Need a new router. Wireless?

In the last a few days, I am randomly losing internet and the speed sucked when it worked. Finally I found out it was the old wired router, because everything went back to normal when I skipped the router directly connect to the modem. The router is about seven years old.

I guess I need a new router.

I am a total noob when come to wireless since I have never ever used it. I have following questions

1. Besides a wireless router, what else do I need? I guess PCI wireless adapters? Then again, I am a noob on wireless lolz.

2. I play FPS games a lot, so I need the lowest ping possible. And I download lots of stuff. Does wireless router have any problem with those?

3. will these cheap routers do the job?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833122016

or
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16833166018

If not, any recommendation?

If you already have the wires down i STRONGLY reccomend you stick to a wired router.
Its much faster and reliable.

Plus you wont have to buy wireless NIC's for each PC you plan to connnect to your network.

You will get a better ping over a wire also.

Ya If the wires are there and they dont bother you, definitely stick with wired.

If you must go wireless, the popular one seems to be the linskys WRT54GL.

As for cards? I dont know...

JaY_III said:

If you already have the wires down i STRONGLY reccomend you stick to a wired router.
Its much faster and reliable.

Plus you wont have to buy wireless NIC's for each PC you plan to connnect to your network.

You will get a better ping over a wire also.

Click to expand...

And you won't get hacked by some kid a few houses down.

I have both a wired router and a wireless one. The wireless one is the border router, hooks to the cable modem. Our laptops, PDA and HTPC talk to it. Behind that is the wired router, and all the PCs and fileserver hook up to it. I do this so if the wired network gets attacked (it's encrypted, but we all know that doesn't matter) then the only thing that is usually available for attack is the HTPC. They'd have to hack back up the chain to get my other computers, where data really matters to us.

For anyone that does business or school stuff on their computer regularly, this is the only was I recommend they use wireless, ie dedicated subnet for wireless (assume you'll be sniffed, because you probably will be) and a dedicated wired subnet behind that, which IS secure.

Basically, if you already have a wired setup, good god don't go wireless! LOL

I didn't expect all of you recommend wired router over wireless router.

What's the difference in ping and bandwidth speed between the two?

Well you can say I have wired setup already, but it is annoying to have all the wires across the floors. Besides, I might get a laptop soon, it would be so much easier to have wireless for it.

Well with wireless you can get up to 200Mb/s (They say) with a draft N router. But you dont really need that much IMO. If you consider the average internet connection is about 4mb/s, 54 is a ton. Unless you are planning to transfer huge files bandwidth isnt a problem. However I have had many problems with interference, effecting the connection strength and speed with my wireless router. For instance, my router lies by my desktop in the living room, and when the TV is on I cant get a good enough signal to even browse the net if im not in the living room also. If your wires arent under the house, then thats understandable. But really do your reasearch before going wireless. Luckly you have all these people here to help!
One more thing: I cant game smoothly for an hour without at least one throttle in the lag. Once or twice and hour for about 30 seconds, my ping will go through the roof, like 1000+ ms. =/ It might just be an isolated router issue, but its enough for me to hate wireless.

Lets not even look at Draft N stuff, its $$$ and you were tring to do this cheap.

For 802.11G is 54 Mb/s /2 (its rated speed combines rx and tx) - encryption over head.
So your 802.11G network will yield you maybe 20Mb/s
This is not idea for a lan that does file sharing.

Get a 100Mb Router w/switch and you have 100Mb up and 100Mb down as the switch will be full duplex.

I suggest looking for a router with a Ubicom chipset. These are often used for "gaming" routers, and have some QoS support for that built-in, and also provide good stability and performance.

The D-Link DGL-4300 is one of the original, ones, and is something of a "classic".

The more recent versions are the DIR-655 and the DGL-4500, but these are expensive. A budget version is the DIR-625.

Wireless routers are much more common than wired-only routers, so these tend to be better supported, more easily found, and often better priced. So you're generally better off getting a wireless router and using it wired as much as possible. Even turn off the wireless if you can. If not, then secure it with WPA and a long randomized passkey at minimum, ideally WPA2.

Don't get hung up on the "300 Mb/s" marketing. Wireless is always worse than wired. It's slower, less reliable, subject to distance, interference, and obstruction effects, and runs on a shared, limited bandwidth medium.

What if I use this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124010
Is it the same as a wired router if I use wires on this wireless router? Would I get good ping and net speed with wires on this wireless?

Avoid that router. It was good up to version 4, but that was a long time ago, and Linksys has since crippled it by reducing its RAM and flash. In other words, it's floating on a false reputation from the past.

To answer your other embedded question -- yes, a wireless router is just a wired router with wireless capability in addition. You can usually turn off the wireless to make it a wired-only router if you don't need the wireless feature.

Hey guys, i dont mean to hijack the thread, altho it might help OC's decision, but i have that wirless router he just mentioned http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833124010 and in the last few months my laptop seems to keep disconnecting, and i have to repair the network (sometimes that works)
it says signel strength excelent but wont let me log on, i have to reboot a few times, sometimes it even disables the internet connection. this laptop is just for web browsing, but gets to be a big pain in the @$$ logging in and out of the network

The Asus WL-520gU is one of the cheaper routers which is compatible with third-party firmware as was the WRT54G (which is a reason for its continued popularity). It has somewhat newer hardware and is not crippled in terms or RAM and flash:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833320023

The ZyXEL X-550 is one of the cheaper ones using a Ubicom chipset:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833181218

Here's a source for router performance stats:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/component/option,com_chart/Itemid,189/chart,121/

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/26843/51/

Are those routers the best ones in their price range?
I don't think I want to spend over $70. Best to be under $50. The lower the better, as long as I get low ping for gaming, and good connection speed, no random connection drops. My ADSL is about 5Mbits/650kbits. I rarely transfer large files between PCs.

For wireless routers I recommend this one generally, but it's currently over twice the retail price because Buffalo is being prevented from importing more of their units in the US right now

Another decent choice is the Linksys WRT54GL as it's the current non-gimped WRT model. It's <$70 and supports opensource firmware(s).


Wireless is faster but with MAC encryption and WPA (or WPA2) you have little to risk with getting hacked at this point and LAN transfers will still be acceptable if you have decent wireless adapters. Really, in most circumstances, any wireless encryption above WEP is sufficient to drive potential hackers away as you'll likely have several unsecured or WEP-"secured" networks nearby. From my experience with backtrack2 it's somewhat easy to crack WEP networks but for WPA someone would have to have a rainbowtables set (~32GB) and a ton of free time to even bother with cracking it. Additionally, the claims of network overhead in this thread were somewhat exaggerated as while there is significant overhead with WEP encryption, with WPA overhead is relatively minimal.


I haven't really seen much of a need to drop back to wired ethernet but both of the routers I've posted support opensource DD-WRT firmware which is easier to use and significantly more reliable than the factory firmware(s), so even using wired with wireless turned off it would be better than most wired-only consumer routers. The only real drawback to wireless that I've seen is slower network transfers than wireless. Most external connections will use 5-15mbps max so you're never going to hit that with a wireless-g or above router.


If you decided to go with a wireless route I'd recommend this adapter for XP and linux. Best to go with a third-party external antenna of at least 7dbi gain. Avoid usb adapters if possible (although Netgear WG111 usb dongles are acceptable in my experience). I feel like most of the people recommending you avoid wireless are using sub-par equipment with stock firmware and/or low-quality antennas.

i use N adapter and connect with a n1 router .. connection varies from 200 - 300 mbps

coverage in my opinion is far superior to g ..even g + i can connect to a router over 6 blocks away at times .. ill never go back to g EVER !!

Xtreme Barton said:

i use N adapter and connect with a n1 router .. connection varies from 200 - 300 mbps

Click to expand...

What are the actual transfer rates? E.g. using iperf version 1.7:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 30 -i 10 -r

Where server is the name or IP of the remote machine.

grumperfish said:

I feel like most of the people recommending you avoid wireless are using sub-par equipment with stock firmware and/or low-quality antennas.

Click to expand...

Um, no. Even people with Cisco or whatever high-end wireless gear recommend wired whenever possible, because it's naturally better. Even otherwise great wireless can go down the tubes due to interference from other "high power" / "high speed" wireless in the neighbourhood, or even simple things such as microwave ovens being used.

OC101 said:

I didn't expect all of you recommend wired router over wireless router.

What's the difference in ping and bandwidth speed between the two?

Well you can say I have wired setup already, but it is annoying to have all the wires across the floors. Besides, I might get a laptop soon, it would be so much easier to have wireless for it.

Click to expand...

It should be noted that most current wireless routers sold in United States of America and Europe include a built in, usually 4-port, switch. Wireless routers tend to be able to handle wired connections.

Madwand said:

What are the actual transfer rates? E.g. using iperf version 1.7:

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 30 -i 10 -r

Where server is the name or IP of the remote machine.

Click to expand...

sorry i havent had time to mess around with it yet ..

the most noticeable thing that i see is signal strength .. which is very very important to me .. i can connect to AP's allot further away

So I bought a Linksys WRT54GL.
It should arrive today.

I have two questions
1. What firmware should I use? Offical or third-party? Which version? Where to download?

2. Is it possible to use wired and wirelss at the same time? Or I can only use one at a time?
I am about to buy a laptop. I'd like to use wireless for it while my desktops are using wired.