TP-LINK N600 Wireless N Dual Band Gigabit Router w/ 2x USB Ports (TL-WDR3600) $39 after $15 rebate + Free Shipping

Quote from Tnyc : Could you confirm if the router came with the latest stock firmware? Umm might be a couple of months before they are back on sale again. The last deal was around BF?

Quote from boltman2007 : QoS on SOHO routers is simply unnecessary and likely to degrade performance overall. It is effectively taking away rather than adding and oinly used when network is saturated. Something has to give its not magic. I'm amazed how much people buy into it as a must have feature for home networks. Like another poster said just becuse you can does not mean you should...especially if you have no real idea if you need it. Just install this router and be happy... change the usernme/password turn off WPS...done

I would like to give some of my devices (certain IP addresses) the ability to use more bandwidth when than other devices. Say I am watching a movie on my WDTV and also surfing the net on my laptop. I would rather the WDTV get most of the bandwidth so no interruptions in streaming HD video. Is this possible?

Quote from dealmonkey : I would like to give some of my devices (certain IP addresses) the ability to use more bandwidth when than other devices. Say I am watching a movie on my WDTV and also surfing the net on my laptop. I would rather the WDTV get most of the bandwidth so no interruptions in streaming HD video. Is this possible?

Short answer no..not with this router or any firmware.... again the bandwidth itself is the main culprit not the mixed traffic.

Try finding a clear 5Ghz n channel to use.

Quote from dealmonkey : is this a common thing for router firmware upgrades?

If it doesn't, you should. I'd recommend a factory reset after a firmware upgrade and then restoring your settings backup or doing the initial setup AFTER doing the firmware upgrade. You can end up with little goodies left lying around in the cmos if you don't. I think a large percentage of wacky router issues are from configuring a unit, doing a flash, seeing that at least most of your settings are intact and just running with that. I have the same recommendations when doing a regular PC bios update.

Quote from dealmonkey : I would like to give some of my devices (certain IP addresses) the ability to use more bandwidth when than other devices. Say I am watching a movie on my WDTV and also surfing the net on my laptop. I would rather the WDTV get most of the bandwidth so no interruptions in streaming HD video. Is this possible?

Internet or wireless bandwidth?

I'm not familiar with this specific router, but most modern ones (particularly with openwrt or ddwrt or ???) have automatic QOS to give video streams first priority, or they at least allow you to specify QOS priority by application or mac address. Plug in the mac address of the WDTV, set its priority to #1 or 'high', voila...shouldn't have any problems with priority internet bandwidth.

If you're talking wireless bandwidth, then you'd want to set it up so your laptop used one radio (2.4 or 5) and the wdtv using the other...or use a second router in the house, one for your video box and one for everything else.

You might also look into a cheap pair of powerline 500 units like the rosewill ones that were on FP yesterday for $49. MUCH better quality of service than most wireless connections, and with a small switch you could join anything else around your tv to a wired powerline network.

Quote from boltman2007 : QoS on SOHO routers is simply unnecessary and likely to degrade performance overall. It is effectively taking away rather than adding and oinly used when network is saturated. Something has to give its not magic. I'm amazed how much people buy into it (blindly) as a must have feature for home networks. Like another poster said just becuse you can does not mean you should...especially if you have no real idea if you need it. Just install this router and be happy... change the username/password turn off WPS...done

I'd have to disagree. SOME routers experience a drop in throughput when employing QOS, because the router has to inspect every packet. In most high end routers in a home environment, unless you're doing live backups from many machines and a ton of multiple HD video streaming, that little performance cut off the top doesn't matter.

Some routers have no drop in throughput when using QOS. But most of those don't cost $40.

In my household, without QOS if someone is doing a VOIP or skype session, all sorts of stuff stops working. If my son is skyping in HD, the ooma voip phone quality sucks and sometimes it wont even ring. If we're doing multiple hd video streams, the phone call quality stinks. But with a set of QOS rules that put the voip box #1, skype #2, and other video streaming #3 and everything else after that...it all works beautifully no matter whats going on.

brbubba,

Do you have a guide how to setup CoDel correctly? I just noticed my OOMA sounded like crap when using Netflix at the same time.
Thanks.

Quote from moonlightinred : Has anyone been able to install luci-app-qos? Because this is why I get when going through putty: opkg install luci-app-qos Unknown package 'luci-app-qos'. Collected errors: * opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package luci-app-qos. Can't find it through the web interface, either. I suppose I should move this to the OpenWRT forum, but I thought I'd give it a quick shot here, first.

Try "opkg update" first.

EDIT: This can be done from LuCi too.

Quote from yazyazoo : brbubba, Do you have a guide how to setup CoDel correctly? I just noticed my OOMA sounded like crap when using Netflix at the same time. Thanks.

Posted what I found in the last WDR3600 thread in the Wiki for this thread.

CoDel should be enabled when you enable and configure QoS. The links in the wiki show you how to test it.

Quote from brbubba : Try "opkg update" first. EDIT: This can be done from LuCi too.

Well, update at least allowed it to find luci-app-qos...but when trying to install, I got this:

Installing luci-app-qos (0.11+svn9425-1) to root...
Downloading http://downloads.openwrt.org/atti...ar71xx.ipk.
Collected errors:
* satisfy_dependencies_for: Cannot satisfy the following dependencies for luci-app-qos:
* kernel (= 3.3.8-1-be18a8a01d768ba03d7c87a93a45a9e5) * kernel (= 3.3.8-1-be18a8a01d768ba03d7c87a93a45a9e5) * kernel (= 3.3.8-1-be18a8a01d768ba03d7c87a93a45a9e5) * kernel (= 3.3.8-1-be18a8a01d768ba03d7c87a93a45a9e5) * kernel (= 3.3.8-1-be18a8a01d768ba03d7c87a93a45a9e5) *
* opkg_install_cmd: Cannot install package luci-app-qos.

Thoughts?

Quote from sklar : I'd have to disagree. SOME routers experience a drop in throughput when employing QOS, because the router has to inspect every packet. In most high end routers in a home environment, unless you're doing live backups from many machines and a ton of multiple HD video streaming, that little performance cut off the top doesn't matter. Some routers have no drop in throughput when using QOS. But most of those don't cost $40. In my household, without QOS if someone is doing a VOIP or skype session, all sorts of stuff stops working. If my son is skyping in HD, the ooma voip phone quality sucks and sometimes it wont even ring. If we're doing multiple hd video streams, the phone call quality stinks. But with a set of QOS rules that put the voip box #1, skype #2, and other video streaming #3 and everything else after that...it all works beautifully no matter whats going on.

With THIS router QoS is not going to help and may hurt overall performance.

QoS is used in Enterprise environments successfully for VOIP but again those are Enterprise class routers. NOT SOHO

I think people are misled about what some of these third party firmware features actually do in real life.
At the very least we already see from various posters the "headaches" 3rd party firmware can cause.

Quote from boltman2007 : With THIS router QoS is not going to help and may hurt overall performance. QoS is used in Enterprise environments successfully for VOIP but again those are Enterprise class routers. NOT SOHO

Hmm, well I don't own one and don't know about the stock firmware, but if it runs dd-wrt or openwrt, then the QOS will most certainly help in mixed voice/video/data environments. Its not like the software decides to not do its job because its running on this particular platform.

So apparently either your thesis is incorrect, or my long standing personal experience with requiring decent QOS in any application using voip or video is incorrect.

I just spent most of this week farting around with the QOS settings on my router, which runs openwrt. Without it, my voip doesn't work right and video conferencing doesn't work right. With it, they work. I'm unable to detect any difference in top end routing performance without running ixchariot, since not a lot of home users can saturate gigabit ethernet for very long.

I might have agreed with you ~5 years ago when not as many people were doing voip or video conferencing/facetime/video streaming, and router performance was so low that cutting into it to do QOS was a big decision. I'm afraid I don't agree at this time given many users current requirements and the power of most modern routers, even cheap ones.

Quote from sklar : Hmm, well I don't own one and don't know about the stock firmware, but if it runs dd-wrt or openwrt, then the QOS will most certainly help in mixed voice/video/data environments. Its not like the software decides to not do its job because its running on this particular platform. So apparently either your thesis is incorrect, or my long standing personal experience with requiring decent QOS in any application using voip or video is incorrect. I just spent most of this week farting around with the QOS settings on my router, which runs openwrt. Without it, my voip doesn't work right and video conferencing doesn't work right. With it, they work. I'm unable to detect any difference in top end routing performance without running ixchariot, since not a lot of home users can saturate gigabit ethernet for very long. I might have agreed with you ~5 years ago when not as many people were doing voip or video conferencing/facetime/video streaming, and router performance was so low that cutting into it to do QOS was a big decision. I'm afraid I don't agree at this time given many users current requirements and the power of most modern routers, even cheap ones.

sklar is correct.
One of the big reasons why open source firmwares like Openwrt are so popular is because they give a SOHO (normal cheap) router capabilities of an enterprise class router.

Quote from dealgeek007 : sklar is correct. One of the big reasons why open source firmwares like Openwrt are so popular is because they give a SOHO (normal cheap) router capabilities of an enterprise class router.

So you are saying managing outbound packets makes a huge difference... I'm skeptical. Its bandwidth you need not "tricks" we all no nothing actually happens to inbound packets unless you have a better router. Its again a placebo effect. The router is not the choke point your ISP is.

Quote from boltman2007 : So you are saying managing outbound packets makes a huge difference... I'm skeptical. Its bandwidth you need not "tricks" we all no nothing actually happens to inbound packets unless you have a better router. Its again a placebo effect. The router is not the choke point your ISP is.

Depends on how you have built the network.
In my case, I have a 40mbps down signal and 4 mbps up.
My router is in the basement.

I have other routers that I use as clients and wire every device to those clients.

In short all my stuff is wireless.

Currently my wireless starts to stutter a little if I use too much HD streaming and OOMA phone at the same time.

This router I am sure will help in my particular situation.

I also have a ps3, Wii a media server, apple Tv, etc which all also operate on the wifi via the client routers.... that are spread across my home.
I also have a server hardwired to the router in the basement running Hyper-V with 3 Windows server instances on it. One of them is used to back up all my other computers in the house (over wireless)

In short in my case the ISP is not the bottleneck, the main central router in my basement is.

By splitting some of my traffic to the 5GHz also, I'll help ease the congestion.

Peace!!