Question Ethernet Router needed for large house?

[luthierwnc]

Hi All and thanks for looking. Had a new and infuriating situation happen yesterday. With one household computer in use and the other two turned off, we got a message that the ethernet connection failed for all devices. I went through the command prompt, registries, all kinds of ineffective internet fixes and finally gave up for dinner. The WiFi on the same router worked fine.

We were watching a DVD from the night before. Figured that was safe -- right? It wouldn't turn on. I figured the cats had knocked the plug out (happens often). When I pulled the power on the DVD player and put it back in, all the ethernet connections suddenly were fine.

AUGHHH! It made me wonder if I have enough router. There are four powered ethernet switches spread around a fairly large house with tentacles to nearby clusters of electronic gizmos. Cable runs range from four feet to a hundred. All are CAT5 or CAT6 cables (depending on when I ran them). The current router is a an Asus RT-N66U which was in the top half of the game four or five years ago. Can't speak to now.

Long story short; should I suspect the router as no longer being up to the job? FWIW, streaming speeds on the distant computers is usually pretty good considering we live in the country where weather and bad drivers contribute to overall network slowness. I guess the question has room for whether I need two routers or a mega hub or just something tougher. After spending three hours chasing the gremlin, I realized no amount of regedit would have fixed this. It took hard-booting the DVD to make the system work.

Cheers, Skip

 

[BFG-9000]

Yes, if you want more than one ethernet device to be able to use the internet at a time.

No, if you only need a local network and are willing to use fixed IPs.

 

[luthierwnc]

Yes, if you want more than one ethernet device to be able to use the internet at a time.

No, if you only need a local network and are willing to use fixed IPs.

So what do I need to do/get? Thanks, sh

 

[bill001g]

You need nothing real special. Even very cheap consumer routers can run many ethernet users. It tends to be the wifi that you see bottlenecks in when you have lots of devices.

The router you have is very old and if it was working ok before your failure you likely need nothing fancy. Even comparing the newest routers there is not much difference between them if you were to use them only as a ethernet router. Most the difference is in the wifi.

Now they do make routers with more ethernet ports but there really is not much reason to do that. You already have switches and you should be able to plug those into a new router.

Now if you were talking many hundreds of devices this might be different since consumer routers are not designed to do that but I doubt you are going to hit any limit even with a $20 router.

Hard to say what I would recommend. Wifi6e is the newest but it is also expensive and buys you nothing if you don't have wifi6e devices. Normal wifi6 routers provide little benefit over wifi5 (802.11ac) but there also is almost no difference in price.
You are running what is now called wifi4 (802.11n) after they changed the names so any thing is going to be a improvement when it comes to wifi.

I would look for a $50 router from any of the major providers. Unless you have some special need all you really need is a box to replace a defective one. You could even buy a exact one like you have.....except they charge more than newer ones.

 

[BFG-9000]

Ah, you've added some details.

In general, DVD players don't have ethernet + only Blu-Ray players need that for firmware updates. The solution is to leave the ethernet unplugged from it until you actually need a firmware update to play a new Blu-Ray disc you just got. If your Blu-Ray player has fallen out of support by the manufacturer, then you may as well leave it unplugged forever as it will never receive another update ever again anyway.

Also in general, you'll want an AP and especially a Gateway, to be new enough to still be regularly receiving firmware updates for reasonable security, and the last such update from ASUS was in 2020. On the bright side, your router was so popular that it's well supported by continued security updates from third-party firmware in the form of both FreshTomato-MIPs and DD-WRT. The downside of this, at least for MIPsel devices like that, is that third-party firmware does all routing in software so speed is limited by the slow 600MHz CPU, as it doesn't take advantage of hardware acceleration features present in factory firmware. So the RT-N66U would be limited to about 107Mbps when used as a gateway with some light QoS settings like fq_coDel in DD-WRT, and whether you actually need a new router or not depends on your ISP speed.

If you've been happy with an N router all of this time then your wifi needs probably aren't very demanding, plus even the fastest router's ethernet could be taken down by a misbehaving device like your disc player.

 

[luthierwnc]

Thanks guys. I just ran a speed-test. It came in at 370 mbs so I think that's quick enough.

It sounds like I should just unplug the DVD (it is a Blu-Ray and fairly new to the lineup). It, the Denon receiver and the TV are all capable of streaming endless content sources through each other. Sometimes kind of fighting each other. And the Blu-Ray is never really off. It's just lurking.

Appreciate the help, Skip