Home Networking Story

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE

After hours and hours of playing around with my Home Router (which is a mid level router supposed to handle speeds of 300 Mbps [see the misconceptions here] as the package says) I was only able to get around 70 of the 300 I was paying for while wired in, and only about 30 on wifi. How could this be? They clearly advertise higher speeds. After a bit of research turns out that “Router” Manufacturers market these routers with a couple misconceptions:

• Consumer Routers don’t actually “route” traffic in the sense of doing it reliably. Which is why when you have more than a couple devices, you may have less stability. The “router” doesn’t know how to handle it.
• Their advertised speeds are usually LAN speeds, meaning the speed you may or may not get when your computer communicates to another computer on the network.
• It may or may not hold up to consistently high traffic without needing a reboot.
• You may or may not see your advertised speeds through the firewall (which limits the speed since it’s CPU intensive with the router)

After finding some of this out, I decided to invest a whopping $89 in a Business Grade router and set my old router up to only do wifi. After doing this, I started getting 80mbps on wifi, and 230ish on wired. Wow, what a difference. I let some time go by and finally bit the bullet in swapping out my old consumer grade router for an enterprise level access point. Well to my surprise, after the fun little setup. My speeds shot up to 195mbps on wifi.

Moral of the story is don’t let one piece of equipment do the job of three. Separate out your Wifi, Router and Modem.

Also, to note. Total price for the router and access point was around $230, though I have set up options of the same caliber for $180. The network setup requires networking knowledge and is not likely to be able to be set up by anyone without it.

CLIENT EXPERIENCE

Recently one of my clients was having disconnect issues, her VOIP phone wasn’t working, LOS Software and the VPN would disconnect constantly. How could this be! She has a brand new, “Top of the Line” modem!?

From personal experience and from pure proof, these all in one modem/routers are never as good as separating out the units. Imagine trying to eat a sandwich, read a book and drive through traffic at the same time. Not very efficient huh? That’s how most of the routers I see these days are. Especially when needing something heavy like VPN or Streaming.

Well, I pulled that all in one out of there and popped in my own setup. As soon as we got it running, we were able to sit on a 20 minute phone call, and use bandwidth heavy apps on 2 other computers at once without a blink. Speed tests were also showing 100% on wifi (usually it’s only 50-80%, mileage may vary). Bottom line, network is working perfectly now for her!