Thinking about treating myself to a decent router

[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.............

 

[BigT]

But where are you streaming from? If it's the internet then that'll be the bottleneck, not a 100Mbit port on the router that your AP may connect to.

If you're streaming to your wireless devices from your LAN then you'll need Gigabit ports on the wired side of your network too or else that'll be the bottleneck.

Perhaps a better way to think about it is, think of all the connections from start to end that you're worried about and where is the slowest connection - that'll be the bottleneck. Without changing that then you won't see improvements. So for example wireless device to internet = 300Mbps to the AP, 100Mbps from AP to router if not on a gigabit port, 78Mbps from router to internet. In that case unless you upgrade the internet you won't see a improvement. Now if you're streaming from the internet and from the LAN simultaneously then fair enough but your AP won't be reaching its theoretical maximum unless you're right next to it in any case.

 

[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?

 

[BigT]

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?

 

[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?

 

[BigT]

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?

 

[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.

 

[BigT]

So I'm assuming that you're getting your speeds from what a Windows transfer dialogue shows you? In which case that's reporting in megabytes per second MBps. There are 8 bits in a byte and network stuff is described in megabits per second Mbps.

If Windows is saying you're getting 10MBps hard wired then that's 80Mbps and so close to 100Mbps you're network ports on your router are limiting you to.

Your AP is advertised as 300Mbps so three times faster than your wired network ports. You should be able to achieve the same throughput if stood close to the AP as you do when wired. Of course I'm assuming your wireless NIC in the computer you're using is up to Wireless N speeds too.

 

[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?

 

[bremen1874]

Can you confirm the units you're using?

M = mega
b = bits
B = bytes

So do you mean 2.5MB/s (20Mb/s) with a Wi-Fi connection speed of 54Mb/s?

54Mb/s suggests that it's a Wireless-G connection.

There are massive overheads with Wi-Fi connections. You can basically halve what the connection speed would suggest is possible.

I sounds like you need a serious overhaul of your equipment before you start worrying about whether it's connected via Gigabit or not.

 

[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

 

[bremen1874]

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

 

[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?

 

[bremen1874]

100 Mb/s is 12.5 MB/s (the correct units do matter).

The overheads on a wired connection are low and achieving 12+ MB/s (as reported by Windows) is to be expected.

 

[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.

 

[BigT]

Of course I'm assuming your wireless NIC in the computer you're using is up to Wireless N speeds too.

the wifi speed connected at 54mbps to the laptop, its quite a old laptop tho running winxp?

Looks like my assumption was wrong.

It sounds like you need a serious overhaul of your equipment before you start worrying about whether it's connected via Gigabit or not.

This. Please don't buy a shiny new router with a gigabit port before you sort everything else out. With what you describe now, if you got a 78Mbps fibre connection, your XP laptop won't be able to use more than about a third of the internet bandwidth over wireless, even with that gigabit port. You'll end up being disappointed.

 

[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.

 

[BigT]

It's not going to make much of a difference. The slowest link from your laptop to the internet is the wireless network card in the laptop we've ascertained. It seems it's rated at 54Mbps which is 6.75MBps and you'll probably get half of that in the real world which is going to be seen in a Windows dialogue as less than 3.5MBps.

 

[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?

 

[bremen1874]

It's about what you'd expect for Wireless G.