Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello!

My girlfriend's parents have just bought a coffee shop which is due to open next week. They've put me in charge of setting up their wireless internet malarky, and I'm wondering which router I should be going for?

Presumably it'll have to handle a lot of users at any one time (if enough people take advantage of the WiFi connection), and it needs to be pretty secure BUT compatible with anything that may wish to connect.

Anyone got any recommendations? No budget as such, so let rip!

Cheers.

WRT54GL.

Or anything that'll take DD-WRT/Tomato. You can set it to isolate each computer so customers can't see each other's computers, which makes it far more secure.

I've got one of those. I managed to set it up with all of my computers and consoles, and I'm a complete idiot. Never had a problem.

I can't remember who sold me it on WoS, but whoever it was if you are still reading here, I still love you.

Go and look at the Draytek range. I've had at 2820 for a couple of months and it makes every other consumer wireless router I've used look like crap. Excellent VPN functionality and feature brimming over. This is the baby I have:

http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor2820.html

Fantastic bit of kit, but obviously not cheap.

Thanks guys I'll take a look at those. How difficult is blocking things like torrenting and certain sites? Obviously we don't want to end up in the shit with people downloading porn and stuff...

The Draytek has an extensive web and url filter option. Dunno about torrants but it will allow you to block file extensions so I don't imagine torrants will be a problem.

The web filter lets you block sites by category. As simple as clicking a few tick boxes. Although this might be a subscription service, you'd need to check.

Worth looking on the Draytek site. The 2820 has many features only found on enterprise class routers from the likes of Cisco which is why alot of smaller businesses use them. In fact a mate of mine has Cisco's at larger sites but Draytek's in the smaller sites.

Tomato firmware, you select "Bittorrent" from the Layer7 list and tick "off".

It also does all games you care to mention, all system functions such as DNS, completly custom queueing. I have mine like

DNS & Eggbox Traffic = Highest Priority
HTTP web stuff = High Priority
BitTorrent = Lowest of all.

So I can sit on Eggbox and browse the web while uploading and downloading at full pelt, it auto-throttles everything. It's using TCP Vegas, as opposed to Reno, which helps it keep congestion low, and throughput constant.

That said, Draytek gear is top quality stuff usually. You won't be disappointed in buying one, but if all you want is wireless stuff a cheaper unit flashed with Tomato would probably do you just as well.

How much are those guys chinny?

My '04 vintage 3com officeconnect fell over a couple of times last week and I paused to consider that it's connected to my imac running full time as a web server, ftp server, web proxy, security camera recorder / server and torrent spewer.
Plus my 360 and half a dozen wireless things.

Or maybe one of those WRT things is adequate for that job. As long as it has the basic features and doesn't crash very often I'd be happy.


Jonarob: does your ISP let you share it out to customers like that? And is there anyway of preventing people across the street from torrenting all their bandwidth?

Please tell me it's code named "The Owl".

I suspect that was me. Go me!

I got mine from these guys:

http://www.dcdi.co.uk/Active-Hardware/Draytek-Routers/c-1-141-142/?gclid=CLSIkp-Cm5gCFQsh3godlRZenA

£155 + VAT if you want the super duper pimped version and there are two cheaper models that have slightly less features.

Not cheap, but worth it.