What difference can hooking up a good router make to your internets performance?

Woody_FX

Hi guys,

Been reading the forums for a few years now and I see a lot of people swear by there own router which they bought.

So the 'awesome' router is plugged into the 'PoS' ISP supplied modem and your devices are all connected off the router.

How is the router improving things? Since everything goes through the ISP supplied modem, and the old saying the chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Some routers can let you setup QoS priorities, but... isnt it true that this doesnt effect whats coming down the pipe, so if one user on your shared connection has massive torrent downloads running, this user will crap-out the connection regardless of the effect the QoS rules. Since the QoS rules don't apply to what the ISP is sending to you.

Appreciate any tips and explanations you can offer so I become less ignorant about this kind of stuff.

Thanks,
W

Yakuza

I'm not an expert as such, but do have a reasonable understanding of routers and the like.

In the case of DSL broadband, you are generally free to use any compatible modem/router combo. The ones the ISP supply will be generally not cutting edge, with fairly old ("stable", they'll tell you) firmware. A newer router may be more tolerant to noise on the line, thus giving you a better connection than the ISP supplied one. It will almost definitely have better hardware inside (a faster processor, more RAM, Gigabit ethernet) and better firmware (less buggy, a better firewall), so things like DHCP and NAT will be faster, it might be easier to put pinholes in the firewall for custom applications.

In the case of Cable, you're stuck with the modem they supply, but you can generally bridge it with a good router, or put the good router in a DMZ and have the modem shunt every packet onto the router, thus having the router deal with your internal network and providing you with the advantages of a good router that I outline above.

I personally use a Buffalo N-finiti router (can't look up exact model now) for 6 months now with my UPC cable connection (stock firmware, I haven't investigated using any other firmware, Tomato or the like) and I've no complaints so far.

I'm sure Watty or Jor El or Cabaal will be along soon with a much better answer

vibe666

this might be a better analogy. think of it like a post office.

you have all these packets going into the an post depot, but they are disorganised and not able to handle large volumes of post, so everything gets backed up pretty quickly. (your isp's modem/router)

now say you have a super efficient courier service next door and an post just uses a conveyor belt to send all the packages that come into them straight out to the other depot without even looking at them. (your own router attached to it)

the other depot has a lot more staff who are better trained and highly organised and they can efficiently manage everything that comes in without delays and send it on its way in double quick time.

also, the problems with torrents clogging up more basic routers is usually due to how long the router keeps track of idle TCP connections before dropping them. most ISP sourced routers will hold on to them for anything up to a week, which is fine if you're just surfing the net as the few thousand requests that the router handles in a week will be well within it's operating capacity and it won't be an issue.

the problem starts when you add torrenting to the mix and you have anything up to thousands of connections going on in a matter of a few minutes, all of which are going to be kept by the router for anything up to 7 days, which will turn into a couple of hours at most if you're hammering the connection, before the router is on its knees and needs rebooting to clear the TCP conntrack cache manually.

any router worth its salt with a decent 3rd party firmware on it (even without now that mfg's are cottoning onto the torrenting thing) will ae enough ram onboad to handle a lot of simultaneous connections and to drop idle connections within 30-60 minutes or so, usually with an option to manually edit this figure to suit your needs.

another reason why i use my own router with a 3rd party firmware is that it allows me to log all my bandwidth accurately so i know what my monthly usage is. admittedly it's not as much use on the 100mbps as it was on the 30mbps now that i have 500gb per month to play with, but it's still handy to have just so i can check it from time to time so that i know i'm not over my monthly limit.