router for small office

There are 2 top performers in that price range. Netgear WNDR4500 and Cisco / Linksys E4200. Both are pretty stable in a work environment. Go here for detailed reviews: http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwa...er-charts/view

Good luck.

I tried the E4200 when it came out. I paid a little over $200 dollars for it, and I had a difficult time setting up my LAN even with Linksys help. They suggested to return the router and get another one, but I ended up just returning it and kept using my WNDR3700.

SonicWall TZ 100

You are not the first that I have heard about this. Why was it so difficult to setup? The admin pages look very similar to routers that are a few years old (like the tired and true WRT54GL). Or was it a hardware issue?

Netgears will reset themselves if you breath on them. Pretty much anything consumer grade will reset itself if you breath on them. Look at the Zyxel routers, they are some of the best out there. As for a office setting, you should be using a Radius server & captive portal, along with VPN, to keep people off of your network that your IT person does not authorize.

And as for WiFi in a business setting. It is good for when you have to go to meetings, or needing to use a network capable inventory scanner, but normal day to day work, forget it. You want to cripple a network, you can do it faster than you can say 'Simon Sez". Especially with 20 users, regardless how fast your outside WAN speed is.

If they are at a desk, tether them to a wired connection. Safer, more secure, and do not have to worry about them always telling you that the network is down, even though it is not.

Overkill.


Exaggeration.


Mostly agree.

I use the Wndr4500 at home for about 3 weeks now I believe and have yet to have it reset itself or even drop the wireless signal on ANY computer in our house.So far amazed by it.

brickie

Doubtufl


Really? I don't think so.




Agree on what? So far, you are two for two on disagreeing in a area that I probably know more about dealing with, than most. You run a business, and you have people sitting at desks, first thing you think about is security. Second is if you are sharing files or using a common application that pulls its data off of a server, wired is the best. Why? It is secured, no one can just connect and pull data. Especially if you operate everyone in a domain to secure them to the network, so no one can just walk in and plug into a ethernet cord or jack and start pulling data.

WiFi in majority of small offices out there, is so unsecured, that anyone can usually connect in a matter of minutes and start intercepting data, before anyone knows. You have twenty users on any network, which most businesses will not pay for anymore than 6 meg thinking that is all they will need, when in reality, most modern offices need no less than 100 meg for the outside.

We crippled a single T-1 in our office, when we moved to a temporary site, after our unit got flooded out of the basement space we were in. Soon after, we got another T-1 and they fixed the problem. On average, our unit pushes about 1 gig of data before even lunch time comes along. We probably push on average a Petabyte of data out to our data servers on a weeks time, and pulling from a remote server, we probably pull about a Terabyte of data on average in a week, so we can make the documents available to others inside our network. Try doing that on wireless in a average ISP provided line.

And how many people in my office use the network you are probably wondering. Twenty. The same as the OP, and we do it on three T-1's with a blade, and business grade routers & switches, most workstations are 100meg to the switches, with maybe five that are gig connect. No wifi whatsoever, because it would never work in our situation, even if the data was non-confidential.

They said it was probably hardware issue.

I see so it was not the router's setup but the hardware. Hope everything works out.

Seems to me you have made some assumptions about the OP network needs.

I'm retired now but did system admin for say 35+ years, strictly SO, and never encountered a case where we needed more than a T1.

I'm NOT saying there are no SOs that need more - just that there are plenty of SOs that don't need that kind of network you are favoring.

There is a lot of work done on SO computers that doesn't require a massive connection to the outside world just a good solid intranet.

I don't have that router anymore. Got the WNDR3700 still. Working great.