Router Advice

[joegabe1974]

Good morning all,

I work in the Telecom world and don't have much IT experience and I am a little confused about routers.

I have been hard wiring Cat 5 through my house for a home network. I presently have DSL coming in to the DSL modem then dropped into an HP procurve hub. I am getting cable internet next week. I was told I should have a router in front of the hub for security. There are so many routers out there. What should I get and why?

Thanks for you help...

 

[LWComputingMVP]

Well, in my experience, half the IT techs will recommend you get a linksys and the other half will recommend you DON'T get a linksys. I'm in the latter. In my experience Linksys devices just are not that reliable. As a consultant who deals with a fair number of homes and small businesses, I'd say about half of them have linksys devices. And of that half, I've probably about 15-20% have issues. out of the other half that don't have linksys products, I've yet to see a single one fail.

Personally, to go cheap, I get SMC devices. But I'll get any MAJOR known brand (NOT Economy brand). For example, DLINK, Linksys, Hawking, Gigabyte (not to be confused with the motherboard maker), store brands, eHome, etc. are, in my opinion, to be avoided. Belkin, SMC, Microsoft (not a fan, but they are a big brand), Cisco (Not cheap and NOT Linksys brand, CISCO Brand), Netgear.

My opinions on quality and products is based on 12 years of experience with the companies I name and the understanding of who founded them and/or is backing them. Their history of putting out solid products (or not) as well.

Most cable providers will only issue you one IP Address. At least with the "basic" package. Additional may be available, but usually at a cost. DSL is similar, but perhaps your DSL plan allows multiple IPs. If the procurve switch does VLANs, you may be able to get away with using that, creating one port on the VLAN of the Cable modem and the remaining in their own port on a non-routable (192.168.x.x) network. A router will essentially do that for you, using Network Address Translation (NAT).