Should I upgrade to 6.0Mbps?

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mayn, if you lookin to upgrade ya internet speed - look at it from a price vs performance perspective and whether you need the extra speed.

jus changed from 3 Mbps/256 Kbps to 7 / 800... and a I notice a huge difference, and it only cost $5 more.

as for routers... pick somethin that does at least 54 mbps, although you will notice a slight performance decrease (as compared to 100 Mbps wired connection) which is kind of obvious due to interference and a slower protocol. 108 and 125 mbps routers are pretty, I have myself a 108 mbps buffalo wireless router and it runs beautiful, has a long range too.
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Exactly. That was dilemma in the beginning. 6Mbps is *only* $5 more a month, which is great...I wish other ISP's would come, all of them offer faster speeds at lower prices. I could be paying $37.95 a month for 6Mbps/384k, but I'm paying that much for 3Mbps/384k..

~Ibrahim~
 
I hope nobody has the impression that 108mbps is what you really get, you do realize that 54mbps will only give you around 20-25mbps under ideal circumstances. Wireless is overrated more than Al Gore.
 
Hehe, look at my avitar, think I'm worried about politics :)

I've not used that model, but I've found buffalo to have very nice consumer grade routers and ap's, though the routing part could use some work, but no consumer grade routers are very good in that department anyway. I have found that a lot of 54mbps ap's have better throughput than 108mbps ones through a wider range of distances. So until n is finalized and proven I'm going to continue to recommend solid g only radios. My personal preference is the cisco 1130ag, use the a side as a bridge if needed then you can use all the bandwidth of the g side for video streaming!
 
True, but there are plenty of us who use our ap's for more than just internet access. I have three media center pc's that stream wirelessly and n would be great for that once HD picks up speed. And I generally transfer large amounts of data when I backup my work laptops to my data servers wirelessly. It's far more convienient than going downstairs to plug into my switch.
 
I've used dlink and netgear in the past and was very dissapointed. Plus most of them don't work properly through multi-phase houses and ups' so it's kinda out of the question for me. Zyxel does make some good stuff though, their hs-100w was a very nice $20 router/ap when it first came out.
 
Check out pfsense, excellent firewall, I run it on an old dell gx240 p4 1.8 with 512 ram and 4 nics. Between that, my 1130ag, and my cisco 3560 with poe, I have dual wans, and qos running over everything. I just moved into a new house and haven't had the desire to wire the upstairs yet. My ap is in the attic watching over everything, poe is great :)
 
Same as pfsense. There are no good firewalls that run on windows in my opinion, they all slow down your machine and break more things than they protect. Sygate was the only one I used to use and now that norton owns it it's crap like everything else they sell. Except corp av of course.
 
I hope nobody has the impression that 108mbps is what you really get, you do realize that 54mbps will only give you around 20-25mbps under ideal circumstances. Wireless is overrated more than Al Gore.
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Do you mean a 54Mbps router will only get you like 20Mbps or something?

If so, I'm sorry, but you are 100% wrong. Nearly everywhere in my entire house (3 floors) I get my full 54Mbps with an "Excellent" signal strength. No kidding. There are a few places, like the basement, where the signal strength drops and I get around 36Mbps, but otherwise I get 54Mbps/Excellent nearly anywhere I take my laptop.

~Ibrahim~
 
Just because the window is telling you that its connected at say 54mbps, you won't get it. Go ahead, grab a file of like 100megs, and transfer it. Time how long it takes. The theoretical max of 54mbps would be 6.75megs/s, so the 100meg file would be done in 15s. Add some tcp/ip overhead and such, and we are talking maybe 20 seconds. However if you actually try this, I bet it will take you around 40-50s instead.
 
Thank you, I was laughing so hard I couldn't respond :lol:

Did you know your speedometer in your car also doesn't show exact speeds when it gets over 100mph? Thought you were going 130? Not likely....
 
Just had to post mine since everyone else was.

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Actually I didn't misunderstand. Michaelahess, who he quoted, said exactly what I tried to explain to him, and its a different part of the conversation from the one you brought up.

For what it's worth, regarding your point, I agree that you won't need more than 20mbps. In fact I found the whole idea of people here discussing him getting a new router as ridiculous, cause even the 6mbps is obviously not going to saturate his existing router either.

As for the OP, if you were serious about file transfer and stuff, you wouldn't be using wireless anyway. And also to add to that, the net always seems slower on wireless because of all the added latency you introduce by using wireless, but you said your desktop is slow too. Since this was not the case before, the most probable conclusion is that your ISP have begun more aggressive throttling. The practice is taking ISPs across the world by storm because they tell you all about how its a measure to stop network abuse and to limit all those p2p downloaders, when in reality they are just throttling everyone and saving themselves money on bandwidth.
 
As for the OP, if you were serious about file transfer and stuff, you wouldn't be using wireless anyway. And also to add to that, the net always seems slower on wireless because of all the added latency you introduce by using wireless, but you said your desktop is slow too. Since this was not the case before, the most probable conclusion is that your ISP have begun more aggressive throttling. The practice is taking ISPs across the world by storm because they tell you all about how its a measure to stop network abuse and to limit all those p2p downloaders, when in reality they are just throttling everyone and saving themselves money on bandwidth.
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Yeah, this whole topic was misguided to begin with. Everything was based on evidence that I "felt" instead of I "tested".... With QoS, though, it works faster, or at least the desktop does. Before then, I could never hit above 2700kbps, but with it I'm consistently hitting 3000+ (the speed I paid for).

~Ibrahim~
 
That is a better test for the kind of real-world performance you can expect, but it's not testing *your* connection to the internet, it's testing the internet itself. Also, all of the speed test servers are located very close to backbones for exactly the reason I stated. If you live in the sticks you could theoretically pay for a connection speed that couldn't be obtained with most real-world single-source file transactions and this test might help you to determine that, but you should do a number of tests at different times of day over a period of more than a week and pick the targets based on hops, not miles and if you're really serious about getting faster be prepared to move (which really makes this entire test more applicable to data centers than home users).

Also relevant to note that it's not the geographical distance that has a significant impact on latency (electrical signals are pretty damn fast), it's the routers in between. "Far" on the internet isn't necessarily a distance. The distance in hops between Palo Alto and Tokyo (which are directly connected to each other) is much shorter than the distance between Montana and North Dakota (which would probably get routed through Chicago, Denver, and Seattle backbone nodes and a number of smaller networks at either end).

I may have missed your point previously, sorry, but I don't think it's a very relevant test for home users and if you are going to try and test real-world internet connection performance it's a bit more complicated than that.
 
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