Thursday, December 14, 2006

Search For the Perfect Home Router

I'm looking for the perfect home router. My current setupis fairly complex. I have CAT-5 cable routed throughout my home and it all terminates in a structured wiring cabinet in the garage.

Here's the basic setup:

Comcast Cable Modem

D-Link DI-604 Cable/DSL Router, 4-Port Switch

Netgear GS108 8-Port 10/100/1000 Copper Gigabit Ethernet Switch

Linksys WRTP54G Wireless-G Broadband Router for Vonage Internet Phone Service

Buffalo WHR-HP-G54 Wireless-G MIMO Performance Router and Access Point


So this all started because I wanted to add an Axis 207W Wireless Network Camera camera as a baby monitor. I got the camera working pretty easily (more on that later) but I found a couple of small problems:

1. Using Motion JPEG the camera uses up almost all of my up bandwidth (768 kb) and interferes with Vonage calls. Solution: QoS
2. Since I am using the WRTP54G as a wireless router (with it's own DHCP) I found that its clients can access the camera but if the camera uses the WRTP54G then other devices on the network can't access it. Solution: Static Routing
3. I don't have enough bandwidth! I'm happy with downloads (8 MB/s +) but not with uploads. Solution: Add DSL and use a router for load balancing between Cable and DSL.