Rethinking the home network setup need advice

[rescueswimmer]

I did some reading and looking for some advice, before I just through money away. I'm looking to retool my Home network.
Home is 3 Stories 1 basement the rest above ground. With that being said. My current setup comes into the basement to a Network panel. In the panel is the spectrum cable modem. Which currently feeds into an older Netgear WNR 3500L gigiabit router. From the router It goes to a gigabit Switch which feeds about 8 Lan cables which feed through out the rooms in the house. (wifi not turned on with this router) Also from the router I have 1 Lan cable that goes to my home office which I have it connected to an older WNDR3700. This has my home office Synology NAS attatched, my desktop and brodcasts my WIFI. What I have been noticing is that I only get about 25-45 Down and 6 UP via wifi, and anything hardlined gets about 150 D and 6-7U. Being on the 3rd floor my Wifi coverage is not that great.

1. I was planning on just upgrading the 3700 in my office with one of the newer Higher end routers, but I'm not quite sure on some things and any advice or anything I'm missing would be appreciated.

So what I came up with in my head. Just replace the wifi router (not sure on this part? that the older 3500L gigabit router is fine and leave it) Then I would have better wifi coverage and my PC or NAS could utilize the Link aggregation feature of the router.

2. Not sure if this is possible but I would relocate my cable modem to my home office which is on the 3rd floor. Then the new setup would be cable modem to new high end router. Then the router would be connected directly to NAS and Desktop. Then it would connect to the panel in the basement to the gigabit switch. This method would eliminate the Older 3500L.

I hope this was not real confusing. Like I said I could use the advice.

Thanks

RS

 

[bill001g]

As long as the 3500 can run traffic as fast as you purchase from your ISP then it is not a issue to keep it. Unless you have gigabit internet most routers have no issues keeping up Most difference in routers are related to the wifi not so much the wired throughput.

In a installation like yours you just put in multiple AP (or router running as ap) in the remote rooms. You could if you really wanted to put one in every room than has a ethernet port. This will give you optimum coverage without the issues of running multiple networks that happen when you use multiple routers

I would avoid using the link aggregation. Most inexpensive nas units can not exceed 1gbit of traffic anyway because of the disk systems. Then your end station you are talking to would also have be able to exceed a gigabit. Many of the disk system in those also are being bottlenecked by something other than the network. In many cases if you really only have a single machine that needs access you are better off not even using a NAS and put the drives direcly into the machine. You could then share it out as a file server. Doing it the NAS method requires you upgrade the main machine and the NAS. In general I would not bother with the complexity of the NAS until you have equipment that can really utilize it. Link aggregation has some limitation on how it load balances the traffic. Link aggregation is not used as much by commercial installation since the cost of 10gbit ports has come down and works much better.