how to pick a wireless router?

[zCypher]

At the moment there will only be one 1-2 systems using it, but that could possibly expand to 4-5 in the near future. I see a huge range of prices on different routers, I'm kinda lost as to how to choose one. I've had good experience with Linksys so far, and bad experience with D-Link on a couple occasions.

One of my main concerns is to have the ability to control bandwidth for users. I don't have a download limit, but I also don't want my speed to be completely sucked away because there's another user downloading something.

Any suggestions?

 

[Emulex]

utorrent?

if so you want 128meg of ram which severely limits your choices.

be honest here. i can crash my 64meg dd-wrt wrt600n with two utorrent pc's at once easily.

 

[zCypher]

what? crash how? and what about utorrent?
this is on a very plain connection (7.5m cable), i want to limit users manually ... I don't want to be unable to check my email because another user is hogging the bandwidth, that's the main thing.

 

[kornphlake]

What are you downloading that is sucking up so much bandwidth? Can the user who is downloading so much schedule the downloads to run over night or while everyone is at work? Configuring QOS is often more difficult and less reliable than having a conversation with your room mate.

I have an Athlon XP 2600+ running ubuntu I use as a router, along with some other really neat things, it's probably the most flexible and reliable option for a router, old PCs are cheap, often cheaper than a good dedicated router. You'll need a wireless access point, but you can probably use whatever wireless router you have on hand and turn off the DHCP server. I use an old Linksys WRT54G I bought on Craigslist for $20.