How to find or make cheap router

2009-03-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

I decided to make this small blog about cheap routers, because I had a lot of problems myself find good and not so expensive router or wireless router, or to made it myself. So I was learning, reading experimenting and I can say that I become a not really expert but pretty close to expert for cheap or home made routers and wireless routers. It can save you money, but also can be very fun, and after all feeling that You have when you make and use your own hand made home router is something with highest posible positive feelings.

So I will suppose that you know what router is and also you need one for something and after some searches you find my site that giving some hope to you that you will find some router for cheap money :) Any case if you don't know what is router and you don't need one and you are still here, take a look at this section of Wikipedia about what router is.

OK,so definitely you are here because your search engine drives you here when you were looking for router. As you can see I DON'T SELL any routers and I don't offering you to buy some routers from me :) I will just explain how to get some really cheap and professional router or how to do it yourself.

When you are buying new branded router like some cisco routers or linkisys or d-link etc, model it is not always best solutions because it is: 1) expensive and 2) will not always satisfy your needs, so basically, depending on your needs, you can get router for small money (or without money at all) on this ways:

1. Buy some cheap router and replace its firmware with some open source firmware that will handle your hardware inside router for about thousand times better (just for example dd-wrt for wireless routers, is so powerfull open source firmware supported by many products will make from some crappy router,wireless or dsl router or even access point powerful,cheap and stable professional router solution)

2. If you need simple Ethernet router with no cost you can make it from some old, but realy old machine that will run some specialized routing linux distro, for this you can use even PI with less than 100 MHz CPU, believe me, this is tested myself)

3. For Ethernet router you can use some again,very old machine with professional and best-on-earth routing software like Mikrotik, I am using this too, for example my about 90Mhz Pentium I machine handles part of network of about 50 computers attached to switch and 3-4 wireless connected laptops without any problem and without restart for more than 8 months

4. Creating super Ethernet + wireless router for almost free, with open source software like dd-wrt, or ArLinux, or my favorite zeroshell routing distro, or, depending of your exact need some other open source linux variant.

Ok, this were just brief informations about subjects that I will explain, everyof thise 4 soulutions and also will add some new like making free or at least cheap firewall (hardware) etc.

I would like to hear your comments, to tell me what you are interested for and I will try to do my best to find solution for you situation (I mean on 'routing' situation that you need to solve). Thats all from me for now. Just not to be boring here is one of most famous cheap routers excellent for adding a lot of more power with replacing original firmware with open source firmware, it is WRT54G Wireless Router made my linksys.

From this $50 bucks baby you can make powerfull and proffessional router that costs at least $350-$400 in this moment for just 1 afternoon. I will write you small guide on how to do that and other stuffs that I meantioned here.

Aditional info: to find some base info about CPUs and hardware that can be used in routers take a look at amd processors list and intel processors list on this blog, where you can find some more info about every separate CPU unit.

Cheap Router Guide

How to find or make cheap router