Home CPE choice

[Charles N Wyble <charles () knownelement com>]

Hopefully this e-mail is considered operational content :)


The recent thread on the new linkys kit and ipv6 support got me thinking 
about CPE choice.

What good off the shelf solutions are out there? Should one buy the high 
end d-link/linksys/netgear products? I've had bad experiences with those 
(netgear in particular).

Should one get a "real" cisco router? The 877 or something? Maybe an ASA 
or the new small business targeted ISR (can't recall the model number 
off hand right now). There is mikrotik but I'm not so sure about the 
operating system.

Is there a market for a new breed of CPE running OpenWRT or pfsense on 
hardware with enough CPU/RAM to not fall over?

Granted that won't cost $79.00 at best buy. However it seems to me that 
decent CPE is going to run a couple hundred dollars in order to have 
sufficient ram/cpu.

My current home router is a cisco 1841. I keep my 6mbps DSL line pretty 
much saturated all the time. Often times my wife will be watching Hulu 
in the living room, I'll be streaming music and running torrents 
(granted I have tuned my Azures client fairly well) all at the same time 
and it's a good experience.  Running that kind of traffic load through 
my linksys would cause it to need a reboot once or more a day.

What are folks here running in SOHO environments that doesn't require 
too frequent oil changes :)