Which Modem / Router To Buy For Heavy Torrent Use?

[Sunny Valentine]

Both DLink 604 and Zyxel 660 Prestige gave me lot of grief when using my Line for Torrent Up/Download. They got stuck every 24 or so hours, needing a Hard Reset.

I then switched to a Linksys Modem (Don't have the model number around), which worked fine until yesterday, when it died (probably by a Voltage Spike).

So,anyone here with a Suggestion which current Modem, available here, with or without Wifi, is working fine with full Torrent Speed Load? I am aware that the problem with most modems is the enormous number of open and half-open simultaneous connections that Torrents require, meaning that some modems can#t cope with that, and gradually cease to work until resetted.

Sunny

[Guest Reimar]

Try to use the "cheap" TPLink ADSL-Router!

I use two of them . They a bit more difficult to setup/cinfigure but they give me even more advantage compare to others! The TPLink having two different firmwares available and the I use are the one with Broadcom Firmware.

Warranty is Lifetime and the warranty is mainly covered by King which having a good service.

Edit://

By the way, I suggest to use an extra UPS for each ADSL Router with buildin Surgeprotector for phonlines! That realy pays off!

Edited September 25, 2007 by Reimar

[Petch01]

I have a TOT DB120 modem as bridge with a Linksys WRT54GL with Tomato 1.07 (third party firmware). The modem is still availabe for about 2,300 THB. Works like a charm. 24 hours a day/7 days a week. If there was any interruption of data-flow it was because of TOT. Settings such as maximum connections and QoS are fully adjustable. Have a look at the Tomato website and explore its features.

http://www.polarcloud.com/tomato

Further on have a look at the Linksys forum to find about user's experiences with Tomato.

http://www.linksysinfo.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=160

I do have an UPS.

Petch01

Edited September 25, 2007 by Petch01

[nikster]

Tomato looks fantastic. Blows any stock firmware / web interface clear out of the water.

But beware - only buy the WRT54GL - the L at the end stands for Linux-compatible. I just bought a WRT54G - without the L - and found it's not supported by any of the open source firmwares. WRT54G started the whole open source firmware thing, but only hardware versions 1-4 are supported, 5 and up have less memory built in and 7, which I just got, even runs on a completely different chipset!

Going to try to exchange for the L version now.

BTW I also had the Zyxel Prestige 660H crash on me under torrent use. On default Azureus settings the router would crash every 5 minutes!

Edited October 28, 2007 by nikster

[Petch01]

Going to try to exchange for the L version now.

I really hope you'll succeed in getting the GL. It's a great router together with Tomato 1.07.

Petch01

[Prasert]

Both DLink 604 and Zyxel 660 Prestige gave me lot of grief when using my Line for Torrent Up/Download. They got stuck every 24 or so hours, needing a Hard Reset.

I then switched to a Linksys Modem (Don't have the model number around), which worked fine until yesterday, when it died (probably by a Voltage Spike).

So,anyone here with a Suggestion which current Modem, available here, with or without Wifi, is working fine with full Torrent Speed Load? I am aware that the problem with most modems is the enormous number of open and half-open simultaneous connections that Torrents require, meaning that some modems can#t cope with that, and gradually cease to work until resetted.

Sunny

You pointed out the bottleneck in most routers when torrents are involved: the enormous number of open and half-open simultaneous connections

The solution can be found in setting a timeout value for the udp and tcp translations. Usually a timeout of 300 seconds for tcp and 900 seconds for udp frees up enough memory and processor time to make sure the router continues to run smoothly.

All routers mentioned sofar do not have a setting for this. Check out eBay for a Cisco 827 or Cisco 837, you should be able to get a 827 for around 3000THB (make sure it has got 32MB of DRAM memory). These models have an adsl port and 4 ethernet ports. Configuration can be done through a web interface, fine tuning can be done through telnet.

The 827 will easily handle 10.000 concurrent translations.

[stumonster]

saw the WRT54GL at Lak si plaza for 1800 baht when I was there last week so I was thinking of getting one because of the ability to flash new/interesting firmware onto it.

can any of the firmwares available act as a VPN server ?

[Sunny Valentine]

So the router, not the modem is the culprit then?

Will have a look at both the Ciscos and the Linksys options, thanks! The Cisco needs a modem, I guess? Is it important which to choose, in my case? And the Linksys is a router plus modem in one case?

Right now I use my old DLink, with an electronic timer switch that cuts the mains off for 10 minutes every day at 5 AM. Works too .....

Sunny

[Richard-BKK]

My experience is that even the best modem is still limited by what the network has to offer. The best thing to speed-up your torrent traffic is to quite any filtering.

I myself use a small Linux box (Celeron 1300Mhz, 384mb with 80gb HDD) to download torrents, this Linux box has no problems with worm, port and virus attacks. So this little Linux machine connects direct to the Internet using the DMZ settings in my router.

I can compare the speed of MS-Windows and the little Linux machine very accurate, as the torrents I download are always the same seeds and only a handful downloaders (it are preview Linux CD-images)

If for some reason I download the torrents with MS-Windows I never get a stream of more then 80kb, with Linux the standard is 100kb with peaks to 115kb and fallbacks to 90kb. The Windows computer has a realtime Virus scanner and Firewall installed....(Firewall is set not to block any torrent data).

Until now the best one on one torrent download I got from the cheap (free) Huawei MT800 modem from True Interent, okay it needed some tweaking, as the IP/port filtering is default set to medium and maximum connection at the same time is default 10 IP's, which blocks or limiteds most Torrent requests....

[Prasert]

...

The Cisco needs a modem, I guess? Is it important which to choose, in my case?

...

No. You plug the phone line straight into the router. If you're using a phone, you also need a splitter. But you need that for every modem or router.

[nikster]

Going to try to exchange for the L version now.

I really hope you'll succeed in getting the GL. It's a great router together with Tomato 1.07.

It's being shipped right now... if all else fails, thanni also has it for around 2100 baht. unsurprisingly, it's the top bestseller

[Guest Reimar]

For really heavy use I woulg go for the Cisco if I don't mind about the cost!

[nikster]

So the router, not the modem is the culprit then?

Exactly. Number of simultaneous connections, to be precise. My Zyxel router passes at around 100 - 200, though it always takes a while so I am guessing it's just running out of memory or something.

Will have a look at both the Ciscos and the Linksys options, thanks! The Cisco needs a modem, I guess? Is it important which to choose, in my case? And the Linksys is a router plus modem in one case?

Right now I use my old DLink, with an electronic timer switch that cuts the mains off for 10 minutes every day at 5 AM. Works too .....

As long as it works, I wouldn't really go out of my way to replace it. As the saying goes, don't fix it if it ain't broke.

The Linksys is actually a wireless router and doesn't have a modem. There are numerous other Linksys models without wireless, with DSL etc but the problem is that none of them run Tomato. The Linksys is a great router solely because of the open source firmware available for it which makes this 2000+ Baht box into something that's as powerful as the expensive corporate Cisco routers, except with an interface that humans can understand.

I bought a separate Linksys DSL modem for BHT 1200

There's a whole range of other Router models supported by open source firmware, but I haven't seen any of them in Thailand. Buffalo seems to have pretty good support for example, as well as Asus. I have just never seen Asus or Buffalo routers here. Tomato only supports a handful of models though. For the big list of OpenWRT supported models see http://wiki.openwrt.org/TableOfHardware

[briley]

Interested in a bit of Richard-BKK's reply that Linux is faster at downloading than windows, but then went on to say windows has real time virus checker.

I've just switch utorrent to add !ut at the end of incomplete downloads so AVG won't check them for virus.

The download speed rose a bit, from 40 to 48

Be interesting to see if there is a sustained improvement.

[Prasert]

For really heavy use I would go for the Cisco if I don't mind about the cost!

You would be surprised if you check eBay frequently. You can get a Cisco adsl router for the same or a lower price, compared to Linksys or Zyxel.

Only the configuration seems to scare people away, but that's a one-time job and it's easy to get any help.

Determining if your router is capable of handling the concurrent translations is difficult if there's only a web interface. Checking the processor usage and available memory is often not implemented in the web interfaces (although Tomato does provide lots of insight compared to other routers!)