Re: Home CPE choice

[Leen Besselink <leen () consolejunkie net>]

On 04/01/2010 12:55 AM, Charles N Wyble wrote:
> 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 cable provider provides me with a modem which is just a bridge, so 
all I need is a router box for firewall / nat, etc. I have a 
Soekris-box, Soekris isn't really cheap though.

But I recently noticed this device, it is $69.95 and has IPv6 out of the 
box I think (no DSL/WAN though !):

http://routerboard.com/pricelist.php?showProduct=90
http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/IPv6/Overview_and_examples

Haven't tried it yet, I think someone might have mentioned Mikrotik on 
this list though.

Also it's little brother will soon be available:

$39.95, 'available on end of March 2010'

http://routerboard.com/pricelist.php?showProduct=56

Would that be the right price-range ?

> 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 :)