There are a lot of high quality routers on the market. People usually do not need to spend large amounts on their routers.
What people do need to be sure of is that their router is going to be sufficient for their needs. If that is just a bigger home or a small office network then one of the cheaper routers available with good quality firmware will easily suffice.
An example of this would be the SonicWALL TZ 170. It's ready to go out of the box and it will support up to 10 users, at the most basic configuration.
It has five-port autosensing 10/100Mbit/s LAN switch. This is as well as a 10/100Mbit/s WAN port. The software operating system is also very easy to use.
What a lot of people don't realize that if their needs are greater than this, they still don't need to spend a lot more on getting a more powerful router.
In actual fact most of the lower priced ones have a lot of power hidden away in them, that can easily do the job. What prevents them doing so is the device firmware.
The way to get round this is to do a firmware upgrade. This can be done with many of the good open source firmware products. Open source means free. A good choice is DD-WRT. The upgrade is not difficult for people with experience, but those without should be careful, as the router can be damaged during the process.
For this reason I always recommend to do as much research as possible on the firmware and router. This will Ideally mean going to the firmware wiki site, which will normally contain a lot of good information on the subject. Often it's a good idea to get the help of an expert for this process, as it can potentially save a lot of time and money in the long run.
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