I, of course knew that 802.11 a/b/g/n etc. are the industry standards, and want to steer clear of the vendors which use drivers at all for the routers, which is what I was looking for a list of and cannot seem to find. None of the vendors I can find seem to know how to put up a comparison sheet of all their products to depict what each unit is capable of what from a glance, which would make looking for specific devices easier. Which is why I posted here, hoping that I can at least get someone who's looked at the routers and done this research to post their findings here, at least for my scenerio.
All of my devices can be wired, (some through rather long cable runs that I'm trying to stay away from,) and all of them can be wireless too, it doesn't really matter on that point but for the most part the X-Box 360, laptop and all-in-one printer will be wireless and at least one of the two Windows machines and X-Box will be directly wired but likely that both will be. The X-Box is directly connected to the Media Center but uses it's own networking. I definately need better security than just "MAC Addressing" which is why I specified that it had to be NAT/SPI/WPA2 as well. I live in a neighborhood where it seems that everyone has a wireless network in their house and I can "see" dozens of them from my house and want to assure that mine is totally seperated and different than theirs, which is why I need to get rid of the idiot crap that Comcast sent me and get all new equipment that I can do something with and secure better, with government encryption if at all possible and at least making mine "invisible" to the rest of the people in the neighborhood. Something that's impossible to do with the current setup from Comcast that I currently have.
I did have a couple of Powerbooks in the house but one of them burnt up, litterally, so now I'm down to one, but eventually will be replacing most of the equipment here with Apple products, or at least the Mac operating system, if I can get it to work on AMD-64 machines, in the future as Windows XP x64/MCE becomes dated. (I'm NOT going to bother with the Vista operating system at all.) As it stands the only reason I use the Windows operating systems at all is for the gaming and Media Center features, but that's all about to change as I'm working on getting Mac running on AMD-64 and with nVidia nForce-4 SLI, once I do, I plan on creating a "Media Center" for the Mac platform and convert the few "racing" games that get played on it as well to Mac but until I do, I'm stuck with using Windows. (The other games already have Mac counterparts or are in the process of becoming Mac compatible.) The X-Box's are networked for playing against each other and for playing on-line as well as for using the extender features of MCE.
I need to have seperated WAN/LAN IP addressing because I want to use a different LAN IP address than what will be assigned my router on the WAN side, when I get it, I'm looking to get away from using 192.168.x.x. My MCE computer does double duties as a server for media files on the network as that's where all the media is placed when purchased then streamed across the network to all the other devices. Thus far, I have 1/2 terrabyte of storage on it and going to at least double that by next year. The problem I'm having is in all my research, I've not found a single resource that shows which routers can do what and for which operating system. I do need to make sure that all computers no matter the operating system can use the all-in-one printer all the time, which is my biggest concern, secondly that the media/gaming/voip performance is given priority over someone just "checking emails", so that I can drop the lag on the network between the consoles and PC's as well as with their online presence. Having 8MB/s service is kinda redundant when someone who has 1MB/s service can run rings around you online due to latencies in your own network.
I had heard the D-Link's were best at this when it come to gaming but am unsure of how they play with the Apples, since the Powerbook seems to be having problems with even finding the printer when using a D-Link print server that's supposed to be compatible with the Mac's. It seems that the Apple Airport Express is limited to only 802.11g and nothing above it, which I'm looking to use for reasons I specified above, which is why I'm looking towards 802.11n or 802.11g with "speed boost" of some sort. Even if the Mac OS can't take advantage, (at least not yet,) of this, I still want it for the PC's and XBox's. Furthermore, I've read tons of complaints about the Airport Express having problems with Windows machines for one reason or another and I'm trying to steer clear of something that's going to be knocking anyone off-line every chance it gets (the Linksys equipment I've used previously was great for that as well, reason I'm not looking at Linksys at all right now). I've looked at other companies products, such as Netgear, (what Comcast is currently using for it's networking package in my area,) Buffalo, and I've used Linksys in the past and wasn't impressed by it so I'm not looking to go back to Linksys anytime soon, but I'm unsure of what else to look at that others in the Apple crowd has found that "just works" with their set-ups. Most if not all the companies are dropping support for the Apple products or at least that's how it seems because of the lack of mention for Apple's Mac OS in their feature lists. Buffalo for example only said that certain models that don't exist on their site were compatible with Apple's Mac OS X but that's of no help at all to me.
The "Plug-N-Pray" reference was to the software part of the router, in where I'm also looking for one that uses "UPNP" for controlling the ports and such in it from software on my computers and X-Boxs, be it Zone-Alarm or Windows OneCare, (OneCare is my current choice at the moment though, but I've also used others in the past that does the best job for my needs,) or whatever. Either way, I'm looking for something that can be controlled by the operating system, if I choose to use it that way, such as for opening ports for yahoo IM without having to go into the port forwarding page each time I use it to open the ports for it to have a web-cam session for an example. Or the X-Box can open the ports itself to play a Halo multiplayer match against someone across the planet for another one, while a video created on the Powerbook in another room is transferred to the Media Center that's also streaming an HDTV broadcast to the X-Box 360 connected to the TV in yet another room, while yet the other computer is scanning in pictures that someone sent of other family members that may also be printing out for sending to even other family members simultainously, all without lagging down the network as much as possible. (This is a serious scenerio where I am, though the computers are also doing other things simultainously as well but for the most part not requiring networking. That still doesn't say anything about VOIP that may be taking place at the same time as well.)
Hopefully this more detailed explanation will be of more help for those of you who think it's such a hard thing to come up with product names of equipment they may be using for their network that has similarly networked hardware attached to it. 2 PC's, 1+ Mac's, X-Box, X-Box 360, EPSON Multi-Use device, and all talking nicely to each other all wirelessly. Seriously, I could just go buy a USB hub, and find some 100'+ USB cables and run the EPSON Multi-Use device to each computer that way, but I'm not looking at going that route if I can steer clear of it and I'm looking for each device to be able to be on the same sub-net without having to run wires everywhere. Hence the need for something that's wireless and has protection beyond just "Mac Addressing" and WEP as the crap router that comes from Comcast provides. Believe me when I tell you that they are crap, I've had mine hacked at least several times now already by kids in the neighborhood just looking for something to do besides running the streets with their parents guns taking target practice at anything that moves and somethings that don't. And with the things I have on my systems I don't need for people to be able to hack into them, at least not so easily that it can be done twice in the same week by the same person.
