Welp, I bit the bullet and bought a router

"Textured Soy Protein" (texturedsoyprotein) 11/15/2014 at 23:14 • Filed to: None

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After my !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , I still hadn't really made a decision. All of them had a good amount of shitty reviews. My gf and I were running some errands today, and happened to be near Best Buy, so I said screw it, I'll pop in there and see if I can't find a router.

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Most of the selection of routers at Best Buy was either the really fancy $200+ routers, or more basic cheap routers. I just wanted an AC router with gigabit ethernet (I have 60 Mbps cable internet from Charter, and the modem has a gigabit port) that was decent and not too crazy expensive.

I picked up a !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! , even though it has— gasp —only a 3-star review average on Amazon. That's kinda misleading because for some reason Amazon lumps the reviews together for 5 different Linksys router models. I've noticed that Amazon does this a lot. Which is damned stupid.

The router included a Cat 5e ethernet cable, which is good, because the ethernet cable supplied by Charter was a basic Cat 5 one. I mean, really Charter? You provide a modem with a gigabit port but connect it with a cable that doesn't allow gigabit speeds???

I set it up, and so far, everything seems good. I still need to figure out how to change the DNS servers from the crappy Charter DNS servers but other than that, speeds are nice and stable.

My devices that support 802.11ac are my 13" Macbook Pro Retina, and my LG G2. I'm actually now pulling 65 Mbps on Speedtest.net when upstairs, and 45-50 Mbps downstairs. The most I'd get on either of them running 802.11n routers was 35 mbps.

My devices that support 802.11n 5 GHz are now all pulling down about 35 Mbps, the 802.11n 2.4 GHz devices are pulling about 20 Mbps, and 802.11g 2.4 GHz devices are pulling about 10 Mbps.

It'd be nice for the 802.11g devices to pull more speed, but it seems like watching Netflix on my PS3 is more stable, with less going down to a lower picture quality. If I want to speed it up, Groupon is selling this !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! for 10 bucks.

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Hmm...what's a little more money spent?

Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy > Textured Soy Protein 11/15/2014 at 23:21

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That's not a bad choice, the company my father works for almost bought Linksys, actually.

Flavien Vidal > Textured Soy Protein 11/15/2014 at 23:25

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https://www.pfsense.org/

Ran for 1 year and 112 days if I recall correctly without ever rebooting... Then the electricity shut down for a couple hours and well, it was sort of forced to crash :)

Any cheap ass PC does the trick for it... Soooo stable...

Textured Soy Protein > Flavien Vidal 11/15/2014 at 23:36

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Um, so what am I supposed to do with this?

Textured Soy Protein > Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy 11/15/2014 at 23:36

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So he doesn't work for Belkin does he? Because that's who ended up buying Linksys from Cisco.

Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy > Textured Soy Protein 11/15/2014 at 23:37

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Juniper, actually.

GTI MkVII > Textured Soy Protein 11/15/2014 at 23:42

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I've had the EA6900 for about a year now and have been very pleased. Good choice!

Boxer_4 > Textured Soy Protein 11/15/2014 at 23:43

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I've been having good luck with Linksys/Cisco routers so far (WRT54G and EA3500). It's good to know that Linksys products are still good even under new ownership (used to be Cisco, now Belkin).

Textured Soy Protein > Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy 11/15/2014 at 23:48

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Ah, I guess I didn't really pay too much attention to when Cisco was selling off Linksys. I just happened to see in a couple Linksys reviews they were talking about how Belkin bought them. Interesting that Juniper looked at getting into the consumer space.

I actually had a Belkin router from like 2006 to 2009 or something like that. It worked pretty solid at the time. One of these guys:

Apparently it was a Belkin F5D7230-4, which looking at its old page on Newegg , had just as mixed reviews as routers do nowadays.

Textured Soy Protein > Boxer_4 11/15/2014 at 23:53

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Yeah, I saw about Belkin in this review . Which also mentions that this particular router came out before the Belkin deal.

Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy > Textured Soy Protein 11/15/2014 at 23:53

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This was years ago actually, they were competing with Cisco to buy it in the early/mid 00's. A lot of the currently running networking stuff in my house is either Linksys, Belkin, or Juniper, with an Apple AirPort for music streaming.

Nibby > Textured Soy Protein 11/16/2014 at 00:00

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Linksys routers kick ass.

Flavien Vidal > Textured Soy Protein 11/16/2014 at 00:05

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It's a router-firewall... Install it on a small PC you don't care about anymore . It will basically transform that PC as a dedicated router. EXTREMELY stable and of course since it's much more powerful than a router like yours, it will never overload unless you connect like 2 or 300 devices to it. Even then, if it overload it will be because you installed pfsense on an old P3 :)

Shankems > Textured Soy Protein 11/16/2014 at 00:09

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My god, if you think router shopping is shitty, try shopping for a vacuum or mattress. Both of which I've had to do this year.

Vacuums have no rating system. They all say 12 amps, and the only difference I could discern between the $100 and $600 vacuum, is that the $600 one has got more colorful plastic, and attachments for crevices I didn't know I had.

I'm too frustrated over my mattress experience to even talk about it yet.

Textured Soy Protein > Zipppy, Mazdurp builder, Probeski owner and former ricerboy 11/16/2014 at 00:14

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I suppose I've had good luck with most of the routers I've used over the years—none of which have been particularly high end. It's been a mix of Linksys, Belkin & Netgear.

Textured Soy Protein > Shankems 11/16/2014 at 00:17

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I actually bought a vacuum not too long ago. I got a Shark NV360 Lift-Away Navigator Deluxe . It kicks ass.

Textured Soy Protein > Flavien Vidal 11/16/2014 at 00:21

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1. I don't have old computers just lying around waiting to be converted into routers.

2. I wanted a gigabit WAN port and 802.11ac radio. If I had an old computer ready to turn into a router, it would need those things added to it.

Flavien Vidal > Textured Soy Protein 11/16/2014 at 00:25

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You still need a "router" for your wifi or to have a wired connection to other PC, but it would be used as a wireless-hub and not do its router job which is what makes routers crash.

Pfsense just provides stability to people who really need it...

Textured Soy Protein > Flavien Vidal 11/16/2014 at 00:31

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This all sounds like way more effort than I feel like making, to accomplish something I don't need.

TDogg > Textured Soy Protein 11/16/2014 at 07:46

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That thing is gorgeous.

davedave1111 > Textured Soy Protein 11/16/2014 at 13:36

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"The router included a Cat 5e ethernet cable, which is good, because the ethernet cable supplied by Charter was a basic Cat 5 one."

Seriously? Where the fuck did they find plain old Cat 5? I don't think I've seen any for a decade or so.

Textured Soy Protein > davedave1111 11/16/2014 at 15:47

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Who knows, but it wouldn't be the first time a cable company found a way to do something stupid.

Textured Soy Protein > TDogg 11/16/2014 at 15:47

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Seems pretty basic black and gray plastic to me...

uofime > Textured Soy Protein 11/17/2014 at 10:39

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in my experience the biggest impediment to wireless speed tends to be interference. That's the biggest reason that 2.4ghz devices have so much trouble reaching the advertised throughput. if you live in an apartment complex where you can see 10+ routers at one time you're going to have problems most likely. you can verify this by moving your device relatively close to the router you'll see the speeds go way up.

even without interference streaming video over wireless sucks. a few years ago I did a lot of testing with my ps3 streaming from a media server and the result was that it worked significantly better when everything was just hardwired. All the jitters in video went away, the menu browsing searching through directories was even much faster.

if at all possible you should try to hardwire your media network devices. You'll be so much happier.

with my gigabit network I have transcoded video from one computer with a windows "share" on a different computer and the bottle neck was still the processor.

my $.02

Jordaneer, The Mountaineer Man > Textured Soy Protein 11/17/2014 at 11:24

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thats odd, I own the cheapest n router known to man (the belkin n150 that cost 30 bucks 5 years ago). and I am able to pull our full download speed over wifi (20 down and 2 up), guess I'd have to upgrade if I had faster internet, but my mom recently upgraded from 1 up and 1 down to 20 down and 2 up, I can't complain, its fast enough for what I need to do.

Textured Soy Protein > uofime 11/17/2014 at 13:13

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I know what you mean about interference, so I've been tweaking the channels on both the 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands. The PS3 with its 802.11g 2.4 GHz adapter is now doing 12 Mbps on the speed test part of its network config settings.

The router is upstairs in the guest room/office, the PS3 is upstairs in the living room. We have a Sony SMP-N200 media streamer in the same room as the router. It's 802.11n 2.4 GHz. Last time I checked it was doing 18 Mbps on the speed test in its network settings.

Netflix on the PS3 has been rock solid with the 12 Mbp it's getting. DLNA streaming from Plex running on my MBP is alright, but fast forwarding or rewinding can sometimes not be so hot. I went ahead and ordered that Netgear universal 802.11n dual band adapter on Groupon. For 10 bucks, it gets the PS3 on to 802.11n 5 GHz, so why not, right? It should hopefully improve DLNA streaming quality.

uofime > Textured Soy Protein 11/17/2014 at 14:46

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yeah, drilling a hole through your floor might be a bit extreme. I would suggest you hard wire the media box if you can since they're in the same room.

I'd really make an effort to move that router to the media center.

Getting on the 5ghz band should help at least until everyone adopts it and it is as cluttered as the 2.4ghz band haha

Textured Soy Protein > uofime 11/17/2014 at 16:00

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Putting the modem and router on the media stand isn't really desirable in my situation. We have landline phone service from the cable company, and the main base station for our cordless phone system plugs into a phone jack on the modem. We don't want to have the modem, router and phone base, with all of their blinky lights, right in our faces while we watch tv.

I'm not too concerned about hard wiring the media streamer. It's at least got 802.11n (albeit only 2.4 GHz). It's only about 8-10 feet away from the router, which is close enough to get a solid wireless signal but far enough that I'd have to go buy a cable since all of my ethernet cables are little ones I've accumulated from various modems and routers over the years. Its DLNA streaming is more stable than the PS3 anyway—probably because it has a better wifi connection.

Overall in the couple days since getting this new router, the network is now working very well, it's just that 802.11g wifi on the PS3 is letting it down on DLNA streaming. Which should (hopefully) no longer be an issue once this 802.11n 5GHz adapter for the PS3 arrives in the mail.