Given that I'm moving sometime soon, I thought now would be the time to get a decent router / adsl modem.

I'm fed up with the horrendous hardware that you get free with ISPs (like the Orange Livebox and BT Homehub), and I've had bad experiences with Belkin.

I'm looking for something that has decent wireless (doesn't drop for no reason) and doesn't suffer from any overheating problems. My flatmate and I both have xbox 360s and it would be nice to be able to hook them both up and play online properly at the same time.

Let's say the budget is up to £100, and a dollar-pound conversion rate doesn't work since everything costs more here (and importing isn't an option because you lose the benefit in shipping and import duty).

wrt54g

wrt*n may be good too, I don't know

that looks good, but is it worth looking at anything with tentative 802.11n support?

That's what I have and I've never had any issues. Great piece of hardware.

I bought an Apple AirPort Extreme recently & I've been quite happy with it. It supports 802.11n, which may be overkill for your Xbox 360 at the moment, but there will most likely eventually be an 802.11n adapter for it. I've heard a few people complain about how this router has issues with the Xbox 360 but I haven't had a single one. I use mine for gaming as well as streaming Netflix movies. It also features a USB port which comes in quite handy if you're interested in having a networked storage device that you can access from the web.

Yeah I've heard nothing good about Belkin routers in the past, the advice I got when I was buying a router was stay away from everything apart from Netgear and Linksys. Personally I got a WGT426 on the cheap a while back and it's excellent.

I'd still look at the WRT series, with N support. I highly recommend looking at DD-WRT's website and see which N routers they support. There aren't many, unfortunately.

But DD-WRT makes those routers orders of magnitude better, even if you don't use most of the features.

I have the WRT54GL paired with a Linksys AM200 ADSL modem. If you have ADSL you'll need an ADSL modem in addition to a WRT54G/GL, as the WRT54G is a cable router.

Also be careful of which version of the WRT54G you get. Some later versions had fairly crippled hardware inside them which couldn't, for example, run the 3rd-party open source firmware which made that router famous in the first place. The wikipedia page on the WRT54G series has plenty of information on which models are capable of what.

If you are interested in 3rd-party firmware for a WRT54G, I can heartily recommend Tomato.

As for 802.11n support, yeah... I'd also like to know if there's a stable, 802.11n router which supports 3rd party firmwares and doesn't have any sizeable drawbacks. It might be a while before that happens though.

I have a low budget Belkin router. Its nothing exceptional sure, but if does the job fine.

The WRT-54G/GL isn't a "cable router". It's a router, period. A cable router is just a cable modem with router functionality inside, basically merged. That's not what the WRT-54GL is.

I know it doesn't have a cable modem inside it, I've just seen it described as a "cable router" in so many places that I'd come to assume that was the standard name for a router that doesn't have a built-in ADSL modem. I guess shops etc. label them as "cable routers" to make it clear to customers that it's not a substitute for an ADSL modem. Apologies if I confused anyone prior to CM's correction.

That wouldn't make sense if they did. It's not a replacement for a cable modem either.

Nobody labels them 'cable router'

Linksys? Really? They make junk.

Better than Belkin.

Edit: Nevermind you don't have Newegg in the UK

Yeah, that damn junky Cisco hardware. Who uses that trash?

I've used a WRT-300N with dd-wrt for the last year and never had any complains with it. Just be sure to follow the instructions closely, as it's easy to brick if you miss a step [and fixing it requires unscrewing everything and shorting some chip pins during a reset.. >_< ]

I've been hoping recently to find a compatible one though with draft N and gigabit, though, so I can bridge them without wasting N's > 100 megabit speed.

In the UK, if you sign up with a cable ISP (i.e. Virgin), you invariably get given a free cable modem by the ISP. It's just a straightforward modem with a USB and ethernet socket so it's only really suited to plugging into a single PC. If you want a wireless network (or whatever) you'd either have to buy a router off the ISP or buy one somewhere else. Virgin is a fairly popular ISP in the UK and there is quite a big market for routers intended for use with their basic cable modems. Nobody in the UK, to the best of my knowledge, sells routers with cable modems built into them (I have no idea if this is different in America) because everyone who needs a cable modem already has one.

Whereas if you sign up with an ADSL ISP, it varies a lot. Some (at least the last time I changed ADSL ISP) only give you a basic USB ADSL modem. If you want a wireless network, that USB ADSL modem is fairly useless because it can't plug into a router since they only have ethernet sockets. So most people buy (either from the ISP or elsewhere) an ADSL router, which has an ADSL modem built into it. This added feature tends to increase its price so you aren't likely to buy an ADSL router to use with a Virgin cable connection (and many ADSL routers don't even have a WAN port to plug the cable modem into).

So the only time the term "cable router" gets used in the UK (and it does get used, for pity's sake, see below) is to distinguish between "ADSL routers", and routers with no built-in modem which you probably only want if you're on Virgin cable. The term "cable router" is used, I think, to avoid confusion among the many people who wouldn't otherwise notice the difference. Those who do know better know well enough to see past the inaccurate name. So the name does little harm until people start arguing the toss on the interwebs.



http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=NW-052-LS

"You're in : Home » Networking » Wireless G (upto 125Mbps) » Cable (Virgin) Routers » Linksys by Cisco WRT54GL 54Mbps Open Source Wireless G Cable Router"

They're using the phrase "cable router" to mean "the kind of router you want if you have a cable connection" rather than "router containing a cable modem".

Now please, that's quite enough pedantry for today.

Yeah I can't say that I've ever seen a router with a built in cable modem for sale in this country.

Also everything else GHarris just said is true.

You guys in the UK make everything way too complicated. In the USA, you have 3 things:

A. A cable modem.
B. A DSL modem.
C. A router.

You combine C, with either your A or B. That's it.

You can purchase routers that have A or B built into them, but they are very rare. Those routers are named "cable modem routers" or "dsl routers", because they have the modem functionality in them. Almost no one does this.

Example of the rare combined ones:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16825112005