[SOLVED] Can I "spread out" bandwidth on a 1GB Fiber connection?

[mrcanada11]

I realize that this question is probably a bit esoteric, but bear with me - old guy that used to know most of this stuff that hasn't seriously studied in awhile.

So, the wife and I upgraded from a 100 Mbps cable company internet connection for about $110 a month to a Fiber Gigabit line about a year ago now for $65 a month. STILL the best tech trade I've made in a long time.

However, there was only one access point into the house that could be run without drilling into walls and generally costing us around $500 to re-wire the whole place. It's in the kitchen - NOT convenient.

So we cut the cords and moved all of our devices onto the home network. One desktop computer (mine), two laptops, two phones, and several tablets for kids and adults, an Xbox, and two Kindle Fire sticks for the TV's. I can run a 50 foot Cat5 cable from the office to the router occasionally, and then connect to whatever it needs to go to for speed purposes. However, if I'm connected by wires, the download/upload rates for most of the devices sit around 300/300 Mbps generally speaking. If I'm connected wirelessly, it sits around 30-40 or so on average. Most of the devices have a clear line of site to the kitchen (fairly open concept), but I'm wondering if I'm better off dropping a Cat5 cable to the router, then running it along the ceiling over to the office and installing a second "wired" router there and connecting all the devices there with a wired connection.

The main idea is to keep all the devices from "clogging the wireless bandwidth" through the only wireless port.

Is there a way to spread the traffic across all of the wired/wireless ports so the signal speed / strength doesn't dip if there is a TV, two Zoom meetings, and a tablet going?

 

[kanewolf]

I realize that this question is probably a bit esoteric, but bear with me - old guy that used to know most of this stuff that hasn't seriously studied in awhile.

So, the wife and I upgraded from a 100 Mbps cable company internet connection for about $110 a month to a Fiber Gigabit line about a year ago now for $65 a month. STILL the best tech trade I've made in a long time.

However, there was only one access point into the house that could be run without drilling into walls and generally costing us around $500 to re-wire the whole place. It's in the kitchen - NOT convenient.

So we cut the cords and moved all of our devices onto the home network. One desktop computer (mine), two laptops, two phones, and several tablets for kids and adults, an Xbox, and two Kindle Fire sticks for the TV's. I can run a 50 foot Cat5 cable from the office to the router occasionally, and then connect to whatever it needs to go to for speed purposes. However, if I'm connected by wires, the download/upload rates for most of the devices sit around 300/300 Mbps generally speaking. If I'm connected wirelessly, it sits around 30-40 or so on average. Most of the devices have a clear line of site to the kitchen (fairly open concept), but I'm wondering if I'm better off dropping a Cat5 cable to the router, then running it along the ceiling over to the office and installing a second "wired" router there and connecting all the devices there with a wired connection.

The main idea is to keep all the devices from "clogging the wireless bandwidth" through the only wireless port.

Is there a way to spread the traffic across all of the wired/wireless ports so the signal speed / strength doesn't dip if there is a TV, two Zoom meetings, and a tablet going?

To best utilize a 1Gb WAN connection, you need to move your stationary devices (PCs, TV, Game Consoles, etc) to a wired connection.
To improve WIFI, you need to add access points. You can only distribute devices if you can tune the transmit power of the AP. You need to turn DOWN the transmit power to minimize overlap between the radios.

 

[digitalgriffin]

You have a couple options.

Option 1: A faster 4x4 wifi 6 router would be a good step up.

On a 5GHz channel you can get over a gigabit if you setup the channel wide enough. This is provided the range isn't too far from the base station. These however can be over $600 for the best options.

For the best speeds you will need the newest Intel NIC wifi cards replaced into your laptop and desktop. You'll also need to buy access points or range extenders with ethernet ports that allow them to run in bridge mode. If you buy a range extender and use the Ethernet ports. This will be over a $2k solution.

Option 2 is use MOCA adapters which uses your coax cable in your house to transmit data. They work best when the coax is not being used for cable tv or atsc signals. But they will still work if you have it occupied. (Just not as fast) So it would go router-ethernet cable-moca adapter-coax through house-moca adapter 2-ethernet cable 2-computer/access point/switch.

Option 3 is use a mesh network that rebroadcast the wifi signal in a relay fashion from station to station. The latest can have high throughput, but suffer from large lag. (High ping) which is bad for gaming. Mesh networks can be over $1000 for 3 node setup. (base router + 2 repeaters)

Option 4: multiple cheap AP. Set up each to use a separate channel. For devices far from the base use a 2.4GHz channel (channel 1, 6 or 11). This will grant up to 300mbps for each AP. For example all my streaming sticks (Roku) use 1 AP 2.4GHz channel. For close devices use 5 GHz. I have an Intel ax210 card in my computer which goes over 1 Gbps. I also isolate my subnet and partition my network. All smart devices sit on their own subnet. This includes Alexa, and devices like smart switches. This way Amazon can't spy on my network. Cheap AP can be had for $80 each

I do not recommend power line adapters.

 

[mrcanada11]

You have a couple options.

Option 1: A faster 4x4 wifi 6 router would be a good step up.

On a 5GHz channel you can get over a gigabit if you setup the channel wide enough. This is provided the range isn't too far from the base station. These however can be over $600 for the best options.

For the best speeds you will need the newest Intel NIC wifi cards replaced into your laptop and desktop. You'll also need to buy access points or range extenders with ethernet ports that allow them to run in bridge mode. If you buy a range extender and use the Ethernet ports. This will be over a $2k solution.

Option 2 is use MOCA adapters which uses your coax cable in your house to transmit data. They work best when the coax is not being used for cable tv or atsc signals. But they will still work if you have it occupied. (Just not as fast) So it would go router-ethernet cable-moca adapter-coax through house-moca adapter 2-ethernet cable 2-computer/access point/switch.

Option 3 is use a mesh network that rebroadcast the wifi signal in a relay fashion from station to station. The latest can have high throughput, but suffer from large lag. (High ping) which is bad for gaming. Mesh networks can be over $1000 for 3 node setup. (base router + 2 repeaters)

Option 4: multiple cheap AP. Set up each to use a separate channel. For devices far from the base use a 2.4GHz channel (channel 1, 6 or 11). This will grant up to 300mbps for each AP. For example all my streaming sticks (Roku) use 1 AP 2.4GHz channel. For close devices use 5 GHz. I have an Intel ax210 card in my computer which goes over 1 Gbps. I also isolate my subnet and partition my network. All smart devices sit on their own subnet. This includes Alexa, and devices like smart switches. This way Amazon can't spy on my network. Cheap AP can be had for $80 each

I do not recommend power line adapters.

This is perfect, thanks! Option 1 helps me a ton, because I already have the WiFi 6 cards for most of the devices. The distance is under 50 feet, since all my cat5 cables are 50 footers. Option 2 is possibly better, since the entire house is wired with coax, but none of it is being used! I'll take a look at both and see how I can make it work!