Which wireless access point?

[Wordan]

Hi,

I hate consumer access points and routers, they always seam to be plagued with problems. Once it is set up you shouldn't ever have to loggin, reboot, or generally fiddle with the thing to try and make it work again. Well thats my opinion anyway. Then you have some acces points not agreeing with some computers and you just get occasional disconnects.

Do the 'comercial grade' brandnames like cisco also suffer from these problems? I've heard from one source that they don't.

Can anybody recomend good quality wireless access points and seperate routers?

Thanks

[Carr0t]

You could get one of the ones running a supported chipset and install the dd-wrt firmware on it. I've got that installed on a little Buffalo jobby, and never had any issues so far (as long as you use IE to admin it via the web interface, for some reason. Firefox doesn't love it. As long as you've got one that can support it you can admin it over ssh instead). As to Cisco's stuff not having issues, I laugh at that having seen how often we have issues with the commercial grade ones we run on campus. Got about 150 of them scattered about now, and there's always some weirdness going on.

EDIT: All the above was about wireless APs. Having re-read your post, given the amount of Cisco routers we have about the place they seem reasonable, but the ones we run are about £1500 each (the low mid-range kind of thing. Not our core stuff). We used to run the cheaper ones (1710s and the like) but they were completely useless. Topped out at about 2mbps throughput and had various other issues too. For home use i've never had a problem with the cheapo thing I use. I get around the issues most commercial routers seem to have by simply bridging the router's connection to a BSD box, which I then run the DNS, DHCP, mail, NAT, Firewall, QoS etc for the house on. I find that to be far more reliable than attempting to use the inbuilt versions of same that you get on a cheap router. And more expensive Cisco commercial routers don't tend to *have* inbuilt DHCP servers etc, as they expect you to be running your own server for that if you're buying that level of kit.