Good Cable Modem/router

Guys

Whats a good Cable modem/router out there for the Virgin Docsis 3 network which supports 50mb Connection. I herad they provide there customers with a Netgear Cable Modem/Router. Has anyone experimented with any other brands like Draytek, Cisco.

You can only attach VM supplied equipment to the VM network (well legally anyway) and they only supply one device for 50 and 100.

Not sure if this link will work or not..

http://help.virginmedia.com/system/selfservice.contr...

although u have to use their Superhub for connection u can disable the router part of it and use a seperate cable router if u want but u have to use it as the cable modem.

You can attach another router but you will be double NATed on the current firmware as there is no option to just work as a modem so you can't bypass the internal router.

can't you just disable DHCP on the superhub to stop it from double nat'ing?

You'd disable DHCP on the 2nd router not the Superhub and plug the 2nd router into the Superhub via its LAN port to achieve connectivity without double NAT.

Which would leave you with the Superhub controlling things and just the switch section of the second router operational - may as well just buy a switch - simpler, cheaper, less to go wrong.

Or put up with the double NAT layer which turning off DHCP wouldn't alter as they are two different functions.

The wireless part of the second router would still work

DHCP is seperate from NAT'ing.

Turn off DHCP and NAT is still enabled, but you NOW MUST statically assign LAN IP addresses.

You need to put the cable modem/router into a bridging mode

In reply to a post by MrSaffron:

You need to put the cable modem/router into a bridging mode

... and there lies the rub - the SuperHub firmware does not support bridge mode.

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

Which would leave you with the Superhub controlling things and just the switch section of the second router operational - may as well just buy a switch - simpler, cheaper, less to go wrong.

Or put up with the double NAT layer which turning off DHCP wouldn't alter as they are two different functions.

Wireless on 2nd router will work. This is what I plan to do to have the pooper hub delivering 5Ghz while another router delivers 2.4GHz.

Many people are blaming the Superhub router section for poor streaming and failing downloads and your scheme will leave it's routing functionality fully operational.

For some reason I don't see those problems but I've no idea why I avoid them and others get them. ????

Possibly two different internals to the superhub.

Not uncommon for first batch to use very good memory etc, and then cost cutting comes in and slightly cheaper batches with more marginal performance that not just about pass acceptance testing are used.

this sounds plausible.

VM staff are in big denial about this, they all seem to claim they have working perfect superhubs no bugs etc. yet many customers have issues.

The fact here is tho VM have blundered big time with the superhub, it was released not ready without a bridge mode. 5 months later it still has no bridge mode and to top it off they release a firmware update which breaks commonly used applications. This new firmware had the bug reported during the beta stage and still got released.

It was only launched in January 2011 so I doubt there has been a full hardware revision but I suppose cheaper components could be the answer.

The current streaming and downloading problems coincided with a firmware upgrade which was supposed to fix some other issues. There have been complaints about WiFi dropping connections and the GUI becoming inaccessible from day 1. I've seen problems with the wireless but none of the other reported problems.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Wed 20-Apr-11 11:06:01)

Hallmarks of new feature using a few more bytes of memory, making other things less stable.

Small memory footprint units like this are interesting to program for even though a long time since I've done anything like that.

With the ADSL products a lot easier to swap to another modem/router combo, VM risks sullying its high speed products, and PR denials when enough people are posting about issues will just make things worse in a twitter world

I had it installed yesterday. So far no major problems. I'm not using the WiFi though as that is offloaded to my old ADSL router (can't be bothered to reprogramme everything to connect to the Superhub).

I have noticed that if I connect my main PC to the old router I only get about 35 Mbit on speed tests (whether wired or via WiFi) whereas if I connect it directly to the Superhub I get the full 50 Mbit. Not sure what is responsible for that?

If you were using G wireless it would only do ~22Mbps so I guess you must be using N and you'll have at least a 100Mbps switch on the old ADSL kit so why you see the big speed drop connected to your old router is a bit of a mystery to me. Maybe somebody else will have some ideas.

You can change the base IP setup on the SuperHub to match your existing network but I've heard it can be a PITA because of issues with the guest network which defaults to 192.168.1.n
I just bit the bullet and reconfigured all my fixed-ip stuff to fall into the SuperHub default 192.168.0.n scheme.

If you use the "Reserve IP" option it reboots every time you add or remove one (plus on one occasion corrupted the entire table for me) so I just hard coded all my fixed IP stuff in the 120 range and set hub DHCP to start at 140

====

It occurs to me you may have just meant change your WiFi kit - you can set the Hub SSID and password in the advanced settings.

Edited by kwikbreaks (Wed 20-Apr-11 12:38:45)

From what i heard on the net there will be a new firmware which will enable bridging on the Superhub. They saying May....ish, fixing few bugs.....

In reply to a post by kwikbreaks:

It occurs to me you may have just meant change your WiFi kit - you can set the Hub SSID and password in the advanced settings.

I did mean that, thanks. I don't know why I didn't think of checking it.

I'm now using the Superhub exclusively. It works fine. No problems with WiFi, in fact, it's faster; I get the full 50 mbit on all my devices now.

Let's hope I didn't jinx it...