Background: My wife Sunny and I recently moved, and upgraded our cable internet from “1.5 meg” to “10 meg” speed. I had to ask to find out that that means we now get 10 megabits per second (Mbps, different from MBps, or megabytes per second) delivered to the house, whereas before we only got 1.5. So far, I’m keeping up. I think of it like a pipeline… we have a much bigger pipeline coming into the house now, capable of moving much more information.
So my problem comes when I’m trying to figure out whether to upgrade our wireless router in order to realize the full benefit of our upgrade. We currently use a Linksys WRT54G. When I tell the Blue Polo at Best Buy about this, he immediately shakes his head and says, “That’s not gonna cut it,” and suggests a mid-range dual-band router, N600 something. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt right up to the point he asks me to spend $75 (at least he didn’t ask me to buy the $180 one, I guess) but can’t explain why I need it exactly.
So, please, you won’t offend me, but break it down for me: why do I need a router that says 300 Mbps on the front, when I’m only getting 10 Mbps delivered to the house. He tried to explain it by saying that 300 Mbps was the speed at which the router talks to my devices and my devices talk back to the router, and I guess I could see why that might be helpful for the USB hard drive I could plug straight into the router (cool feature, BTW), but why does that matter? Those “pipelines” would be WAY underused if I can still only get that same 10 Mbps in the first place, right? Will my current router really not cut it?
FYI, I consider us pretty light internet users. We’d like to Skype without having to worry about video quality, watch movies on Netflix in the bedroom, and check out a YouTube video with no buffering, but that’s about as bandwidth-intensive as our wireless use would get, I think. We’d like to get an Xbox360, but that would probably be hardwired into the router for online play.
My simple take on what he said: It’s like being in line at McDonalds behind somebody who doesn’t know what he wants to order. If you’ve got five lines of people taking orders, and the one you’re in is stuck behind some loser, it’s really aggravating.
That said, just because the guy said you needed to spend money doesn’t mean you need to spend money. Up to a certain point, it’s his job to tell you that you need to spend money.
So, one simple question: When you got upgraded to 10Mbps, did you see an increase in speed? If not, then you probably do need to upgrade your router. If you saw an increase in speed, and you’re happy with it, you’re good.
My question, if we’re asking questions as little kids? Something I’ve always wondered: What’s the “-fi” stand for?
You can talk to the devices in your house with a fast router, but the bottleneck will be the gateway to the Internet.
I think your salesman is full of it, as 10Mb/s isn’t all that fast nowdays – fast enough for your tasks, though. However, the WRT54G might not be able to use the full speed of your cable supplier due to obsolete firmware and hardware. The catch phrase to look for here is DOCSYS, and I suggest you consult with your cable company to see what they recommend that interfaces with their system the best.
I was able to use that model of router up to 8Mb/s, but was unable to get a straight answer from the manufacturer about its top speed.
Fidelity, like High-Fidelity. More of a promotion ploy than anything else.
You are basically correct. 802.11n’s speed is of interest when you are transferring data between computers on your network. It also offers more range over 802.11g, but you didn’t indicate whether you have range issues. You also need 802.11n WiFi adapters in your systems to take advantage of 802.11n features.
There is a possibility some areas of your residence may not have enough received signal strength to allow for a data rate faster than your net connection on 802.11g, and an 802.11n network could fix that. But that would need to be evaluated by testing.
Linksys WRT54G
That’s… kind of an old router. A very good one, to be sure, but kinda old. IMO, it should be fine for what you’re describing - performance benefits of upgrading are likely to be marginal. OTOH, if you do things like bittorrent, the number of connections your router can handle can become an issue.
Why not try it out for a while, see if it’s ok, if not, you can always get a new one and plug it in.
Thing is that WRT54G is actually a pretty reliable router, and new ones are a complete crapshoot for lasting any length of time. Anyways, an 802.11g router might not be state of the art, but barring extensive local network bandwidth use (lots of streaming video between computers in the house, etc) it should still be lots faster than the connection to the intertubes themselves.
I’d suggest going to speedtest.net and performing a couple of speed tests. They will show you what speed you can get to your wireless PC. If it is close to 10Mbit/sec already, there’s no need to do anything.
The speeds shown on wireless gizmos (routers, access points, PCs, and so on) are “up to”, meaning they’re theoretical maximums. There are a couple different things in play here:
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The highest sets of speeds need new equipment on both ends. A 450Mbit/sec router (the highest currently-available speed) is only going to help if you have a client (PC, Mac, whatever) that supports the same protocols (that’s the “b”, “g”, “n” and so on), supports the same frequencies (2.5GHz or 5GHz), and has enough antennas. Unless you happen to have a PC that’s much newer than you existing wireless router, you won’t see an improvement. You can always open the PC and replace the wireless card, but that can be a bit intimidating and some manufacturers (HP, I’m talking about you) go out of their way to make this difficult.
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WiFi is like CB radio was, back in the day - there are lots and lots of people talking at the same time and some of them are using illegal power levels. You’re competing with everybody else on the channel you selected, and there are only 3 “good” channels - 1, 6, and 11. I suggest using something like inSSIDer to see what channels have the least interference in your area, and changing the channel on your router if there is one that is substantially better than the channel you’re currently using.
And don’t sell the WRT54G short. Depending on the particular model, it ranges from adequate to surprisingly powerful. If one were looking to squeeze more out of a WRT54G, DD-WRT or Tomato firmware gives more control and features over the stock Linksys firmware.
The WRT54G is fine. Once you get everything up and running, you can visit various speed test websites to see how close to your 10 Mbps speed you are actually getting. I would be surprised if it could not handle that.
If that’s all you do, I don’t even see the need to upgrade from 1.5 Mbps. Were you having latency problems with that connection? I did all of that just fine with a DSL line that was around 650Kbps. I often had Netflix going in two different rooms at the same time.
I would suggest keeping any hardware you already have until you experience issues that might be related to insufficient throughput. In other words, if it isn’t broke…
A few months ago, my dad asked me if he should get a new router and I gave him the same answer that most have given here – “your router’s not your bottleneck, don’t worry about it.” Then my brother-in-law looked at me and said, “Is it even 802.11N?” I scoffed, but then I realized that I had no idea what he was running, and generally speaking, 10 year old electronics blow. So I gave him my blessing to upgrade and now he can use his iPad without having to sit within 10 feet of his router.
I’ve been running a WRT54G with Tomato since, gosh, forever it feels like, but after seeing how much better N is, I went out and upgraded. And you know what? I wish hadn’t waited so long. There’s theoretical range and throughput, and then there’s what actually happens when you’re trying to push a signal through plaster walls. And my 802.11N router is doing a much better job of reaching the far corners of my house, and at much faster speeds when it gets there. If I go sit down on top of my router, sure, it’s not any faster than my old WRT. But outside of that ideal scenario, the new router is noticeably better.
(Caveats: YMMV, my house is not your house, your usage patterns may differ, etc etc)
According to this site,
However, Wikipedia’s Wifi entry says
There’s a problem right there. Seriously. The advice given here is much more reliable than any advice you could ever receive at Best Buy.
Exactly. Now, please post pictures of yourself so we can critique your wardrobe, too.
And when we say ‘pictures of yourself’ we really mean '‘pictures of your cat’.
I had a ~7 year old netgear router that couldn’t handle the upgrade from 1.5 to 10 Mbps. I just couldn’t get the advertised speed, wireless or wired, until I hooked the computer directly to the modem. A new router fixed that problem, after I poked around and found that that router apparently just wasn’t up to snuff.
That said, the easiest way to figure out if you need a new router is to try the old one. At worst, you will get slower than advertised speeds, but it will still work. No need to rush out and buy a new one.
UPDATE: Finally got my router unpacked an installed last night (I was hardwired when I wrote the OP here), and it *seems *faster while I’m sitting in my living room, 5 feet away from the router.
Right now my router is on the far western wall of my new house, and our bedroom is on the far eastern side. I noticed just this morning that my iPhone was showing only 1 or 2 out of 3 possible bars for WiFi strength, so range may be an issue, but I’ll have to wait till I run an actual speed test to see. If so, an upgrade to an n-compatible router would likely help that? The WRT54G isn’t n-compatible?
Thanks. That website should do quite a bit to help me sort this out. I googled internet speed test, and some of them seemed kinda shady to me, so it’s good to have one that other, smarter people have used.
If by latency issues, you mean Netflix would continually have to pause and buffer if the other person was using WiFi at all, and Skype would shut off our video completely because it detected that the quality was too low, and YouTube would sometimes take 5 minutes to load a 3-minute song with album art as the video portion, then yes. I obviously don’t know that much about how many Mbps this kind of stuff *should *require, but are you saying the problem may be with the cable internet provider here instead?
I know, believe me! I was already in there buying something else and thought I should at least ask.
I thought it meant ‘pictures of yourself, in a bikini, but only if you’re a chick. And hot.’
Pay close attention also to the wired side of your wireless router. If you have your computer hooked up through a router to your modem, you should get a router that has gigabit ethernet (on the wired side).
FWIW, I recently upgraded to a Cisco Linksys E3200 and like it very much.
you think you need 1000mbps wired for a 10mbps internet connection?
Think again.