Death to cheap consumer routers

tumult — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 15:57:44 -0800

I'm tired of wireless routers that suck. Over the years, I've gone through four different Apple AirPorts (all different models, two were Extremes and one was Express) a couple of WRT54Gs (one was an S, which I tried two different versions of the firmware on, followed by DD-WRT and then OpenWRT. The other was a v6 with the vxworks built-in firmware) a couple of Netgears (don't remember the models) and using a computer with a PCI 802.11x card.

All of the routers were not so good and eventually died. The AirPorts would continue to get spotty until they could no longer be configured through the administrative interface. The WRT54Gs would first intermittently have their wireless go out until I restarted them, and then would eventually start crashing more and more frequently, and then eventually the administration panels would stop functioning. This happened with all of the various firmwares. The Netgears would sometimes act slow and seemed to drop connections frequently, and lacked the configuration power of the Linksys routers. The PC works ok, but I don't like having a huge honking PC where my cable comes in. I could run ethernet to the room with the rest of my computers, but then I would have to run ethernet back out to the original room to where my media center PC is, because that computer has to be wired (802.11b/g isn't fast enough to stream HD). I guess I could put a switch there with the cable modem, though.

I'm considering building a small, cheap PC to act as a router/fileserver, but I figured I'd see if anyone has some good suggestions here for a router, first. I'm willing to spend up to $250-$300, since that's what I'd spend on a new PC anyway.

I don't know if I'm cursed or what, but my second WRT54G just had its wireless "burn out" like the other one, so I'm willing to make a long-term investment at this point. This has all taken place over the course of three different residencies, so I guess cheap consumer routers just blow and there aren't ghosts in my outlets.

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Death to cheap consumer routers