sometimes i think that knowing too much can only complicate your life. such is the case with my wireless network at home. we bought a roughly 10 year old house about a year ago and back then it was not standard practice to wire the house for ethernet. ten years from now, wiring the house for ethernet may fall out of fashion as wireless technologies improve, but in the meantime, wired networks are still by far the easiest way to get fast performance in your network.
+----------------+ +-------------------+ +--------------+
| Speedstream |_____| AirLink101 AR670W | ___| Dell Desktop |
| 6520 DSL Modem | | Wireless N Router |___\ | EDIMAX PCI |
+----------------+ +-------------------+ | Wireless G |
\ \ +--------------+
_\ _\
\ \
\ \
+-----------+ +------------+ +--------------------+
| Linksys | | Buffalo |_____| D-Link DGS-2208 |
| WRTSL54GS | | WHR-HP-G54 | | 8-Port 10/100/1000 |
| dd-wrt | | dd-wrt | | Desktop Switch |
+-----------+ +------------+ +--------------------+
| | | | \
| | | | \
+-----------+ +------------+ | | _\
| Microsoft | | Sony PS3 | | | \
| XBMC | +------------+ | | \
+-----------+ | | +--------------+
+---------------+ | | | Nintendo Wii |
| Dell Latitude |----+ | +--------------+
| D820 Laptop | |
+---------------+ +----------------+
| D-Link DNS-323 |
| NAS w/ 1TB HDD |
+----------------+
unforunately, that is not much of an option for me because i don’t want to be running cables everywhere. this has prompted me to setup a mostly wireless network at the house. i’ve been pretty unhappy at the network performance i’ve been getting, though, particularly when i am transferring large files from my laptop to the NAS. i have been averaging about 1MB/s.
what’s going on here? well, let me describe the setup. the wireless router is upstairs. the NAS is downstairs. my laptop is downstairs. when i try to copy a file, the signal goes from the NAS downstairs to the router upstairs and then back downstairs to the laptop. that’s a lot of travel for data that is 10 feet from me.
so i decided to try something special. i setup a dd-wrt router to be a repeater bridge downstairs. this repeater bridge connects to my primary router and shares the internet connection through the local ethernet ports. it ALSO acts as another access point. so now i have two APs. i connect the NAS to the new AP’s ethernet port and i connect my laptop wirelessly to the new AP. this means the travel is much shorter. and it was fantastic! speeds were tripled! so i thought that i had found the perfect solution to my problem, but it turns out that that is not quite the case. when i am upstairs trying to connect to the NAS speeds were horrific. it turns out that a repeater bridge setup (as the name would imply) repeats your wireless signal. from what i understand this cuts your total available network throughput in half because you are spending half of the time repeating a signal. ugh.
so i opted for the easier solution. i moved the DSL modem and router downstairs instead. i haven’t really found a good place for it, but this move has doubled my previous speeds. not great, but it is bearable.
…and I bought a house a few years ago, that was built in 2008. It has CAT5 running to every room, with a “home run” aggregation panel in a closet. Unfortunately, every one of these beautiful CAT5s are dedicated to POTS ( plain old telephone service ).
If I was brave, I’d ditch landline and get some sort of VOIP. Then I could stick a gigabit switch in the closet and wire all the rooms with Ethernet. As it is, I have an ad-hoc hodgepodge of wireless, GigE, holes to get cables from room to room, a phone cable tacked to the side of the house…..
I thought of an interim solution – a box that connects to the external POTS and behaves like a telephone, and talks VOIP to the internal network. There actually are such devices – accessory cards for Cisco routers – but it would take excessive dedication to actually obtain such a thing and learn to use it.