Router / network upgrade advice

[Digitald00d]

So the attached picture is my current home network. Single family residence, two story, approximately 2800sq ft. Router (inside an out building) to bridge (in house) distance is about 60ft. Only thing between them are windows and screens. The AC68 units still work, but are getting slow at times. I’m running standard Asus software on them. I did have Merlin at one time. I tried setting them up as a mesh system, but couldn’t get them to connect. I don’t game. I do stream from the Apple TV and it works fine, 90%+ of the time. When a show starts, say off Netflix, it may pixilate at the beginning, but seems to catch-up. My provider connection is wireless, 10M dn / 1M up, unlimited. Best I can get at this location. I have about 6 wired devices and 10-15 wireless devices. Of course the in-house wired devices go through the Netgear EoP devices.

So I’m considering getting the AC86 unit as a replacement and I’m looking for ideas.

Do I get two new 86 units to replace the 68s and keep the same network setup?

Do I get one 86 and keep/reconfigure the remaining 68s in a different network setup?

Do I get something else besides the AC86 unit?

Anyway, I’d much appreciate some ideas you have out there. Ask any questions you may have. TIA -les

 

[Greg72]

It is only going to be as good as your Internet connection. Having 10mbps for Download is going to cripple your network in this day and age of always streaming media use. You could upgrade to a. Million dollar Enterprise network and it is still not going to solve your issues when wishing to stream media on your network from sayNetflix and wishing to do other things at the same time.

 

[Val D.]

Only thing between them are windows and screens.

This "only thing" may reduce your throughput significantly, depending on the materials used for the windows and screens. Coated UV glass + metal screen can kill your wireless link completely. Your signal level is already low for direct line of sight.

My provider connection is wireless, 10M dn / 1M up, unlimited.

Your existing routers can handle easily 20 devices. One thing only will improve your internal network - a wire between the routers. You don't need anything else. Internet speed won't improve much even if you buy the best routers available on the market.

 

[Digitald00d]

So overall, aside from my slow ISP, the network layout doesn’t seem that bad? Aside from knowing there’s always room for improvement.

What about having one 86 unit at the router location and repurpose the two existing 68 units as upstairs/downstairs nodes in a mesh configuration. Anyone mesh the two different units with any luck?

I have a few different ideas I may also thinking about.

For example, I have a Ubiquity device with an external antenna. I could use this at HOUSE location to get outside the windows/screens.

Another idea; when we built the house 16 years ago, I had each room wired for land-line telephone but it was never connected. I think they used Cat6 cable. We use mobile phones like the rest of the world, so I could repurpose the ends to have Ethernet to each room in the house. That would get rid of the EoP units, although they seem to be ok when streaming Netflix, Prime, YouTube, Hulu, etc.

And lastly, I could just forget it until one of my 68 units totally croaks and then fix it.

I dunno, just fishing for some ideas.

 

[CaptainSTX]

Wired connections from the router to either APs or Mesh devices is always going to be the most reliable. You can probably stay with the AC68 as they are very reliable and will more than handle your WAN speed. The only equipment you might need to buy is a small un managed switch for US$20-$30. Feed one LAN port on your router to the switch using one of the telephone wiring locations if necessary. Best to keep your routers with WiFi in a central location in your home if possible.

You will need to convert all the jacks and plugs from how they are terminated now to Ethernet Cat5e. This requires using all eight conductors not six like telephone wiring. I recommend that you use the 568B pinning standard as it is the most common. To facilitate this process buy or borrow a simple tester US$10 - $ 15 to verify correct pinning and continuity of each cable and its terminations. It will also you verify which cable runs to which location.

There are plenty of videos on YouTube showing how to make the terminations. Installing female jacks is easy. Male plugs can be frustrating to say the least. Klein Tools is now making a knock off of Platinum Tools excellent clam shell male crimp-er and clam shell connectors. Clam shell male connectors are they way to go if you want reliable connections and value your time and sanity. Even with clam shell connectors you still need to test every run. Unless you install connectors for a living consider yourself good if you can achieve success 90% of the time on the first try particularly with male jacks.

 

[degrub]

and the cable is most likely CAT 5, possibly CAT5e. The jacket will have an embossed label specifying.

 

[Greg72]

I would implement QOS rules along with limiting how many people can do bandwidth hogging (streaming media from the Internet, gaming, downloading) at the same time.

Phone lines were either pulled with Cat-3 or Cat-5 and most likely not in a Homerun fashion.

Walk around using InSSIDer to see where the weak spots are along with possible channle congestion issues and use iPerf to measure overall bandwidth on the network. You may find that you can get away with a single Access Point in a Central Location.

I have a single A/P that covers my whole house. It is centrally located in our Front Room. All devices get the needed bandwidth and speeds for wifi are very stable.

 

[CaptainSTX]

and the cable is most likely CAT 5, possibly CAT5e. The jacket will have an embossed label specifying.

That was what I assumed in my reply, but it is possible it is Cat 6 as the standard for Cat 6 was published in June 2002.

Of course back then most US residential customers were never even dreaming about needing that much bandwidth on their LAN as the average download speed in the USA didn't exceed 10 Mbps until 2014.

 

[coxhaus]

I would set your wireless for 20mhz bandwidth for all channels on both 2.4 and 5GHz for clients. And then QoS. You will find you like the snappiness of the small fast channel.

 

[Trip]

Biggest improvements would be converting the bridge link to wired (or a purpose-built outdoor, directional product like a Ubiquiti LocoM2 Pair, EZ-Bridge Lite or similar), switching from powerline to Cat5/6 in the house and making sure you're running smart-queue QoS on that 10Mb internet link (the AC68 can do it with Merlin firmware). Lastly, of course, would be an internet upgrade as soon as it's available. But in the meantime, the first three things will give you as good an internal network as possible.

 

[Greg72]

That was what I assumed in my reply, but it is possible it is Cat 6 as the standard for Cat 6 was published in June 2002.

Of course back then most US residential customers were never even dreaming about needing that much bandwidth on their LAN as the average download speed in the USA didn't exceed 10 Mbps until 2014.

Cat-6 is overkill for pre-wiring houses and even just wiring a house or small business for Internet. You see it in Enterprise because VoIP is becoming the norm, also cheaper to pull just Cat-6 at the same time for all runs vs a mixture of Category spec and try to deal with remembering while terminating 100’s of runs to patch panels, which is data and which is voice.

Cat-5a will handle up to 10gbps in a normal home setup that is not exceeding 200’ per run. With Wifi-6 now out, you should see less people pulling Cat runs for devices. I have zero Cat runs in my place because I have a 1gig connection and have enough coverage with the A/P that I have. My old setup I had wired devices because they did not play nice with the previous A/P that I had along with only using the A/P for portable devices.

 

[Val D.]

And lastly, I could just forget it until one of my 68 units totally croaks and then fix it.

Option A:
Your routers are fine, more than what you need. Just refresh them a bit, reset and re-configure. Run wires everywhere you can reach. Make it right, but keep expenses as low as possible. Costly upgrade with no real benefit is a waste of money.

Option B:
Money is not an issue and you got the itch. Get whatever hardware you want, build a server rack with 100 flashing lights on it and a fiber optic internal network. Quantum computers are coming, sooner or later. Why not, if you can. Life is short.

 

[Klueless]

10M dn / 1M up

For many of us all roads lead to ... the Internet. If that's you then 10 x 1 is your pinch point. 10 x 1 is an austere highway. Anything you can do to facilitate the polite sharing of a limited resource will pay dividends. For me I found QoS with a simple "bandwidth limiter" (about 9 x 0.9 in your case) helpful. It gave the illusion of better performance.

Then there's "future proofing". What's your next likely step up? 30 Mbps? 100? And when? Months? Years? There's a good chance what you have will be just fine for the foreseeable future.

The rest is about stability, reliability, variability, etc. of all of your uh ... on-ramps.

You imply you're using AImesh? I've no experience with that.

Anyway, you show two wireless links between the two routers. One of them is unlabeled. Is it even used? Regarding the other it looks like it's being used as "the" back-haul? That "could" suggest anything on SSID4 is getting an extra "hop" of delay/variability as well as virtually all (including SSID2) clients contending for bandwidth on the half duplex wireless back haul link. Like others have suggested - a hard wire between the two buildings/routers should help.

Per diagram; 351 wireless Mbps between routers sounds great (to me). How are you measuring that?

This "only thing" may reduce your throughput significantly, depending on the materials used for the windows and screens. Coated UV glass + metal screen can kill your wireless link completely. Your signal level is already low for direct line of sight

-74 dBm? (Kinda flies in the face of 351 Mbps?) Open the windows and screens and see if that changes. Another bullet for a wire. (That said I ran for years with 5 GHz shooting through the windows of two buildings but, it also induced some variability.)