Getting back to it

[Eplfan2011]

I haven't had any time for the saw for the last couple of weeks, due to the need to get some house projects done before the snow flies here in northern Illinois.

 First up was to winterize my little koi pond, get the garden shed cleaned out and organized along with the garage.

 My wife also wanted me to address our poor wifi / internet. We do have gigabit internet but due to our oddly shaped tri level there's lots of dead spots and generally slow wifi especially in our living room where most of our internet enabled devices are.

 I've considered just moving the router but that will only move the dead spots. I've also considered mesh extenders.

 In the end I've ran Cat 6 cables to rooms with stationary 10/100/1000 devices like my media server in my living room. Bridged another wifi router to existing network to cover the dead side of the house. 

 With so many devices with so many different connection limitations I never imagined how difficult it would be to try and get the best performance out of them all. My stationary items with 10/100/1000 Ethernet connections were easy as all I needed was to plug them into the giabit eathernet. To my surprise all my TV's ( all only two years old or less) only had 10/100 Ethernet ports so if I hardwired them I'd never get more than 100mbps so I had to make sure all the 10/100 devices had a strong 5ghz wifi signal so they could use fast wifi. Also I have some old items that use only 2.4 ghz wifi including the old laptop I use for patterns, vinyl cutting ect.

Overall it worked out well speeds ar so much better my media center PC is now averaging 800-1gig it was averaging 150 Mbps before, we're getting really good speeds on the 5g wifi network all over the house and even the 2.4 gig networks pushing some good numbers.

Overall a success and even more cheap as I had a old router just had to buy cable and ends !!! Now I can get back to sawing I hope

 

Edited November 7, 2022 by Eplfan2011

[Phil Royer]

Glad that this worked out for you. We had a similar situation, that I solved by installing a mesh network (not extenders). By installing, I mean buying the mesh network boxes and plugging them in with a slight amount of set up. Fairly expensive, but it solved our problem.  It is great that an inexpensive solution worked for you.

[Eplfan2011]

54 minutes ago, Phil Royer said:

Glad that this worked out for you. We had a similar situation, that I solved by installing a mesh network (not extenders). By installing, I mean buying the mesh network boxes and plugging them in with a slight amount of set up. Fairly expensive, but it solved our problem.  It is great that an inexpensive solution worked for you.

As I said in my post I looked at mesh, it's nice but expensive and I really wanted a wired connection for my media center PC for stability and max through put. At a later date I still may set up a mesh system and keep the hardlines, it's done for now and we'll see how it goes.

Out of curiosity which mesh system did you use Phil? 

[Phil Royer]

I used a Netgear Orbi mesh system. My tech support recommended this one (my son in silicon valley) I got it at costco at 100 off, but still quite high

Phil

[barb.j.enders]

Wow!  This is mostly "geek" to me.  Thank goodness hubby is my tech support.  I know we have a "mesh" but it still doesn't work properly.  Very hard to get service in our basement.  It seems that the magic of internet doesn't like 1950's plaster & lathe homes with poured concrete basements

[Eplfan2011]

2 hours ago, barb.j.enders said:

Wow!  This is mostly "geek" to me.  Thank goodness hubby is my tech support.  I know we have a "mesh" but it still doesn't work properly.  Very hard to get service in our basement.  It seems that the magic of internet doesn't like 1950's plaster & lathe homes with poured concrete basements

That's our problem barb apart from our router is in the concrete basement. I ran hardlines from it and used a regular second router piggy backed upstairs on the ground floor to serve the ground and first floo. so far it's working well, we have good internet on all three levels.