For any of you out there that are an ISP and provide routers to subs any input would be grateful. What would u guys say an avg/acceptable mortality rate for Routers Mainly Linksys WRT54-G’s and cheap belkins. all of a sudden we have gotten a rush of calls from customer whose belkin routers are more or less “dead” and only work 5 mins at a pop. and weve always had to replace linksys routers quite frequently. Any rhyme or reason to this?
About a year or so…
They seem to be made of poor quality components as of late. Anyone that asks for us to provide a router is sold the Linksys RV082 along with an additional monthly charge of $30 minimum for over-the-phone support. They are more than welcome to call Linksys for free support though and not be billed the extra monthly charge.
We are more than happy to sell and install cisco 1800-series ISR’s however. Usually the customers that want something like this will have their own staff install and configure it themselves.
I am tired of messing around with these garbage consumer-grade appliances. It’s too obnoxious these days.
Look into the Netopia 3386-ENT router. So far so good on my network and they run about $100.
No GUI config screen, all telnet. Simple and effective.
They also have an SPI firewall, DOS protection, and VPN built in.
Buffalo WHR54G + OpenWRT=Bullet performance
I heard that Buffalo Tech can’t sell wireless gear in the States right now because of a court injunction. Is that still true?
wow. about a year? that sucks. and cant do telnet routers. i can imagine trying to walk a customer through that on the phone. and buffalo in my experience, is better suited for hot wings, not routers
We had a high failure rate with Linksys. Started recommending DLink and have not seen a failure yet.
We are an ISP that has had massive failure with the Belkin routers, not only do they stop working but they will time out during downloads and cannot stream without just crapping out. Belkin claims that a firmware upgrade will fix this but we have found that once again they are just blowing smoke.
My opinion, DON"T use Belkin at all as they have very poor quality control and cannot even seem to fix a simple problem known as overheating.
Good to know.
Have only run across 3 of the Belkins, one failed.
No problem Jerry, glad to help.
BTW, Belkin will not even acknowledge there is a problem with their units and continue to send us ones to test as we send the failed units back. Same problem different day.
As we all know, Canopy units will work no matter what, a simple layer 2 bridge. The people at Belkin don’t get how this works, even the level 3 tech guys…shakes head.
Just look at the Belkin 7230-4 or N1 router, only 4 vent holes on top.
IMO anything under 100 bucks is junk.
A 100.00 router might have $10-15 in parts. How good can it be?
jwaller wrote: We are an ISP that has had massive failure with the Belkin routers, not only do they stop working but they will time out during downloads and cannot stream without just crapping out. Belkin claims that a firmware upgrade will fix this but we have found that once again they are just blowing smoke.
My opinion, DON"T use Belkin at all as they have very poor quality control and cannot even seem to fix a simple problem known as overheating.
yea weve probably had to replace at least one belkin a day since mid february
We’ve used Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, SMC and Belkin. We’ve had the best luck with Linksys.
wifiguy wrote: We've used Linksys, D-Link, Netgear, SMC and Belkin. We've had the best luck with Linksys.
ditto
Why not build your own. Use a Soekris box, load it with BSD and put in a wireless card and connect a rubber-duck antenna to it. This way you can have total control over the router at the client end. And it will last a heck of alot longer then a crappy DLINK or Belkin router.
Frothingdog.ca wrote: Why not build your own. Use a Soekris box, load it with BSD and put in a wireless card and connect a rubber-duck antenna to it. This way you can have total control over the router at the client end. And it will last a heck of alot longer then a crappy DLINK or Belkin router.
yeaaaa we dont have the time. we have about 2500 customers and install 70-80 a month. dont have the time to spend building routers lol
According to the user guide, the 3386-ENT does have a web interface for setup. I’ve never used it.
http://www.netopia.com/support/hardware … NT_qsg.pdf
I’d definitely give this a look if you’re interested in reliability. The big DSL carriers use these things so they must be doing something right.
Also, I’m assuming you are from Bay Broadband, and that you are still using a lot of Canopy gear (I am on the shore occasionally). Stay away from the Netgear RP614- it’s one of their wired consumer routers and I’ve seen issues with them not booting up properly when a Canopy SM is attached to the WAN port.
yea were about 90% canopy. and ive had to many horror stories about netgear stuff or trouble when customers buy there own.
We have also landed on Linksys routers, but only sell the GL model. That way when the crappy factory firmware flakes out, we can put X-WRT on it and make it sing and dance. When we see problems with the Linksys routers, they all go away with the 3rd party firmware.
I’ve even replaced a router connecting 4 networks with a linksys box when I didn’t have a spare and lightning ate the “real” router. Split the vlan in the Linksys and you’ve got a 5 port router. I put that one in about two years ago, and the new spare is still standing by waiting for the linksys to fail in any way.
I’ve put in the x-wrt firmware in an office or two, and configured it as a VPN endpoint so that the employees can VPN in from home, etc. If you can do it with Linux, you can probably do it with x-wrt on a GL. It’s really good stuff.
You don’t even have to be a linux geek since x-wrt exposes 99% of the config and capabilities through the web interface.
I’m going to be working on a project this summer to set up a few of these as hotspots.
Just in case there was any doubt, I like X-WRT. 
VLAN1 wrote: [quote="Frothingdog.ca":o1zmxs40]Why not build your own. Use a Soekris box, load it with BSD and put in a wireless card and connect a rubber-duck antenna to it. This way you can have total control over the router at the client end. And it will last a heck of alot longer then a crappy DLINK or Belkin router.
yeaaaa we dont have the time. we have about 2500 customers and install 70-80 a month. dont have the time to spend building routers lol[/quote:o1zmxs40]
That was quite shocking number per month.
What plans do you sell to customer? and do you have installation charge also? Please share your little secret with us :wink: