How much would YOU consider spending on a good router?

[jim]

Just spent £31.50 on a brand new Netgear DG834 for my dad to replace the junk that Orange sent him. It was less than I expected, especially for what I consider to be a fairly decent brand, but in this instance I don't think he really needed anything flash at all.

I'd still struggle to spend a lot on a router though - maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just not convinced that spending more on Cisco/Draytek over Netgear would improve anything that I'm interested in, primarily stability, average line speeds, and pings by any noticeable degree (as with the Killer NICs)... regarding all the features, dual WAN and all the rest of it sounds lovely, but short of one or two port forwards I never touch any router configuration pages, so it probably wouldn't be that useful.

Mind you, some people round here seem to have pretty complicated networking solutions with rackmounted switches and so on, so maybe my networking needs are just too simple to appreciate all this

[aidanjt]

For me it's mostly to gain the IRC conntrack module. And more advanced userspace network daemons like BIND which don't lend themselves well to embedded, the added advanced QoS is just a pleasant bonus. If it wasn't for that, I wouldn't bother spending more than £40 myself.

[Antagram]

Think £60 would be my limit, something like a Netgear DG834GT price range. That's because I don't need a 24/7 router as it gets turned off in the evening.

[pipTheGeek]

Think £60 would be my limit, something like a Netgear DG834GT price range. That's because I don't need a 24/7 router as it gets turned off in the evening.

My previous Netgear was rock stable... So long as it WAS left on 24/7. If it got turned off overnight, which I used to because it was plugged in the same power strip as the PC, it wouldn't get a DHCP lease when it was turned back on... Not for a while anyway. If you left it alone, then re-started it and the cable modem then it would work. The time you had to leave it alone for ranged from 5 minutes up to an hour. I did try contacting Netgear tech support, they were totally un-helpful and suggested I didn't turn it off

[darkblueslider]

Hah, I'm glad i found this thread - i was looking for recommendations on a new router (my Linksys one died in May - or well, started dyin gat least once an hour). I've been using the free one that came with Talktalk since... and I'm fairly convinced its a piece of poo - my current problem (which I'm totally not sure i can blame the router for) is seemingly random ADSL drops - which i've not had before at all - previously routers have died and had to be rebooted but never a router where the ADSL went down and the router stayed up - previously i had no problems with ADSL dropping

the funny thing is, i was I looking on Amazon the other day and pretty much all the routers from all brands had a mix of people with glowing reviews and people saying it was awful - and left me thinking i didn't want to buy any of them.

So i guess the answer is - i definitely might consider spending £135 on the Draytek 2820... Doubt i could stretch to £200 though!

Question to anyone with the 2820 though... for the NAS Does anyone know if it works with 'portable' USB powered hard-drives such as WD Passports and prettier versions

the website says "*Some USB hard drives may require their own power supply." I think the thing is some of these harddrives these days ship with a dual-USB connector for power - so i wonder if they work. Anyone with any experience using them (although i can understand why its unlikely people would choose to buy a model like that for NAS) i'd appreciate your experiences.

[Neo_VR]

i paid 130ish quid for a draytek 2820n as i wanted reliable "power user" broadband/vpn and decent wireless..
it effectively being future-proof by having adsl/cable and usb is just a bonus

[gss03]

Drayteks Rock.
Rock solid ADSL from then every time.

Recent RMA job for a draytek I had was posted Friday,
Received tuesday, returned fixed to me on Wednesday.

Got loadsa drayteks out and about in Edinburgh (from 2600 -> 2820Vn jobs)
All just work - well worth the investment of £150 for one if ever you need a new router.

[kingpotnoodle]

I run Astaro on a Intel Atom ITX board with 1GB RAM, dual port gigabit NIC and a 40GB 2.5" drive... I use an ADSL2+ modem, Wireless-N access point and gigabit switch all from Netgear.

Loads of features, easy to maintain, SSL VPN amongst the usual forms... downside is the massive power draw compared to an all in one router (~30W for the ITX box and add another 15W or so for networking gear).

Cost wise the whole lot has probably set me back over £200, which I guess is the other downside!!

[Bugbait]

To answer the OP's question, whatever that's needed within reason. If it's £200 then fine, £300, sure, £500 maybe but I'd need to have a decent reason for it (extra bling-bling features).

Recently replaced my overheating, flaky, pile of crap otherwise known as a Netgear DG834N. The recent summer caused it to randomly fail (lost all connection on wired and wireless) every few hours. This was already replacing the cheap and nasty Speedtouch that ships with all Be/O2 connections. Connected up a Draytek Vigor 2820Vn and have been very happy since. A huge amount of configuration options that I've barely started to utilize and very solid so far. I've experienced one drop out on the DSL line but it automatically reconnected and was up and running in 1-2 minutes. The Netgear rarely ever recovered from a DSL link loss without a soft, and often hard reboot.

[mercyground]

I've used drayteks before and was ok. Dont like the table handling. you couldnt setup 2 routes properly so our VPN star had to pass it ALL back to the headoffice and back out. Would have much prefered to send headoffice stuff via vpn and rest out to net directly.

Used to use a old P1 box with Smoothwall software and two lan cards and a Virgin cable modem. Earlier last year i picked up a cheap 2nd hand belkin cable router wiht wireless. Quick firmware upload and propping it up so it gets airflow under it (Stops it crashing from overheating) and we're golden.

Bittorrent tends to kill it now and then but its been pretty stable.

[losso]

on a good router that will last me a long time, £80.