Looking for cheap and best Router-switch?.

I am looking for cheap and best Router-cum-switch?. Which is the best?. In US there are only 3 or 4 brands are available, but in Asia there are like 30 to 35 brands are there it seems, lot of cometetion and price was dam cheap itseems comapre to US.

Reply to
santa19992000
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The Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement can tell you EXACTLY which Asian Counterfeit Operations are doing the best job today in marketing counterfeit router "cheapness."

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Sincerely,

Brad Reese BradReese.Com® Cisco Resource Center

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Reply to
BradReeseCom

Sorry, it is my mistake, Actually I am looking for SOHO market (Home office). if I have one Broadband connection, in a Small office/Home office I would like to connect all 10 or 12 computers and printer in Local area Networ, I am looking for 8/16 port switchs, which should have FE ports with auto-detection.

Also I am lloking some products which should supprt load balancing, for eaxmple in Internet cafe lot of computers shoudl connected to Internet.

Reply to
santa19992000

You may find the Cisco Product Advisor helpful:

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Sincerely,

Brad Reese BradReese.Com® Cisco Repair Worldwide

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Reply to
BradReeseCom

How many of those are different internally?

Reply to
James Knott

In article , wrote: :I am looking for cheap and best Router-cum-switch?. Which is the best?. :In US there are only 3 or 4 brands are available, but in Asia there are :like 30 to 35 brands are there it seems, lot of cometetion and price :was dam cheap itseems comapre to US.

You won't get very far unless you name some specs. Managable or not? Number of ports? Port speeds? Number of copper/gbic/sfp interfaces? Routing protocols supported? Security features? Required VLAN features? Required QoS features?

As for brands, I can name more than "3 or 4" off the top of my head: Cisco, Nortel, HP, Netgear, D-Link, Linksys, SMC... and that's not even including the numerous off-brands available in consumer electronic stores.

Reply to
Walter Roberson

In article , BradReeseCom wrote: :The Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement can tell you :EXACTLY which Asian Counterfeit Operations are doing the best job today :in marketing counterfeit router "cheapness."

I looked at their site, and do not find that information anywhere. I see that they have a "report" on grey marketting available... to businesses who send them a company fax that indicates the reason why they are interested. It isn't clear whether the "report" names names. But it doesn't really matter whether it does, because the report is only about Grey Market activities, not about counterfeiting.

I looked at the Press portion of their site, and do not see anything about counterfeiting there. Every single item I checked was about grey market (not counterfeit) activity, and every single suit I could see was against North American principles -- channel partners, warrantee companies, professors at US universities claiming educational discounts fraudulantly.

:

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But perhaps I just missed the page. Could you point out particular URLs there, or navigation instructions if a master URL with frames are involved?

Reply to
Walter Roberson

In article , wrote: :Sorry, it is my mistake, Actually I am looking for SOHO market (Home :office). if I have one Broadband connection, in a Small office/Home :office I would like to connect all 10 or 12 computers and printer in :Local area Networ, I am looking for 8/16 port switchs, which should :have FE ports with auto-detection.

Okay, managed or unmanaged? Load requirements? Security features? Any QoS requirements?

:Also I am lloking some products which should supprt load balancing, for :eaxmple in Internet cafe lot of computers shoudl connected to Internet.

That sounds like a separate requirement, possibly with a different number of ports and possibly with the addition of an uplink port; also, in such a situation, reliability or redundancy become important. [An Internet Cafe that is down with network problems loses it's main excuse for serving mediocre food...]

Is it actually "load balancing" you are looking for, or is it "rate shaping" ? Load balancing refers to distributing load to resources equally, such as might be required if you provided application services (e.g., gaming) or if you had a cluster of servers that were acting as http cache servers for the user hosts. "Rate shaping" would be used if you want certain bandwidths per port, or if you want to restrict the actual network draw against your WAN connection [e.g., if you pay by peak access rate.] "Rate shaping" usually implies buffering and stuffing in packets as soon as there is a chance to do so. There is also Policing, another form of QoS, in which packets beyond a certain rate are simply dropped -- which is not supposed to matter for UDP, and triggers TCP congestion-control algorithms to slow down TCP.

Within policing and rate-shaping, an important factor is the level you wish to police or shape at. Per-port is fair common, and per-vlan is perhaps the next most common. If you want to go down to per-application (e.g., allow full rate to http traffic but restrict KaZaa rates) then your choices become much more limited and much more expensive. Part of the difficulty there is that one can no longer assume that a certain port corresponds to a certain application: many of the P2P programs are able to fall back to using port 80 (normally http) in order to bypass firewalls or rate controls.

In the Internet Cafe environment, security also becomes more important: users will not want other users to be able to spy on them or control their sessions or whatever. And you want to prevent viruses, trojans and other kinds of malware from using your LAN as an avenue to spread between the various systems (especially if you are offering wireless access to user-provided systems.)

When your business is at stake, it is ultimately self-defeating to go for the "cheapest" router: if you are earning (say) $50/hour in access fees then having your network down for a day while the wait-staff tries to debug the problem is going to chew through your profits, losing you easily $500 in a day. When you have a LAN that fools and borderline sociopaths are going to have access to, you need your networking equipment to be tough instead of cheap.

Reply to
Walter Roberson

To the OP, you might want to look at F5 and Foundry, among others. Pretty far down the list you'll even find Cisco, assuming cost and scalability aren't your top priorities.

To the OP, again, I just completed a detailed RFP on products that fit this description, and ProQuent and P-Cube came out on top. Give them a look if you're serious about policing, rate shaping, and not being fooled by traffic that masquerades on well-known ports.

Reply to
Bill M.

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