DIR-655 Which HW Rev. to choose

[aakerbeere]

Hi

I plan to replace my Netgear WPNT834 by a D-Link DIR-655. Since actually there are out at least 6 HW Revisions (A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, B1), i don't know for which one to go if i can choose.

Thank you for your advice.

Kind regards
Markus

 

[Spock83]

The last one? (B1). You have a choice?

 

[aakerbeere]

eBay or similar

Thank you Spock

At eBay or similar i have seen at least the last three of them until now.

Kind regards
Markus

 

[stevech]

Hi

I plan to replace my Netgear WPNT834 by a D-Link DIR-655.

Ill-advised.

 

[aakerbeere]

Ill-advised.

So steve, tell me what would be well advised in your eyes.

Thanks

 

[stevech]

What are your needs and expectations?

 

[aakerbeere]

Mainstream, no online gaming for the moment

What are your needs and expectations?

Steve

My network is built by the Netgear WPNT834 (802.11b/g, LAN/WAN 10/100) and Belkin Powerline Gigabit adapters. As wired clients (Realtek, 2*10/100/1000, 1*10/100 [should i replace this one by a 10/100/1000?]) there are two desktops and a NAS (where i do backups; i would like to have more bandwith for this) and a notebook (Broadcomm 802.11n, Atheros 10/100/1000). The apartment is a single flat of concrete/brick-built walls and concrete floor and ceiling. The router is well centered in the apartment and the most distant corner is at approximately 30 feet.

In the neighborhood there are actually at least 5 different active WLANs (802.11g/outstanding, 802.11g/adequate, 802.11g/no, 802.11g/no, 802.11n/no) and not to forget we use a cordless phone and sometimes a microwave. Until now i did not realize any problems due to this fact or i did not become aware of. At this point i'm not sure if a dual band/dual radio model would be a better choice.

IPV6 support.

Because i'm a bit overwhelmed by the choosing and i don't want to grapple with features that i don't need, for the moment i wanted to go for a cheap, simple, well reviewed and mainly featured model like the DIR-655.

I do appreciate very much your advice.

Kind regards

Markus

 

[stevech]

You've got the jargon down!
Here's some opinion:
upgrade from 11g to 11n only if you want to stream HD TV via WiFi. Even so, you'll be disappointed streaming HD on WiFi. Streaming standard Def. TV on 11g is OK if the signal strength at both ends of the link are very good.

Moving gigaByte sized files on WiFi, 11g or 11n will be frustratingly slow. So the case for 11n, IMO, is if you get it "Free" in newer PCs, then yes, get a $50 11n capable WiFi router - >if< your distances permit excellent signal strengths. Weaker signals make 11n no improvement over 11g and weakest yet, benefit from 11b.

If you have PCs connected by wire (ethernet) to your LAN, and if you do frequent gigaByte sized file transfers, AND if the storage system is Windows or a very expensive NAS ($500), then upgrade the PC to gigabit Ethernet. But a PCI ethernet card in an older PC cannot get much faster than 100BT ethernet.

Powerline Ethernet (like MoCA ethernet) rarely gets over 75Mbps. The switch built into the devices may be gigaBit, but the medium itself isn't.

Other WiFi in the neighborhood: Ideally everyone is on either channel 1, 6 or 11, none in between, to avoid the overlapping channels. What's important is NOT how many neighbors' SSIDs you detect, but rather, how active a neighbor is who's using the same or nearly the same channel as you. This is usually only key if the neighbor is streaming video on WiFi, or is a very heavy file sharing (bittorrent) user. If you suspect they are, simply move your router to a different channel- the client PCs will follow. A dual-band router is one way to mitigate having NO channels without heavy traffic, and that's very rare.

IPv6 - not a consumer issue for 10 years.

steve

 

[aakerbeere]

Homegroup

Thank you Steve

I just brought up IPv6 because Microsoft claims it for using the homegroup feature. I do use it on my network and IMO it's working as expected even tough my router does not support IPv6. Or can it be true that i'm missing some homegroup features due to IPv4 limitations? So this is confusing and i don't know if i really need a IPv6 router to get full homegroup support.

Kind regards
Markus

 

[stevech]

I have several PCs on my home LAN. Two Win 7 and one XP and some laptops. I disabled Microsoft's HomeLAN and configured the LAN and folder sharing to work like it did in XP.

Likely, file sharing and so on doesn't care whether it's using IPv4 or v6. There might be some security features in v6, but probably not valuable in a home LAN.

 

[aakerbeere]

I have done it

But during the evaluation process I switched to "Draytek Vigor 2130n". I am happy about wLAN Bandwidth. It increased from 2.5 MB/s to nearly 8 MB/s. This should be fair I think.

Where I am disappointed until now is about Ethernet Bandwidth. I should declare having replaced at the same time my Powerline Adapters "Belkin Gigabit" (F5D4076) by "Devolo dLan 500 AVPlus". Although Bandwidth increased from 4.5 MB/s to 6 MB/s I cannot believe this to be the end of the flagpole. This is less than wLan. Further on i noticed having a fast Ethernet NIC in my PC (Realtek 8139, PCI, I forgot in the meantime) and started evaluate a Gigabit NIC (Logilink PCIe, Realtek 8168B/8111B). Before purchasing I noticed my sons PC using exactly this Chip on Gigabyte Motherboard. So I did a copy of a 4.4 GB file from my sons computer over the network to the NAS (both using 1Gb/s setting). Surprisingly bandwidth only went to 4.5 MB/s. I don’t understand what's going on. All NICs are set to "auto negotiate". Manually setting NICs bandwidth to 1Gb/s does not change anything.

So I fear when purchasing the Logilink Gigabit NIC I will have less real bandwidth than with my current fast Ethernet NIC.

Am I going too far when expecting higher bandwidth on powerline than on wLan? And why does bandwidth on my sons Computer not exceed bandwidth on my own one?

regards
Markus