Please advice on current network setup.

[vkvance]

Hi,

Currently I have my setup done as shown below for quite sometime:


Is this the most efficient way to setup? My current fiber plan is 150Mbps.
I did not use any repeaters or range extender as I heard they slow down the bandwidths.
My goal is to get the best speeds without compromise but I am wondering if I could reduce the amount of network devices being used.

 

[stevech]

too bad you have great fiber service.
Unfortunate that it has to go over a WIFi bridge link before users get it.

Is the fiber modem in the same building?

 

[vkvance]

too bad you have great fiber service.
Unfortunate that it has to go over a WIFi bridge link before users get it.

Is the fiber modem in the same building?

My fiber modem is in the same house and its connected by lan cable to my rt-n66u router.

 

[jlake]

What kind of speeds are you getting on the n15u?

It looks like you have a really good setup, but I'm not quite sure why you've chosen the little N15U to be your workhorse router. Why did you choose the little N15u and it's tiny CPU to be your workhorse router for such a nice fiber connection? How does it perform?

 

[vkvance]

What kind of speeds are you getting on the n15u?

It looks like you have a really good setup, but I'm not quite sure why you've chosen the little N15U to be your workhorse router. Why did you choose the little N15u and it's tiny CPU to be your workhorse router for such a nice fiber connection? How does it perform?

Oops, I forgot to mention about that. The N15U was given to me by my ISP for free.
On lvl 2, I am not so focused on how good the N15U can broadcasts its wireless speed but more on the speed through LAN cable.
So in order to safe some money, I reused the N15U and did not upgrade it.

For PC1,PC2 & PC3 that are connected by wire to the N15U, I am actually able to get 140Mbps to 150Mbps on speedtest.net/. [The servers I selected for the tests are hosted by companies in the same country as I am in though.]

Is it safe to say that the way I have setup is correct/good enough?

 

[stevech]

My fiber modem is in the same house and its connected by lan cable to my rt-n66u router.

My point was that your 3 PCs have to suffer the wireless link to get to the ISP's nice fiber modem and the Internet. Isn't there a way to wire this?

 

[vkvance]

My point was that your 3 PCs have to suffer the wireless link to get to the ISP's nice fiber modem and the Internet. Isn't there a way to wire this?

unfortunately, its too tedious to use do wiring from lvl 1 to lvl 2.

I have signed up to upgrade my fiber plan to 1gbps which will be arriving in a few months time.

I need to upgrade my rt-n66u and ea-n66 to the AC versions in order to utilize the speed fully but there isn't any AC version for ea-n66.
Are there any alternative ways to setup?

 

[stevech]

unfortunately, its too tedious to use do wiring from lvl 1 to lvl 2.

I have signed up to upgrade my fiber plan to 1gbps which will be arriving in a few months time.

I need to upgrade my rt-n66u and ea-n66 to the AC versions in order to utilize the speed fully but there isn't any AC version for ea-n66.
Are there any alternative ways to setup?

Seems to me to be a bit of a waste to pay a premium for fiber to the home and really nice/fast data rates, but then the PCs that use this data are impaired by a WiFi bridge link.

 

[azazel1024]

I'd agree. I can't see the diagram, but even if you upgraded to the AC66u I doubt you'd see more than 600Mbps or so with a pair of them in bridge mode. So you aren't going to be getting nearly the 1Gbps fiber speeds you'd be paying for.

Are there no intermediate packages to save yourself some money? Or wiring it?

I'd find out what kind of WAN you are hooked up to. DHCP/WAN you can look at the smallnetbuilder WAN test numbers, but a lot of fiber is PPPoE, and that is generally around 30-80% of DHCP/WAN numbers because of the overhead with header compression involved in PPPoE. Apparently TP-Link routers are supposedly very good at PPPoE and a number of others, like Asus routers, are terrible at PPPoE.

In either scenario, even DHCP/WAN, unless you are buying enterprise class routers, you probably are not going to get full 1Gbps speeds paying for 1Gbps fiber. You'll probably get more like 600-850Mbps, depending on the router, and probably more like 200-750Mbps if it is PPPoE...dependent heavily upon router selection (which is hard to do as few test PPPoE).

Now...obviously if it is real cheap to pay for 1Gbps I'd go with it...but is there any real reason to? Maybe I am used to my crippled internet connection here, but with my 75/35 connection, I'd say I am lucky if 1 in 4 connections can actually push my 75Mbps downstream connection to the max (actually, its a hair over 80Mbps in reality, but I won't complain). I'd imagine at 150Mbps even fewer connections could make it sweat.

Again...poor market...my 75/35 (for the US) is fairly cheap at only $70 a month unbundled...but stepping up to 150/50 for me runs me $130 a month and 300/75 is something like $200 a month (600/105 is $300 a month. Damn you Verizon!), Realistically all I'd ever really want is a 150/50 and that is a little more for the uplink than the downlink for the occasional times I am uploading a bunch of stuff to dropbox, flickr, that sort of thing where I have a coupld of GBs queued.

 

[vkvance]

I am currently paying $48.88 SGD per month for 150Mbps but my ISP has a new plan which is $49.99 SGD per month for 1Gpbs. I have signed up for upgrade and have been informed that it will be implemented on Q3 2014 for me.

After seriously thinking through, I will be doing wiring instead. Seems to be the logical choice.

 

[stevech]

wiring.. good. Can't the ISP move the connection point?

Also, remember that in WiFi, the connection raw bit rate, e.g., 600Mbps as mentioned above, corresponds to a net yield at the IP layer of about 60% or less, on average, best case.

Truly, it's hard to sustain a net yield over about 150Mbps with WiFi - a bit better in 5.8GHz but WiFi/wireless has this truism:

"wireless is not 100 times harder than wired, it's 1 million times harder".

Makes sense only for moving things.