6 people in 1 house, wireless router not handling traffic well.

[enkideridu]

I'm living in a house with 6 people on 2 floors, and the router isn't handling all the traffic well.
I have an extra router that might be able to serve as an wireless access point, but from what I've been told that wouldn't solve anything if the problem was that the first router doesn't have the capacity for that much traffic. It's a 50+ dollar wireless N router though and fairly new (forgot the model number)

What's the cheapest way to solve this?

 

[tigsounds]

You don't say what the traffic consist of. Computer to computer transfers? or Internet slows down with 6 people using it at the same time. If it's the Internet, cheapest is to pay more for a faster connection.

 

[wanamingo]

Faster connection would be preferred but a more advanced router wouldnt hurt.

Try to get a router with multiple antennas, this will allow for multiple send and receive request to be fulfilled. Right now most routers have one internal antenna so when 4-6 people are all asking the router for info they are communicating through one anntena. With multiple all can ask at once and receive at once, but if you internet is slow its not going to help.

 

[enkideridu]

You don't say what the traffic consist of. Computer to computer transfers? or Internet slows down with 6 people using it at the same time. If it's the Internet, cheapest is to pay more for a faster connection.

It's a home connection, mostly youtube (although rarely all at the same time) and games
It shouldn't be a speed/bandwidth issue, we have a 28 megabit connection
Two of the computers sometimes get dropped from the internet

 

[tigsounds]

The sinker in your situation is the the dreaded "What's the cheapest way to solve this?"

Good equipment cost money. More antennas will not help either. More simultaneous channels will if the wireless is getting loaded down. A nice dual-band gigabit router is the fix but a good one will cost about $150.00

A nice one that would help greatly is this one HERE.
It's $155.43 with free shipping.

Why gigabit? Routers are like card dealers. Your data throughput is much like cards. How fast can they be dealt? The source might be 28 Mb but who waits on who? Do the computers wait for the router or is the router ready and waiting on the computer? The latter is preferred. Gigabit network PCI adapters are cheap. USB Wireless-N dongles are not too bad either, and if you want to be sure things are moving as fast as today's technology goes, get dual band Wifi dongles/adapters for the remote computers. Just stay away from Belkin and D-Link. Belkin never works as well as they say and D-Link won't tell the truth about their specs, or they hide behind statements like "16 times faster" (than other older technologies). To D-Link I'd say "Let's see some real numbers, like specifications you can be held to."

 

[enkideridu]

Best answer selected by enkideridu.