Hey all,
SO I have this brick of a router (Amazon.com)
and it is getting to the point where the connection literally cuts in and out to the point where something will be buffering and I know it is just waiting for the wifi connection to go down and come back up again before it resumes. I am wondering if I buy a Access point and just shut off the wireless radio in my router if the router will hold back the network and access point? I also have a pretty nice switch (Redirect Notice)
which I got through a grant on my campus, Is my shit router holding back the infrastructure I want to put in place? I will be hosting 50-80 VNC users connecting through my public IP address to use the remote VNC sessions and I want to remove any bottlenecks and improve throughput.
Do you have any hardware suggestions or tricks?
It may work on that router but I wouldn't trust it. Consumer level routers are usually made to be as cheap as possible and commonly don't have very much memory (most consumer routers have around 64Mbs) which could cause problems especially if you have many clients or incoming/outgoing connections.
This video goes into why consumer routers are usually a very bad idea, especially for power users.
As the video suggests I would use something like pfSense/OpenSense on your own hardware. I currently use pfSense on an AM1 system with the Athlon 5350 APU and a single 4GB stick of DDR3. Currently AM1 systems are some of the cheapest hardware you can buy, plus they are quite power efficient. If you don't want to go that route you can also install pfSense on a virtual machine if you have a server or any computer that is running 24/7 that has resources to spare. Routing usually doesn't consume many resources unless you are going crazy with caching and such and should be a much more robust solution than any consumer level router.
Honestly the uptime of my pfSense router alone trumps my old router as I had to reset it at least once a week but this machine will run pretty much indefinitely, unless I need to change hardware or apply an update which isn't often.
Mine is setup with three interfaces, one for the WAN, another for LAN, and one dedicated to wireless for which I use a Unifi AP AC Lite access point. pfSense also has many more features that you won't find in consumer gear such as a more advanced firewall, system monitoring, VPN server, and can even cache commonly requested packets so the client can fetch them directly from the router and not the internet which can vastly improve network performance.
If you don't want to build your own router using pfSense (Because it can be a pain to get working sometimes), you could try going for a Ubiquiti router, I believe @Nomaran uses one after his adventures with pfSense didn't pan out.
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you could try a alt firmware ,open wrt is good
This was one of the most detailed and helpful responses I have ever read thank you
