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I'm considering upgrading my current DD-WRT micro equipped router to something more powerful. I am interested in a router than handle atleast double the amount of connections my router can currently (4096) to better handle BitTorrent traffic when it's maxing out my connection bandwidth (16mbps/2mbps). On top of that I would want to create a gigabit lan for streaming 1080P video throughout my home.

For this type of situation would a higher end consumer grade router be able to fit this bill with DD-WRT on it for tweaking settings, would I be better off looking at a commercial grade router, or what about building a linux machine to act as a router and use a switch in combination with that instead?

I'm looking for the most bang for my buck, since I'm sure that there are plenty of $1000+ commercial routers that could do everything I want but be overkill for my application.

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Perhaps look into pfSense, m0n0wall, Smoothwall or Untangle - they are small router operating-systems, that run on regular (old/slow) PC hardware.

Any of these will handle a lot of connections, and can do pretty much anything you could wish from such a system (multi-connections with failover, QoS, intrusion detection, host/connection to VPNs etc etc)

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Untangle looks very nice especially with the amount of work they've put into the UI instead of having to manipulate everything in .conf files etc. – Chris Marisic Jul 31 '09 at 14:45
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You could try to find second-hand cisco routes on ebay?

A friend of mine used to find very good equipement sold there.

Just find a few models which meet your requirements and check their prices on ebay.

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Do you or anyone have any opinions of the Cisco WRVS4400N, I attempted to find it's technical specifications on Cisco's website but couldn't so I sent them an email asking if it could support 20K connections. – Chris Marisic Jul 20 '09 at 13:18
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@dbr

I agree with your answer, and would also like to add to your list:

Untangled - http://www.untangle.com/home

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The connection limit can be easily increased on your current DD-WRT. Did this myself - works on my Linksys WRT54-GS.

If you like DD-WRT, you could use the x86-Version on a small PC hardware (like ASRock ION).

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I already had increased it from the few 100 it is by factory to 4096. – Chris Marisic Oct 7 '09 at 19:04
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