What router would you reccomend.

[Big Jim]

At one of my family's houses there are a lot of people accessing the internet and the net connection often drops (router rebooting or just a dropped connection)

I believe this is down to the amount of hammer the router is getting and I also believe a business class solution is going to be needed going forward as they have been through approx 3/4 routers up to this point.

3 x Xbox
3/4 x laptop
1/2 x desktop computer
+ low usage of mobiles from a couple of people.


There can be times when all of these devices are on at the same time, particularly in the evening.
But a likely scenario would be
all 3 xboxs
2 laptops and 1 computer
all accessing the net at the same time.

Would my assumption be right that a home grade router is just not going to cope with that amount of traffic ?

I am about to suggest the upgrade but I know that money will be a factor and they will not want to spend much.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I used to be a huge fan of building your own routers on powerful x86 hardware, various *nix distros like PFSense, m0n0wall, IPCop, Smoothwall....dozens of others...played with many of them.

So a few years ago, that would have been my answer....take an old PC and put PFSense on it and you'll have a router capable of handling the enterprise size loads that a 10,000 dollar huge honking router would do.

But these days, current generation off the shelf routers do quite well for homes. I actually shut down my 1U rack mount server at home that ran PFSense..dual core Atom, and just started using a Cisco e3000 that I picked up on NewEgg for 55 bucks on a sale. Flashed it with Tomato firmware. Covers my 3 story 3,600 sq ft home very well, handles a teenage boy that torrents and plays games nearly 24x7 and his smart phone and his laptop, daughter with her Kindle Fire and PC in her room, wife with her iPhone, iPad, Laptop, and Desktop computer, myself with my gaming rig, laptop, and Droid phone. And Apple TV.

Current replacement model is the 4200...but you can still pickup factory refurb 3000 models.

Dual radio...so some 2.4 and some 5 clients...splits load very well.

Several laptops can stream very well at the same time, no way my older G gear with DD or Tomato could handle that.