Router rubbish

chunter

While sorting out people's broadband woes it fairly apparent what is a good router and what is a bad router.
I've always had 2 particular favorites, which tower high and mighty in the league of router rubbish.
The first is the Orange tent router. A truely awful bit of kit form 3-4 years ago. Notable for an almost impssible to work control panel, a non-existant wireless range and a 26 digit wireless code.

The second, which I thought was the defunct was the silver BT 2wire business router. Notable for internal software which is just plain ineptly stupid. And about 25% arrive faulty. Which is why most business with Bt business broadband have 3 or 4 of them. They should be binned on arrival and somebody should shoot down to the shop and buy a real router. Problem solved.
By they way, they're back because they're being shipped with fast broadband adaptors. Infinity indeed.

The latest is the latest Huenui wireless router, the echolife hg521.
Long-suffering (I'm talking years) TalkTalk customers have been getting this router for the last few months. Alas, they now started giving them to AOL customers. To see the what the problem is, google it.
In summation, a sizable percentage of them don't work. Their wireless connection hangs after a couple of minutes.

There does seem to be a competiton amongst broadband providers out there now to see how can ship the worst, cheapest and rubbishiest free router. It must be some kind of in-joke between them.

12 x 15 = 180 quid a year. Add 50 quid to that for the price of a belkin or netgear (that will work with any isp and last 5-10 years) and just those isps to keep their rubbish or better still, tell them you're going to charge them for having to recycle it.

grumble over.

GunJack

Add D-Link to your list of goodies, particularly the excellent DSL-2640B and DSL-2740B models. Broadcom 6348 and 6358 chipsets respectively, and the 2640B out-performs 834GT's on many lines even though they run the same chipset. Wireless is pretty faultless too, easlily covering my 3-storey house from the ground floor

Know exactly what you mean with the Huwaei carp...my MIL got one from TT and it's abysmal...and can't use DMT or RouterStats with it to try and tweak some performance out of it :mad:

sickofusernames

GunJack wrote: »

Add D-Link to your list of goodies, particularly the excellent DSL-2640B and DSL-2740B models.

I bought the 2640B to replace my G624T but my sync speed was considerably lower so took it back and purchased a Netgear 834G in the end and haven't had any problems so far.

Anyone know if the chipsets were different between the two?

savemoney

Netgear are good. I now use a Draytek router not a cheap one by any means but its been reliable and fairly good wireless speeds 270Mbps

Internet is important to me so I pay over odds for reliability/speed as I do with ISP

Mista_C

chunter wrote: »

The first is the Orange tent router. A truely awful bit of kit form 3-4 years ago. Notable for an almost impssible to work control panel, a non-existant wireless range and a 26 digit wireless code.

I was only telling a friend of mine about this particular monstrosity yesterday. I found if you popped off the out white "tent" with the Orange logo on it the signal improved a bit. Nothing massively significant mind and it was still of bag of spanners but it was enough for a handful of people.

GunJack

sickofusernames wrote: »

I bought the 2640B to replace my G624T but my sync speed was considerably lower so took it back and purchased a Netgear 834G in the end and haven't had any problems so far.

Anyone know if the chipsets were different between the two?

chipsets in the G varied from version to version, i.e. v3, v4,etc. Think the latest incarnation of the 834G is v5, which isn't Broadcom as it won't work with DMT/RouterStats, think it's TI/Infineon off the top of my head..

Inactive

chunter wrote: »

The second, which I thought was the defunct was the silver BT 2wire business router. Notable for internal software which is just plain ineptly stupid. And about 25% arrive faulty. Which is why most business with Bt business broadband have 3 or 4 of them. They should be binned on arrival and somebody should shoot down to the shop and buy a real router. Problem solved.
By they way, they're back because they're being shipped with fast broadband adaptors. Infinity indeed.


.

They do have a huge following as being good on poor / long lines.

ChiefGrasscutter

I too thought that the BT 2-wire business one had a good recommendation on poor lines - but if as you say 25% don't work then that is not good. Perhaps those that do are good.

In essence the problem is that everyone everywhere is looking for something cheap - in all walks of life. The manufacturers are responding by making products even cheaper to get more sales and the result is obvious: they fail or don't work properely. Part of the reason is that goods become obselete so quickly now that why should the manufacturers produce something of a high quality if its only intended to last a year before being "upgraded".

The culprit - errrr it's the customers unfortuntely. They see broadband at price X with a free router at the same price as competitor Y with no router and don't stop to think that if its cheaper overall there just might be something crap (like the router) in the package being offered.

The problem is endemic. Decades ago on a building job you would get 3 quotes. You would choose the middle one to do the work as the most expensive was ripping you off and the cheapest one was a cowboy. Now everyone chooses the cheapest evertime, so the builders respond by always trying to produce the cheapest quote, invariably involving bottom of the range parts and shoddy installations by sub contractors - and then everyone complains about crap building work - am I surprised - err no!

kwikbreaks

Inactive wrote: »

They do have a huge following as being good on poor / long lines.

I bought one based on that reputation and it was no better that the Speedtouch 585v6 I was using at the time. Awful GUI iirc. The DG834v3 with the AR7 chipset was in my experience an abysmal performer but I've seen many people recommend them as they held sync on 0 or even negative noise margins. What those people didn't seem to realise was that a genuinely decent router would sync faster and have a stable noise margin on the same line - I proved that with my son's who went from 4Mbps unstable to solid 5Mbps using my old 585 instead of his dg834v3.

I've got a loft half full of ADSL routers all of which are now redundant as I swapped over to cable. The only one I got around to selling on eBay was a Draytek 2600 which had a good reputation but was a really dire performer on my line when it went over to ADSL Max.

free4440273

Belkin -- bloody awful !

hubert_cumberdale

i always use netgear or cisco routers