Last week my long suffering wrt1900ac died leaving me in a bit a lurch. Around our house, Wi-Fi is totally taken for granted. It just needs to work... well enough.
While I get this sorted out, I am lucky enough to have a family that is willing to live with a few network cables running down the hall and through the living room while I test various solutions. Interesting, everyone is happier with our cobbled together n600 primary router that covers most of the house, a ancient n300 router set up as an AP in the garage, and a wired connection to my chair in the living room than they were with the 1900AC.
The culprits for me are the custom built data acquisition devices running in the garage/work shop. These tend to have rather old Wi-Fi stations which would periodically upload 10+ megabyte data sets to the nas for later analysis. These uploads would cause the entire net work to stutter. Isolating them on their own AP with wired backhaul reduced a lot the complaints that the network was slow.
The second problem is my laptop in the living room. I like to work from the living room in the evenings, but I transfer a lot of data back and forth to the nas or desktop workstation. These transfers (particularly uploads) would cause the network to shudder. So short term, I am running a wired connection to my laptop.
The take away for me is that in a home with medium to heavy network usage matching the wireless system to the household needs and environment is more important than raw throughput.
While waiting for my new APs to arrive, I continue to do more testing. Once the APs arrive, I will do more testing while still connected to the cables running lose in the house before running dedicated cabling and drops as necessary.
While I get this sorted out, I am lucky enough to have a family that is willing to live with a few network cables running down the hall and through the living room while I test various solutions. Interesting, everyone is happier with our cobbled together n600 primary router that covers most of the house, a ancient n300 router set up as an AP in the garage, and a wired connection to my chair in the living room than they were with the 1900AC.
The culprits for me are the custom built data acquisition devices running in the garage/work shop. These tend to have rather old Wi-Fi stations which would periodically upload 10+ megabyte data sets to the nas for later analysis. These uploads would cause the entire net work to stutter. Isolating them on their own AP with wired backhaul reduced a lot the complaints that the network was slow.
The second problem is my laptop in the living room. I like to work from the living room in the evenings, but I transfer a lot of data back and forth to the nas or desktop workstation. These transfers (particularly uploads) would cause the network to shudder. So short term, I am running a wired connection to my laptop.
The take away for me is that in a home with medium to heavy network usage matching the wireless system to the household needs and environment is more important than raw throughput.
While waiting for my new APs to arrive, I continue to do more testing. Once the APs arrive, I will do more testing while still connected to the cables running lose in the house before running dedicated cabling and drops as necessary.
