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WIFI router for growing office

tygeezy

tygeezy

Senior member
Hey guys, I was hoping to find some opinions on an ideal router for a small/medium size office. We currently have this dual band buffalo router, but it is starting to be stretched a little thin. We house two small law firms in our building. We are using 4 of the wired ports on the router for voice over ip phones. On the wireless function of the router we have 23 clients which are from cell phones, i-pads, laptops. This router runs dd-wrt and is stable for the most part, but it does crap out every once in awhile which bring internet and the phones down, which can be a real pain in the ass.

So i'm looking for a very stable wifi router that has a fairly fast cpu to keep up with all the voice over ip phones and the amount of clients we have on the wifi.
 
Interesting, are there any other suggestions? According to the firmware I have installed the router has very low load despite having a lot of wireless clients. It seems to just be a little on the unstable side and resets it self every few days. In fact, it just reset itself again and the firm in the back came and asked me about phones being down again.. Would hate to get one of these and still have stability issues.
 
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Well, I see potentially a few issues. First off, definitely get a few separate Wireless AP's such as the ubiquiti the other poster linked to. Better yet, just pick up a three pack and put them throughout the office. That will likely take care of all of your issues as the buffalo router was not designed to handle the wireless load you're placing on it. The ubiquiti's will handle that just fine.

If you continue having issues, re-image your buffalo router with a different firmware. You are using ddwrt firmware but you're using the buffalo variant which could be causing other issues.
 
Your signal quality is definitely on the low side for the clients shown. Strength is important to a degree, but quality is VERY important.

Also, as others have said, it would be better to distribute load a little better as well.
 
You guys don't think one of those aps would do the trick? Are building is only 2200 squarefeet with a small upstairs portion that is 800 squarefeet. We are renting out mroe space though. Can one of these devices support 30 or so clients? I'm assuming these guys will put out a much higher quality signal? I had to pick up an 8 port switch as well. Our building is wired with cat 6 so we are using up all four ports for voip phones.
 
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Wireless routers are crap. Once you go UniFi you will never go back to the retail crap. I have had 2 UniFi's for over 6mos and not once have I had to reboot them or anything.

This is what I run in my house and it is absolute overkill for what I got but I have not had to mess with it since I set it up. We have a rental unit in our property that has it's own wifi network and I limit my renters bandwidth through the UniFi.

Ubiquiti EdgeMax Lite router
3 UniFi APs
TP-LINK TL-SG108 8-port gig switch

I paid $250 for everything which is not bad considering how much those top end routers like the asus black diamond cost and the asus cannot touch the network performance of this setup.
 
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I will still be dependent on the buffalo router plus the switch for local clients. I'm assuming I have to have the ubuntus plugged int othe buffalo to get internet as well. According to the firmware the router has been up for 15 days.
 
tygeezy said:
You guys don't think one of those aps would do the trick? Are building is only 2200 squarefeet with a small upstairs portion that is 800 squarefeet. We are renting out mroe space though. Can one of these devices support 30 or so clients? I'm assuming these guys will put out a much higher quality signal? I had to pick up an 8 port switch as well. Our building is wired with cat 6 so we are using up all four ports for voip phones.
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A 3pack of UniFi's is less than $200 while one is about $100 so if you go for the 3-pack you basically get one free which is worth it.
 
tygeezy said:
I will still be dependent on the buffalo router plus the switch for local clients. I'm assuming I have to have the ubuntus plugged int othe buffalo to get internet as well. According to the firmware the router has been up for 15 days.
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The UniFi's? Yes, they'll have to be plugged into a port on the network but not neccessarily into the Buffalo.
 
ch33zw1z said:
The UniFi's? Yes, they'll have to be plugged into a port on the network but not neccessarily into the Buffalo.
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The network is kind of dependent on the buffalo which kind of concerns me because that is where I have the nternet plugged into. I will also be plugging in a switch to one of the buffalo's ports because we need more lan clients.
 
tygeezy said:
The network is kind of dependent on the buffalo which kind of concerns me because that is where I have the nternet plugged into. I will also be plugging in a switch to one of the buffalo's ports because we need more lan clients.
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Your buffalo might crap out with that many clients period. I would look into a more robust router and use separate switches.
 
tygeezy said:
The network is kind of dependent on the buffalo which kind of concerns me because that is where I have the nternet plugged into. I will also be plugging in a switch to one of the buffalo's ports because we need more lan clients.
Click to expand...

like gus said, look into a new router. might as well go it done right.
 
tygeezy said:
Any suggestions on a router?
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Well depends. If you just want to do routing and routing only with separate switches I would look no further than an Edgemax Lite. It has 3 ports so you can run 2 completely independent networks off it if you want. If you want to do it right and have something that will have no issues growing with your business I would go that route with separate unmanaged switches.

http://www.ubnt.com/edgemax#edge-router-lite

That router eats a $400 microtik for lunch for $100.
 
I will probably need 6 or so lan ports while the rest can be run off of wireless. I'll see how things go offloading the wireless traffic onto the three smoke detectors I just bought. If there is some stability issues that still exist I will go ahead and get that router and hook the switch up to it to create more ports.
 
tygeezy said:
I will probably need 6 or so lan ports while the rest can be run off of wireless. I'll see how things go offloading the wireless traffic onto the three smoke detectors I just bought. If there is some stability issues that still exist I will go ahead and get that router and hook the switch up to it to create more ports.
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Technically speaking you are not offloading anything because the UniFi still has to route traffic through the buffalo. You are just freeing traffic on the wireless radio portion of the router.
 
gus6464 said:
Technically speaking you are not offloading anything because the UniFi still has to route traffic through the buffalo. You are just freeing traffic on the wireless radio portion of the router.
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Which apparently isn't very good because of the low quality signal. So i'm assuming things will be a bit snappier for wifi clients.
 
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