and wired ports in the back half of the house) connected to it with cable runs he did himself using pre-tipped Cat 6 from Monoprice. The security cameras are connected to their own switch as is most of the home automation stuff and everything else is connected to the 3rd switch or the 2nd router.

My current theories are that he either has something on his network causing a broadcast storm or he has more devices than a consumer grade router can handle. Thoughts?

If he has more than one DHCP server running, that could be causing problems. Or a loop wired into the network maybe. There's an outside chance one of those devices could be failing as well. I'd check all the routers to make sure only one DHCP server is turned on, then consider hooking up a packet sniffer to the network to see what's going on.

his network being slow and eventually grinding to a halt.

More precise info on that would be good, as in what is slow to what, and maybe how the wiring is set up. Is it local network stuff that's broken, just to the Internet, or all networking? If traffic is just crossing the other router, and not the main one, does that still work okay?

During a failure, trying to figure out where the failure is will help a lot. First thing to check is pinging; do internal pings work? Do external pings work? Try pinging by number and then by name. Do some DNS lookups to make sure that's still working. complexmath's suggestion of making sure there's only one DHCP server is a good one.

Basically, test ping (very simple), then test DNS, then test sharing files between local machines, then test pulling files from the Internet. Once you start seeing failures, that should tell you a lot about where the problem is.

I would expect a modern, fast router like an AC3100 to handle literally hundreds of devices without a problem. I suspect something's misconfigured. Those N66Us are really fast, too, so I would figure that would be more than capable.

It could be a dying switch; they don't die often, but they can certainly hose everything badly when they do.

edit: also, ask him to think back to when he first saw the problem, and ask him what the last change was to the network before that. Don't ask 'did anything change', ask when the last change happened and what it was.

Think we may have worked it out. So when it happens all network traffic dies internal and internet, wired and wireless. Turning off the NIC on one of his PCs fixes it without rebooting the router. He is going to look into updating drivers and OS to see if that solves it. I think the NIC may be causing some kind of broadcast storm.

Ooh, good catch. That could have taken a real long time to find.

Hey, networking people, I swear I knew what I was doing with cabling and networks literally 20 years ago (we're talking token ring days, people), but it's been a long time, and I don't know crap anymore. I have CenturyLink DSL, and I was having some issues with throttling and general performance, plus some NAT issues with multiple Xbox Ones. Also, the old router (an ActionTec c1000A) was starting to kind of smell like an electrical fire, and that said to me "replace it".

I picked up a Netgear Nighthawk R7000, which appears to be "generic gaming-centric router #1" from loads of posts I've seen, plus a Netgear DM111PSPv2 DSL modem. Installed it on Saturday, and it worked fine for three days. Yesterday, it started dropping connection regularly, and today it's even worse; I worked from home this morning, and it was going out constantly. It looks like the connection is dropping at the modem prior to hitting the router, so I got into the logs. and saw this:

Wed, 2016-06-01 09:40:08 - Send out NTP request to time-a.netgear.com
Wed, 2016-06-01 09:40:11 - Receive NTP Reply from time-a.netgear.com
Tue, 2016-05-31 19:54:26 - Router start up
Wed, 2016-06-01 09:53:15 - Administrator login successful - IP:192.168.0.2
Wed, 2016-06-01 10:08:58 - Administrator login successful - IP:192.168.0.2
Wed, 2016-06-01 10:10:55 - LCP down.
Wed, 2016-06-01 10:11:32 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Wed, 2016-06-01 10:11:32 - CHAP authentication success
Wed, 2016-06-01 10:55:44 - Administrator login successful - IP:192.168.0.2
Wed, 2016-06-01 11:09:55 - Administrator login successful - IP:192.168.0.2
Wed, 2016-06-01 11:27:45 - Administrator login successful - IP:192.168.0.2
Wed, 2016-06-01 11:31:44 - LCP down.
Wed, 2016-06-01 11:32:23 - Initialize LCP.
Wed, 2016-06-01 11:32:39 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Wed, 2016-06-01 11:32:40 - CHAP authentication success
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:26:51 - LCP down.
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:27:27 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:27:27 - CHAP authentication success
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:30:47 - LCP down.
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:31:23 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:31:23 - CHAP authentication success
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:57:04 - LCP down.
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:57:41 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Wed, 2016-06-01 15:57:41 - CHAP authentication success
Wed, 2016-06-01 16:21:42 - LCP down.
Wed, 2016-06-01 16:22:18 - LCP is allowed to come up.
Wed, 2016-06-01 16:22:18 - CHAP authentication success
Wed, 2016-06-01 16:50:34 - Administrator login successful - IP:192.168.0.2

I left for my office not long after 11:30 (one crash), and it crashed again at around 3:30 (which is when my son would have gotten home and turned on the Xbox). I called tech support this morning, and they said they show no problems on the line, and they blame the hardware. Any thoughts here? This is, not shockingly, pissing me off.

CHAP authentication success

That looks like a modem problem; it's dropping the connection, bringing it back up, authenticating with your ISP, and then dropping it again.

You should contact your ISP and see if there's something they can do on their end; there might be some setting they can change to make it work. Otherwise, that unit might be defective.

The fact that it worked for three days also suggests that the problem is local. But if it's not too hard to talk to your ISP, explain the problem, and see if there's anything they can do.

edit: note that there might be nothing wrong with your old modem. If it's just a dumb passthrough box, or can be put into that mode, you might not need a new one.

I re-arranged my desk last weekend, and started noticing intermittent connection drops. Brought up the router panel for my N-RT66U, and saw that the router is fine, but wasn't getting a solid connect from the modem.

Fast forward to this weekend, and my wife is trying to watch Netflix and the modem <-> router connection is dropping every 10 minutes. Grab a spare cable, swap out the network cable I had between the two, and we've been right as rain the rest of the night.

Of course, this is when I realize I haven't bought a single new network cable in almost 10 years, and still have been running cat5 for my whole wired setup.

Sounds like a chance to get some cat6 up in here to make better use of my network speeds!

Cat5e will handle gigabit. You only need Cat6 for short runs of 10g. For long runs, you need Cat 6a.

Each new category is more expensive, thicker, and harder to work with. If you're not going to go over gigabit, 5e is (relatively) cheap and very easy to fit most places.

I don't know how the setup will be in the new place, but usually I've been able to get away with a 1m run between the modem and router, and then a 3m run from my router to my PC. Then the rest of the house gets covered with wifi.

Malor wrote:

Cat5e will handle gigabit. You only need Cat6 for short runs of 10g. For long runs, you need Cat 6a.

Each new category is more expensive, thicker, and harder to work with. If you're not going to go over gigabit, 5e is (relatively) cheap and very easy to fit most places.

I have never found Cat6 or 6a to be harder to work with than 5 or 5e. I have made lots of cables and done lots of runs here at work with Cat6 and I replaced all my cables at home with Cat6 a few years ago (used Monoprice). I did that mainly because my cables were all from random sources (pack ins with consoles etc) and many of them were old.

Rykin wrote:
Malor wrote:

Cat5e will handle gigabit. You only need Cat6 for short runs of 10g. For long runs, you need Cat 6a.

Each new category is more expensive, thicker, and harder to work with. If you're not going to go over gigabit, 5e is (relatively) cheap and very easy to fit most places.

I have never found Cat6 or 6a to be harder to work with than 5 or 5e. I have made lots of cables and done lots of runs here at work with Cat6 and I replaced all my cables at home with Cat6 a few years ago (used Monoprice). I did that mainly because my cables were all from random sources (pack ins with consoles etc) and many of them were old.

^ and this is why I just want to start fresh. Make a $20 order with Monoprice to cover all my needs, and then throw out every other networking cord I come across as we move next month.

Long run Cat6e can have some inflexible jackets.. since it's designed to go straight for a good distance and not bend that much.

Potentially disruptive product in the growing network mesh approach to home wi-fi.

Basic differentiator from other mesh solutions is price. $49 ($39 for pre-order) per "pod" is much cheaper than other solutions on the market. I like the simplicity of it--if it works seamlessly.

I love how the "How It Works" page on their site is more or less a "why this is better".

I had to go to the FAQ, and dive into the setup question to find that each 6-pack comes with an networking cable and you connect one Plume to your modem, which acts as a base AP for the rest of the Plume devices.

Other than that, it seems pretty cool, but also feels a little overkill when you've already dropped $200+ on a modem and router and only have 1100 sq ft to cover in an apartment.

What's the current go-to wireless router for $100 or less?

Here's a few that you might want to take look at:

http://www.consumertop.com/best-rout...

Thanks.