Re: 100mbit router

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> I have a 30/20 Mbit internet connection.
> I want to buy a new router, because the old one: DL-604 is no longer
> supported.
> What router should I buy, that can handle a 30/20 connection?
> No wifi, only ethernet.
> Are there cheap routers that supports VLANs and can handle this speed
> [uploading and downloading at the same time]?

I have recently started using an old wrtsl54gs (using OpenWRT),
configured as a typical "home router" (e.g. it uses NAT) except the
upstream is a 100Mb/s link.  When connected directly, I used to see up
to 9MB/s effective download bandwidths, and now I see them only go as
far up as 5MB/s.

So, 50Mb/s is probably the limit for such a small machine, but it seems
sufficient for your needs.  Those little boxes have a 266MHz MIPS CPU
and 32M of RAM
(http://wiki.openwrt.org/oldwiki/openwrtdocs/hardware/linksys/wrtsl54gs).
They support VLANs as well.

I'd expect newer home routers to handle that kind of traffic as well,
tho there's been a tendency to reduce the specs (to cut costs,
presumably), especially on the RAM and flash fronts, less so on the
CPU side.


        Stefan