Thinking about treating myself to a decent router

[Phil2008]

I have been with sky for a yr now, but over the last 6 months or so the broadband has been rubbish, and over the last few days I have been using my good 10yr old dlink 504t router that I paid about £70 back in the day. This router has been the only ever decent router I bought myself, others has been cheapo things. I have been using the sky hub for the past yr and yeah its ok, but since using my dlink again, I wouldn't mind buying another decent router.....

Im on ADSL atm, but bt are apparently going to upgrade the lines so hopefully I'll get fibre........ But this is the problem with the sky T&C you have to use their sky hub with fibre, so what would happen if I get caught using a different router? It seems a odd set up because sky will let you use a 3rd party router with ADSL but not with fibre?

 

[Phil2008]

Thanks guys for your quick responses. So I should be ok using a different router when bt upgrades the lines, can sky tell if your not using their hub, as I was thinking I can temporarily connect up the sky hub if I need to ever ring them up?. I was reading about the MER thing last night, glad they have dropped it. So yeah if I can get the funds I wouldn't mind a 6port Dratek router with no wifi, as I had a large house and have a wifi access point in the centre of the house so I get complete coverage... But I might have to make do with a slightly less expensive one, but I want one with activity lights for the LAN ports?

Do I need a VDSL/ADLS router for both ADSL and Fibre?

 

[Phil2008]

What features of the DrayTek are you going use?

Unless you have a specific requirement I'd use Sky's router and add one or more wireless access points. If you need more network ports buy a switch.

Well I would like a gigabyte lan port for my access point, as can have 9+ things connected to it during the day, and just a few other lan ports for pc and printer, with some spare. Also need port forwarding and static IP assignment.

Also would a better router make the connection any more stable and faster?

 

[Phil2008]

The problem is the sky hub has only 100mbps lan ports

 

[Phil2008]

For sky adsl broadband you can use a generic username/password ect if you want to use a 3rd party router, but these details wont work for fibre, so you are forced to use their sky hub, unless you extract the info from the sky hub and the MER isn't a problem. I haven't found any info about the MER being scraped online?

Get a Billion 8800NL R2. It has an ADSL and VDSL modem and is a brilliant bit of kit for the price. I rate it better than my Asus 68u which is twice the price.

It doesn't have gigabit, but I really can't see the need unless you transfer large files often internally, and even then 100mb is still pretty quick.

I have looked at this router, it looks pretty good and will probably do everything I want it todo aswel. I see it has a WAN Gigabit port but guessing my wifi access point wouldn't work in that socket?

 

[Phil2008]

Absolutely. I don't understand this fascination with having the Access Point on a gigabit port. Unless you put a gigabit switch in that EWAN port, the rest of your network is going to be restricted to sub 100Mb using the Billion and your VDSL is sure going to be sub 100Mb so what's the point.

True, but there's a lot of stuff connected to the wifi access point,, I guess just don't want it bottlenecked with the AP being plugged into a 100mbps port. The access point gets quite a pounding as its used for media streaming from my desktop pc and internet access around the house. I have the tp-link 300M Wireless N Access Point for all the wifi devices to connect to, and have the wifi ip addresses managed by the router.

This is what's connected to the AP atm, accept for numb 1, thats my pc wired into the router.............

 

[Phil2008]

Basically my pc and main router is at 1 end of the house, so there's noway the wifi on the router will cover the whole house, so I have the access point in another room that is near enough in the middle of the house, so it covers all the rooms. The access point is networked cabled back to the router, with the pc and printer plugged in to the router, so every wireless device can connect to the access point to access the internet, my pc and the printer if needs be.

If all that makes any sense?

 

[Phil2008]

It does. If I understand correctly, none of your wireless devices routinely do large file transfers to your PC? In which case your internet is always going to be the limiting factor for everything you do. I fear you may be worrying unnecessarily and I wouldn't want you to spend money and see no real world improvement. Is there anything you do now that causes you concern in terms of the performance you see?

Not atm, I sometimes copy files to devices from my pc, but for gb worth of data I hard wire the data across, as the wifi will only do about 2 - 3mb transfer rate and thats if no one else is using the wifi. I will be changing the access point sometime to a faster one, as this one is quite a few yrs old now.

So if I am going to buy a decent router, I want it to be slightly future proof so it will last quite a while. That's if sky has got rid of the MER thing?

 

[Phil2008]

So your bottleneck is your wifi. It's capable of 300Mbps but you're only seeing a fraction of this. I'm going to assume you mean megabytes and not millibits so that's about 24Mbps throughout. A change of router is not going to make a blind bit of difference to anything. A change of faster AP might not help either as it could be the location. If you stand right next to the AP and transfer a big file to the PC is it any quicker?

Ah so 2-3mb's isnt anywhere near the max of the AP, I thought it was. Anything I copy across hardwired, only ever transfers at a max of 10mb/s, so I thought 2-3mb/s wasnt too bad for wifi? I'll test the transfer rate tomorrow with the laptop next to the AP.

 

[Phil2008]

Umm just tested it with laptop about 0.5meters away from the AP and its still only transferring at 2.5mb/s with the wifi speed connected at 54mbps to the laptop, its quite a old laptop tho running winxp?

 

[Phil2008]

Mega bytes yes.. I have now just tried it with a wired connection, and its now transfering at 11.3MB/s

Tried the wireless again from about 6-7 meters away from the AP, 2 brick walls and transferring just under 2MB/s now. I thought the cable from the router to the AP might of been dodgy, but with the speed dropping the further away from the AP, indicates that its something todo with the AP and I have checked to see its set to full speed. It could be just the AP wearing out I guess, but if it dies on me, I do have a 150mbps AP to fall back on.

But no one has really complained about the speed, so I haven't ever really taken much notice of the wifi speed, untill now

 

[Phil2008]

At 11.3MB/s you aren't even maxing out a 100Mb/s connection.

I thought 100mbps was roughly 10mb/s.. I havent ever gone much past 10mb/s with a 100mbps wired network connection, as far as I can remember?

 

[Phil2008]

windows 7 reported as 10.3mb/s if I remember rightly... Tonight was the first time transferring files using win10, and its increased to 11.3mb/s.

 

[Phil2008]

I am going to try my smaller tp-link AP and see if that makes any difference, also the AP is next to a cordless phone, so I dont know if that's interfering with it... Anyway I will have a play with it this afternoon and see if I can improve things.

 

[Phil2008]

Ah.......Well I have changed the AP and placed it a bit higher,, but na still the same speed 2.50mb/s..... So this is about the correct speed then for the laptop?

 

[Phil2008]

I might change it back to the old AP as I think it might give better wifi coverage as its got 3 antenna's, but the small AP has only 1, but I can place that higher up. I'll see how it goes.. The next thing I am going todo is extract the proper username/password from the sky box or try to anyway, then I'll be set up for fibre when it comes available. But I still don't know about the MER thing, has sky scrapped it or not?

 

[Phil2008]

I don't know how to make this any clearer but neither your Access Point nor your router is the issue here. You can swap and change all you like but the Wireless G on your laptop is going to be the limiting factor period.

I not bothered about the wifi side personally as I hardly use it anyway, its the rest of the family that uses it for phones,ipads, laptops.. ah yeah my laptop is the oldest laptop, but I only do a bit of net browsing with it... Other then that I use my desktop pc and thats wired in the router.