Need help choosing a router for the new home

[drunknmunky]

This is a follow-up thread to this one.

We haven't placed the order for a NAS yet (busy with the move!) but will likely do so within the next couple of days.

We already own an Apple Airport Extreme (MB763LL/A, Model: A1301). We were sent a Sitecom 300N router by our internet provider.

We chose to go with a 100Mbit Fiber connection for the new home. We plan on doing 1080p streaming from a NAS for which I'm sure we'll use a wired connection to ensure stability and to avoid surprises. Same goes for music streaming.

My goal is, quite simply, to get the most out of our fiber connection and to ensure that even large file transfers (emphasis on "large files" rather than "large number of files") inside the home are handled at the fastest possible speed.

The Sitecom router is not dual-band, simultaneous or otherwise. Would you suggest I use the Airport Extreme instead.. or do you even have an ideal suggestion for a new router in this scenario?

Thanks!

 

[stevech]

100MBps home IP service is a gross overkill I feel. Streaming Netflix takes a small fraction of that - easily done with lower cost. Of course, Internet hosts won't give a single user 100Mbps content-speed.

But hey, have at it!
A few years from now, maybe 100Mbps to the home will be common and cheaper.

I don't know of a consumer grade router that will do well forwarding packets at 100Mbps on the WAN side.
Generally, look for a high end SOHO wired-only router, say, a ZyXel or some such. Or if you dare, get an IT geek to setup an eBay used Juniper or Cisco.

Then do WiFi in the new home with Access Points in various zones of the house with cat5 runs to the router/switches. As WiFi evolves, you can replace the access points and leave the router alone.

 

[Osamede]

100MBps home IP service is a gross overkill I feel. Streaming Netflix takes a small fraction of that - easily done with lower cost. Of course, Internet hosts won't give a single user 100Mbps content-speed....But hey, have at it!...A few years from now, maybe 100Mbps to the home will be common and cheaper..

Was it Bill Gates that said nobody will ever need more than 128MB of RAM? You're in good company, I guess.

For some reason, you're assuming he lives in the US, which may not necessarily the case. In Sweden for instance people have access those speeds of fiber lines to the home for a pittance, like 30 dollars a month or something.

In any case he had said that he wanted to do FTP, so if whomever he is FTPing to or from has the same time of line, then obviously he can get good use out of the line speed. Not to mention torrents and such. Netflix are only in the US but there a few other streaming services out there, like LoveFilm and so on. They are all basically doing extremely compressed, relatively mediocre quality streams today but that is obviously only a short term thing - its not long ago when everything in music was 128 kbps mp3 files, yet today many people dont even bother with anything that isnt a lossless file.

 

[thiggins]

I can't speak to the performance of the Sitecom router, since I haven't tested it.
There are plenty of consumer routers with > 100 Mbps routing throughput. Just check the Router Charts.

For LAN performance, you just need to use a Gigabit switch. If the router you choose doesn't have one, just connect a separate one. Routing performance (WAN > LAN, LAN > WAN) has nothing to do with LAN <> LAN performance. LAN traffic is handled by the switch chip and the router CPU doesn't get involved.

 

[stevech]

100Mbps - low cost - not in US.
For sure!
I see that the vendor "Sitecom" is in Italy.

LAN to WAN routing - packets per second - I saw chart and wonder if it used jumbo frames or some such.
A consumer router (cheap) with port forwarding, maybe QoS, etc. would surprise me with such PPS rates.