Has anyone tried an industrial router at home?

How much better performance would I get from one of these? Will my ISP bottleneck any performance gain with one of these?




Cisco Airnet 1260- $750 at Newegg





Cisco Aironet 1260 Series - Products & Services - Cisco Systems

 

What's your connections speed, what do you use it for and how many people are using it?

 

I have Cox internet:

Up to 15Mbps with PowerBoost is what my ISP gives.

or



Use it for solely internet.

3 users.

 

Your ISP 'connection speed' has little if anything to do with your internet connection.

Yes.

What you are paying for is the nominal speed of your local link from your home to the nearest pop/node of your ISP. How that pop/node gets fed and who else on that pop/node competes with you for actual bits from the internet is beyond your control and is generally NOT subject to the terms/conditions of your contract.

So spending a pile of $$ on an 'industrial' router isn't a wise use of $$. You might enhance in-house connections if you do a lot of file transfers from machine to machine but for your internet, it won't make a lick of difference.

 

I get my full 25mb/s with my cheap dlink and cheap actiontec.

I think "industrial" stuff is not necessarily faster just made for more traffic/connections.

 

And I get my full 15 mbps (well, occasionally) with my $150 netgear managed gig switch, the $75 Zonet router and $50- Motorola DoCSIS v3 Surfboard. I've been tempted to up my connection (comcast) to the full 100 meg available in my neighborhood for a month or two just to check out the local comcast peering.

The most I've pushed through the 'system' are multiple linux install image (iso) downloads from tds.net while at the same time watching HD streaming from xfinity/comcast and/or Hulu. No stuttering on the streaming and the iso images all downloaded at 2+ meg/sec each (about 6 at a time).

My Zonet router takes care of the home lan (wired and running at GigE) and does DHCP (with mac address reservation), the surfboard box takes care of the external routes, and for the sake of having 802.11, I've got an old Cisco a/b/g/n wireless box up in the attic running as a repeater/bridge depending on the mac address handouts setup on the Zonet. The netgear switch is running at layer 2/3 so a lot of in-house switching happens there and not on the Zonet box.

 

I agree with ViciousXUSMC- with that usage pattern and connections speed there's no reason to spend money on an industrial router.
You can buy the best home router available (Netgear NNDR3700) for five times less and you still wouldn’t be able to put max load on it.

 

I noticed this on another forum yesterday:

Linke Computer, EnGenius, ESR9850, EnGenius EUB-9850 Wireless N Gigabit Router 802.11B/G/N 300MBPS SmartNAT , Linke Computer
EnGenius ESR9850 300Mbps Wireless N Router with Gigabit Switch Reviewed - SmallNetBuilder
Router Performance Comparison Charts - WAN to LAN Throughput - SmallNetBuilder

This little ~60EUR router has over 600Mbps throughput* when used with Gigabit internet connection. It will also handle huge amounts of connections without crashing like cheap routers usually do, perfect for those running p2p.

*That's 1.5x as much as ~400Mbps that Netgear's WNDR3700 can do.

 

That isn't router. It is wireless access point, and it is the lightweight version, which means it won't operate without Wireless LAN Controller. Yeah, the throuhput of that AP is amazing, but you need another 5k-10k for the controller.

In fact, consumer grade wireless router won't be able to match enterprise class AP, switch, or router, but enterprise grade device won't come cheap.

 

You can't say that it's a good router because LAN-WAN routing throughput is 700mbps. You do realize that this means throughput between Internet and your LAN? So either you have a 700mbps connection or you're not using any of it. That's why EnGenius being 700mbps capable is in real life no better than Netgear which is able to do some 400mbps.
There are many other factors that decide which router is better and that's why smallnetbuilder themselves recommend WNDR3700.

 

I have an Aironet A/B/G router. I replaced it with an Airport Extreme not too long ago though. The Aironet had a really good Tx distance, and a pretty sensitive Rx. Overall it's really meant to handle LARGE traffic volumes reliably... and that's it. It was CERTAINLY no faster than other routers with A/B/G and it's MUCH slower in throughput than the Apple Airport.

For home use, I really don't recommend it. I got my Aironet as it was a leftover from a network deployment I did, and they gave it to me for $100.

 

First of all we actually have those Cisco units installed at my office and you know what they are pretty flaky actually. I get more reliable performance from my D-link DAP-2553 wireless access point at home, a unit that is pretty damn good if you set it up right. Costs only 130 bucks and its poisitoned as a small business-enterprise unit.

On the pure routing side, again for say 250 bucks spend on something like the Draytek 2130, you're gonna have to goo quite far to find meaningfully better throughput.

The trick is not really so much about buying to crazy priced enterprise units - its more about finding the one that are positioned for small business market and basically built to same standards as the higher priced stuff. And avoid the consumer crap.

I'm sure the Netgear or whatever will do okay for a few months but those things all chronically suffer from poor thermal design so they will overheat and freeze up every so often then after a while they burn out and you got a 3 month warranty so you're screwed. At that point, you're back on the market buying again.

The other benefit of leaving the consumer stuff is you get better support and longer warranties.

 

Consumer crap? While I do agree with you that business models will indeed come better built and with a better support structure in place, I wouldn't dare call all routers that aren't designed for business "crap".

I'd happily agree that several "consumer crap" routers that I've run across get hot, I've not once ran into one that burned itself out in 10+ years of using and servicing them for family and friends.

Most people don't need the sorts of things that business models are known for, and cons to you might not be cons to someone else. Lets try to be a little less subjective, eh?

 

Are you kidding me?? I deploy one right now. How do you set up? What is your WiSM module? I bet my whole month paycheck that Cisco Aironet will beat D-link in any situations. How do you deploy your Aironet?

 

I'm not the adminstrator of the network - just one of 80 people in the office who are rather unsatisfied with the new wireless network featuring that access point right there. It can produce very fast throughput from what I have experienced but at the same time its very flaky and quite often we get dropouts or deadspots - its really maddening.

What more can I say - its a wireless network, it works or it dont. That's what "quality" means to me as a user. I see the potential but for me with Wifi first and foremost it must be stable and there at all times when you need it.

To Blake, mainly what I mean with many consumer products is that they are poorly designed in ways that are unforgiveable. In a particular with respect to heat dissipation. This is simple stuff where cost cutting goes too far and IMO is done almost intentionally for planned obsolescence where you have a 3 month warranty and the poorly designed thing konks out in 9 months and voila they have you back on the market buying again.

I would never really speak on blanket terms about wi-fi brands because many of them use different chipsets from a mix of sources within their product lines and with quite a variety of attention in terms of firmware quality. I can vouch specifically for that D-Link DAP-2553 because the outstanding performance I have experienced, but I could equally tell you that my experience with the D-Link DIR-825 was awful.

 

I can get on board with this.
I misinterpreted your earlier post as saying that you wouldn't advise the normal user to touch a consumer grade with a 10 foot pole, regardless of circumstance.

The churnin' and burnin' mindset definitely takes a toll on the average consumer, while putting lots of dollars in corporate pockets.

 

I completely agree with these two.
You have no need for a system like the one asked about, even if all 3 users are "heavy" users running torrents and such, you still will not come close to the capabilities of any decent upper end consumer grade router like the WNDR3700 or Linksys E3000 or even lesser models.

Sorry, but no.
STOP BUYING JUNK.

You should get AT LEAST a year from your equipment trouble free even in an office environment. Less for junk, more for better stuff. If not then you either keep buying junk, or you need to take a look at what equipment you are using and how and where you are positioning your equipment. I have offices with 5+ year old wireless and routers and they aren't having problems.

My older Netgear (634?, it only cost me $100 at the time) was 4 when I retired it (I needed gigabit) and shipped it to a friend who has been using it for over a year flawlessly. My current router (Linksys WRT610N) is over a year old (or is it two? Out of sight out of mind), it hasn't locked up or even slowed down once in that time. I run a couple VPN's, streaming webcams, lots of torrents, tons of uploads and downloads, a few neighbors piggy back it on occasion. I run an average of around 300-400gigs a month through it, sometimes as much as 600. It hasn't blinked once, the Netgear was under similar load and needed a reboot once every 6 months for good measure.

Even if it "only" lasts a year, you can buy 5 of them for the price of an industrial. In less than 5 years, a new, faster standard will be out and you will likely want to upgrade to that, so even if your industrial works fine, you will want to change it.

 

Ok, I am somewhat agreed with your opinion. User always has different perspective from IT regarding the network, but you have to know that wireless technology is half-duplex. It can't provide the same quility of service or speed like wire network. All AP, including Cisco Aironet, has some limitation when too many clients connect to it, but Cisco Aironet can offload the traffic to another AP if it is being deploy correctly.

You are also talking about deadspot. Hey, it is normal for wireless technology. There is nothing 100% in wireless technology, and you should understand that. If you compare Cisco Aironet with D-Link, I don't think D-Link would stand a chance regardless what model.

If you want stable network, you have to use wire network not wireless. That is the rule of thumb. Wireless technology is just the supplementary to overall network.