Routers -- Do they all suck?

[Megamorph]

I have been through numerous routers over the past couple of years and am currently using a D Link. The D Link slows my connection AND drops the connection for a few seconds every couple of minutes. It's a real pain in the ass.

Are there any routers out there that will not slow my connection? I want speeds like I am hooked directly to the modem. Are there any that don't have problems staying connected?

I am currently using Road Runner cable.

 

[amdskip]

My Linksys G router doesn't drop my speeds and I hardly ever have to restart it.

 

[spidey07]

Have had a linksys router for about 5 years now. sounds like a configuration or provider issue.

Eliminate any and all SOHO network gear and go right into the modem to tell for sure.

 

[JackMDS]

In the last 5 years I dealt with big numbers of Routers (wire and wireless) made by all the top Brands (Buffalo, D-Link, SMC, Netgear, Linksys, Belkin, and few more).

I can safely state.

Myth One. Routers do not slow down Broadband Internet connection (provided that there is no mis-configuration of the Router's MTU).

It is more of Users' Psychological state than reallity. The physical box between the Modem and the Computer translates into Slow down.

Myth Two Routers Drop the connection. Routers that can be configured to ?Always Keep Alive? Do not drop a connection.

Unfortunately, there are ?Bad? individual units of any Brand that one can buy (especially among Entry Level Network Hardware that suffers from ?Bad? QA).

:sun:

 

[OdiN]

Yeah my Linksys WRT54G works great - no problems.

 

[Skott]

I been using a DLink di-604 for a while and never had a problem with it.

 

[nweaver]

my debian router works great

 

[Tazanator]

in routers like cars the price and design affect the performance. the home stuff is so-so designed for cheap and simple stuff. The commercial stuff is designed for abuse and high performance. That said I like the imagestream commercial routers (I have 5 and use 2 at my home ( the house and a lan party system in the garage)

 

[Megamorph]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
I can safely state.

Myth One. Routers do not slow down Broadband Internet connection (provided that there is no mis-configuration of the Router's MTU).

It is more of Users' Psychological state than reallity. The physical box between the Modem and the Computer translates into Slow down.

Myth Two Routers Drop the connection. Routers that can be configured to ?Always Keep Alive? Do not drop a connection.

Myth One: In my case, it most definitely is a real problem.
Myth Two: How do I configure the router to "always keep alive" and why would that even be an option? Can the Linksys be configured this way?

 

[Atheus]

Myth one is not a myth - TCP connections going through a router running NAT and QoS must all be tracked and inspected to determine protocol. If the router does not have enough memory or processor speed to do that, packets will be dropped and the box may well crash or fail in some way. This could even cause it to lose it's connection completely.

Myth busted

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: Atheus
Myth one is not a myth - TCP connections going through a router running NAT and QoS must all be tracked and inspected to determine protocol. If the router does not have enough memory or processor speed to do that, packets will be dropped and the box may well crash or fail in some way. This could even cause it to lose it's connection completely.

Myth busted

Entry Level Network Hardware was not developed to do VOIP, Video Streaming, Gaming, BT, etc. at the same time.

If you did not notice, almost None of the Entry Level Sub $100 hardware have QoS.

Getting two, SOHO Internet accounts with SOHO Level Dual WAN Router migh present another picture.

A Ferrari would Break too if you use it to carry sand to a construction Site.

:sun:

 

[spidey07]

Originally posted by: Atheus
Myth one is not a myth - TCP connections going through a router running NAT and QoS must all be tracked and inspected to determine protocol. If the router does not have enough memory or processor speed to do that, packets will be dropped and the box may well crash or fail in some way. This could even cause it to lose it's connection completely.

Myth busted

Proof?

Protocol has nothing to do with NAT/PAT apart from layer4 unless you're running layer 7 protocols that negotiate port numbers (rare), even then once the connection is established the negotiation is done and its put into state. It is merely a simple state table working at layer 4.

And if you're overloading a state table you have more serious problems.

 

[Atheus]

JackMDS -

Entry Level Network Hardware was not developed to do VOIP, Video Streaming, Gaming, BT, etc. at the same time.

So you would concede it _does_ in fact fail under such (not exactly rare) circumstances, therefore busting myth one?


Spidey - I know perfectly well higher-level protocols have nothing to do with NAT, but they have everything to do with QoS.

Proof that routers can slow a connection? Well, i don't have experimental proof, but how about this:

- A router requires a processor and memory to route and manipulate packets.
- The more packets to be routed and manipulated, the more processor and memory capacity are used.
- It is possible to attempt to route and manipulate so many packets that the capacity of the router is exceeded.

Would you disagree?

/edit: grammer

 

[Tazanator]

okay .. lets get the expert view points on this ... from http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2003/0714rev.html "We measured the performance effect of filtering with three metrics: throughput, average latency and maximum latency (see How we did it). To determine routers' ability to recover from failure, we also measured reboot times under load for each device. " humm what was asked earlier wasn't it....
" In the filtering cases, we asked vendors to configure one router with filters covering multiple conditions: source and destination IP address; protocol number; and TCP or User Datagram Protocol (UDP) port number. We asked vendors to set their last filter as the one we'd use for test traffic, forcing the routers to cycle through their entire filter list. Vendors also enabled logging, so we'd know how many packets "hit" each filter. Tests were run with eight, 16, 64 and 256 unique filters applied.

In the routing test cases, we asked vendors not only to apply various numbers of filters but also to enable two routing protocols - Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and Open Shortest Path First (OSPF).

We ran through the various numbers of filters with two routing scenarios, dubbed "small tables" and "big tables." In the small-table case, we advertised reachability information for 64 networks each over BGP and OSPF. That's the sort of table size a small or midsize business might run.

In the big-table case, we advertised 125,000 routes using BGP and 4,096 using OSPF. The first number represents the current size of the Internet "full table" - the total number of networks visible in the global Internet. The second number represents about 10% of the size of a Tier-1 ISP's OSPF Area 0 network - the core of any OSPF network.

Holding the full Internet table might seem like a lot to ask of an access router. However, a growing number of corporations use multi-homed connections - BGP connections to different ISPs for redundancy - and their actual table size might be at least twice as large as the one we used. "

Well you can read the rest.....