Nexus needs a new router! Comments/Suggestions please!

The pricepoint at which home routers are sold does not allow for consistant performance characteristics. Most common electronic components are priced on a sampling rate basis. What that means is "how many 'bad' ones do you get out of a sampling size", and what does 'bad' mean? Do you get one bad chip of RAM per 1000, per 10000, per 50000? And does bad mean that it drops a register ever 100 times, 1000 times, or 1000000 times?

The quality stuff mostly goes to OEMs. The really bad stuff gets tossed. The rest in between goes into parts bins. SoHo routers are designed using what's called "parts bin engineering." That means that the engineers take a look at whats avaliable at what prices and design the equipment based on that.

When you're talking about the VERY low production prices these devices are tuned to, reliability vs replacability becomes a huge factor. If I can buy 1 million 8Meg chips of ram knowing that 990,000 will last a year before going bad, then I can just indlude replacing 10,000 out of 500,000 routers a year in my price point. I may well know that another 20,000 chips will go bad within a further year, but I don't care about that because it's out of warranty, and my marketing research tells me that people will grumble, but they'll pony up another $50 for another router without too much crying.

So:

Some people have great luck with SoHo devices, but some people replace them every 9 months. Out of my group of friends & aquaintences I saw about 10 linksys routers go bad in one year, and that's when I stopped recommending linksys under any circumstance.

If you want reliability it's going to cost more than $50. If you are willing to spend $1500 then go buy a cisco 2600 and have fun. If you are willing to spend $150, go to a trade show and get a decent looking old PC w/ 2 NICs and install IPCop or M0n0wall.

When it comes to wireless, these problems are FANTASTICALLY exacerbated. People seem to think that they're goign to buy a router, a bunch of ram, competent code, a radio that reliably broadcasts and recieves freaking ETHERNET, and a four-port switch for <$200. They're fooling themselves. Right now the cheapest way to get reliable wi-fi is either an Apple Base Station or a good deal on an Orinoco-chipped business-grade AP. If you can find the latter it will be around $180, the former is consistantly avaliable refurbed from Apple for about $150. Other than that, you can either look into building your own as an extension to building your own router, or you can play the crap shoot with random-quality SOHO models.

Either way, go into it with your eyes open, and don't listen too much to the "I love netgear, I love linksys, I love d-link" crowd, because they are all built out of the same parts bins on the same price points.