New Router advice

Hi I am looking for a new router advice currently on sky but want it compatible with FTTC/P.

Looking for the following features

a) true dual band (2.4 and 5 ghz at the same time)
b)gigabit lan ports
c)VPN ability so i can connect back to my home network while out and about
d) ability to work both in 20 and 40 mhtz channels
e) wireless N

Would prefer it to have

a) external aerials that can be changed
b) mutiple SSID would be nice
c)vlan not really needed but would be nice

I am currently looking at http://www.buffalo-technology.com/files/products/WZR... Dual-Band Wireless-N High Power Gigabit
Router and Access Point WZR-HP-AG300H however nowhere in the UK have stock atm and keep gettign psuhed back.

Can anyone suggest any other router that are worth looking at

Cheers D

I have one of these, currently using with Sky pending installation of FTTC:

http://www.avm.de/en/Produkte/FRITZBox/FRITZ_Box_Fon...

Ticks all your boxes except detachable antennae. It also provides network attached storage, works as a VoIP+analogue PBX (including call routing, pairs directly with DECT phones and has answerphones) and it's fully IPv6 ready (native WAN and supports tunneling).

The DSL side supports ADSL, ADSL2/2+ and VDSL2; you can use this without the Openreach modem or configure a LAN port for PPPoE.

You can find these for about £190. I bought mine from momilc.com in France.

very nice, however bit more than i wanted to pay

I have been looking for a new router as well but have concentrated my search on those that include an adsl modem i.e. draytek 2830n (buggy firmware) and billion 7800n (solid but not as many features). Do you have an adsl modem in mind for your sky connection that will work well with the buffalo? I did try a £20 buffalo effort with my 2700hgv but couldn't get them to work together with the 2700hgv in bridge mode.

Edited by mathew2 (Thu 15-Sep-11 09:38:19)

Hi Doug,

Do you know if the fritz can do QoS?
What chipset is it?
What's the NAT session table size?

Thanks.

HI, I I was going to use one of sky router and just upload customer firmware (www.skyuser.co.uk) as it gives you full control over the router

The 7390 supports source and protocol-based quality of service, allowing you to build rules to put combinations of clients and protocols into one of three queues: real-time, prioritized and background.

For example, I have five rules:

All VoIP realtime
All streaming realtime
AppleTV all prioritized
All VPN prioritized
All SSH prioritized

I believe the VDSL2 chipset is from Ikanos, although AVM roll their own firmware. The GUI includes a page for you to provide firmware feedback complete with statistics:

On this page you can send AVM information reflecting the status of your DSL connection. This makes it possible to optimize your DSL performance with the next firmware update. Many thanks in advance for your support.

Please select the data that apply to your current connection. When you click "Send", this information will be transmitted to AVM along with a record of the DSL negotiation. This recording contains no personal information or excerpts from the data exchanged with the Internet.

There is no hard limit on the size of the session table other than available resources, and with 512MB it should easily handle 25000+ connections. The CPU is pretty powerful; I've seen one user report WAN to LAN throughput of 300Mbps: http://digitaldreamer.com.au/nbn-ready-routers-10-ro... (using LAN1 as the WAN port, bypassing the VDSL2 modem to avoid the bottleneck for the purposes of testing).