Hey guys im trying to get a new router for my house use. Right now i have a Belkin and it has been with me for nearly 4yrs. Right now i can tell that i need a new router. Here is what is going on, i do P2P and gaming (Aion, WOW, and others). But i can only do one thing at a time, meaning when i P2P i can not play games it just wont happen, at most what it will happen is that my whole internet drops and i need to restart the router by either unplugging the power or going to 192.168.2.x and restarting it from there (even though it says connected, it has no getway). When im P2P i cant browse the net, the speed is crawling. When im just playing games, it works like a charm. So i want a wireless router since i also have 2 other computers in my house that share this internet (wireless) that can handle P2P and games at the same time without feeling a hurt, is that possible? i kno it will be great if i can flash it with Tomato or dd-wrt. I have Comcast Cable with highest speed 16mbs dl any suggestions
You'll find it's more an issue of routing tables and the number or simultaneous connections (not to mention half open connections, etc.) the router can reliably swap in and out of the amount of RAM it has when it comes to P2P. Consumer routers are notoriously underpowered for large number of simultaneous connections, add to that less than stellar firmware , too little RAM and you have common causes of consumer routers not responding or needing a reboot. There is a large open source community that developed their own firmware to replace device vendor firmware. I use third party opensource firmware in my consumer routers like Buffalo that kicks out 1000mw, been in service 3 years 24/7/365 in my attic on a 12 dbi omni, think I've rebooted it twice....still though it's best to limit the number of simlutaneous connections in your P2P client, disable services like DHT (which open you even more to monitoring by antiP2P measures) and leave the router you have with a reasonable amount of traffic to manage.....just 2 cents worth today. If you run enough connections, most affordable routers will choke...and 16Mbits is an awful lot of bandwidth. Also I find it best to use a robust wired router as my edge router, and a seperate wireless access point, a lot to ask a small CPU to do both under heavy loads.
With dd-wrt firmware, his router won't choke. I have firmware settings for p2p set at 4095 simultaneous connections, and even if I download 15 large files at once, combining thousands of open connections, the router just keeps on going at full isp bandwith, and surfing/gaming keeps on flying without a hitch. Before flashing with wrt, that was impossible. It's a pure firmware problem, a design flaw in the programming, the router itself is absolutely fine. Even the size of the memory chip doesn't matter one bit, cause it's the firmware programming that reserves and maintains/flushes the actual memory allocations, and wrt firmware always flushes the allocated spaces in time and effeciently, avoiding chokes, and will have more then enough with the 2 or 4 MB available on the router. dd-wrt is in his case the best solution, and he won't get better results otherwise.