Over the weekend my router that was provided to my by my ISP went bust. After ringing my ISP they said it was most likely something to do with the power supply and that they would send out a new power unit.
But I thought I would take the opportunity to upgrade my router as in my house of two people, we have two laptops, a network drive, xbox, iPad, iPhone, Apple TV and I want to extend it with a FreeNAS box.
I went out and bought a what I thought was a modem router but it turns out to just be a network router with no modem inbuilt. (Linksys E1500 Wireless N300 Cable Router with Speedboost).
So I don’t know if it is worth doing, taking back the router and swapping it for one that includes a modem or saving a bit of cash and plug the router into the router that I was given by my ISP. Is this compatible? Is it worth it will I get any upgrade on the network?
5 Answers -
venkatp16
June 26, 2012Belkin is the best .. give it a try and why do you need modem in this setup?
Ben
June 26, 2012Just wondering why you need the modem.
Mike
June 26, 2012In general there is nothing bad/wrong with getting another Router for your network.
You will have to make a few networking (design) decisions and a little bit of setup.
I.e. do you want all devices to be a single network or a separate network using the new router etc..
What to do and whether it’s worth it depends on the modem your ISP has given you [in my opinion]. Some of them are bad (to put it in friendly words) others are fine to be used.
Personally I swapped my ISP’s modem against my own router-modem combo simply because it’s firewall was incapable to be fully turned off (to run my own router behind it), it’s port forwarding wasn’t working anywhere near reliable and I could never be certain whether my ISP-modem had some issues or my provider itself.
If you are comfortable with the modem provided by your ISP I would keep using it because they often try to blame issues on third-party hardware.
Then simply add the new route behind it either as an Switch+WiFi access point (by setting the WAN port as Ethernet) or create another LAN segment behind it i.e. 10.0.0.0/24 between modem and router, 192.168.0.0/24 between your own router and clients.
jessemanalansan
June 27, 2012For me, as long as you have the correct setup with the router. Any router Cisco/Belkin will do.
FIDELIS
June 27, 2012Hello, did you receive the part sent to you by the ISP? If you did, did it work? I would try and see if it is possible to disable the router part of your provided modem/router. Once that is done, make sure to connect the router you bought and set it up with the modem included in the combo.
Most times the hardware provided by ISP is not the greatest. Personally, I would rather have dedicated hardware instead of combo.