Internet Question

[mikester]

Be patient guys, this is going to be a hard thing for me to explain.

My house has a Leviton media panel on the wall in the basement. I put it in a number of years ago when I was doing the renovation of my upstairs/attic. I have a brand new modem in the box. We got the modem from the cable company because the existing modem was their old design and we were having problems with internet speed. I have a Belkin wireless router sitting on top of the media panel. The modem feeds the router with a single CAT5 cable and the router has 4 short CAT5 leads that go to a board in the panel that feed 4 hard wired CAT5 plugs in my house. One is in an upstairs office, 2 are in an upstairs bedroom (my son used to do video games) and 1 is in my kitchen.


My wireless internet speeds are very slow. Almost non existent upstairs. I bought a new wireless router. Had the same speed issue. I put the wireless router on the main floor in the kitchen and it was just as bad. I plugged one of the laptops directly into the modem and it was fine.
Heres the problem. I still have the old Belkin router hooked into the system. I need it to feed the jack that the new wireless router is plugged into. I could run another line into the kitchen so one would feed the new router from the modem and the other would be for the media panel but theres 4 cables needed to feed the rest of the panel.
Someone told me that I need a switch ? This would take the place of the old router and go in the media panel. Then it would be modem to new router, new router to switch and then switch to panel to feed the jacks in the other rooms. I want to still use the jacks so I can put in a booster in the upstairs bedroom so my daughter can get better signal.

Is this making sense ? Any suggestions ?

 

[jeffmoss26]

That looks correct to me.
Modem-router-switch-panel-jacks in the individual rooms.

You would probably want your wireless router to be set in access point mode so it does not hand out IP addresses.

 

[mikester]

The wireless set up is secure now. Never had a problem.

 

[jd_1138]

I'd put the wi-fi router on the middle floor above basement. Then you should get a better signal. Did you install the new modem? I couldn't tell from the description if you did or not.

Also,, maybe try one of the Asus routers set up with the Tomato firmware. They are better than the typical junky routers from the usual vendors.

 

[cheechi]

what materials are the walls?
where in the kitchen?
how high up off the floor? (not main floor, basement, how far up off the floor of that room)
what else is nearby?

In addition to what Jeff says, if you have plaster, concrete board, a very thick tile on the walls, you are going to get really limited wireless signal. either they make it too echo/bouncy (concrete board, certain backers and of course tile) or they just absorb it all (stucco & plaster)

You don't want the wireless to be too close to the microwave. It broadcasts on 2.4GHz, the reason the FCC let's you use that band is every house in America has a microwave oven and they distrupt any long term communication that could happen on the 2.4GHz band. Cordless phone? computer with wireless mouse? wireless speakers? in wall speakers/intercom? ceiling fan with remote control, too close to the garage? all of these aren't great places for it to be put.

How many other networks are available if you stand in the kitchen and look? any stronger than yours? If doing the access point like Jeff suggested doesn't fix it, or doesn't fix it all, give us more details.

 

[justsam]

Does the NEW cable modem also have a wireless router? If so just that and a switch.

If NEW cable modem is only a modem, than do as others have suggested, modem to router, to switch.

Also as others have suggested, if you use the OLD wireless router in a different location to improve wireless coverage configure it as an Access Point, not as a router.

What speed are you paying for and what are you measuring?

http://www.speedtest.net/

 

[mikester]

Thanks for the replies guys. I thought I had described the set up pretty well. The modem is brand new. The Belkin router is at least 10 years old. I purchased a brand new router a month ago. The new router is on the main floor of the house in the kitchen. The house is so small you can vacuum 3/4 of the main floor without moving the plug. Old house but remodeled with sheetrock walls. It was a single story with an attic that was converted to living space.

All of the computers in the house are laptops. Two Toshiba, 1 MacBook Pro that belongs to my daughter. No problem if I plug in to the back of the modem. I think the problem stems from the new router going through the old router. The old one needs to be taken out of the system.

A speed test shows the download at 18.73, the upload at 5.37.

 

[jd_1138]

A switch simply takes an internet signal and splits it up. So you can use one to feed the modem signal to the wires in the basement.

 

[erty67]

18 is fairly quick. the old router could very likely be an issue. 10 years is an eternity in the internet world. If the home is that small, have you tried running the modem just to the one outlet feeding the new wireless router?

a switch does not issue IPs so it would need to be connected after the router.

 

[erty67]

Here's another question. as mentioned above, is that 2nd router set up in access point mode? are the upstairs computers still trying to connect to the basement router SSID? If it's that old, it's probably wireless-B. Those at best were only good to 11Mbps wireless.

 

[mikester]

All this **** is way too confusing. Im not exactly into fixing this stuff. Ive got buddy that's a union electrician that does security systems and this kind of stuff. I think Im just going to give him a call over the weekend and see if he can straighten this out for me. Much easier ! But thank you all for the replies.

 

[wyliesdiesels]

If u still need help i can help out. I work r an ISP and deal with this stuff daily!

For starters if u have 2 routers daisy chained/connected via lan ports(not wan/internet ports) then u want to disable DHCP on one as u will have conflicts and the 2 routers will be fighting each othr when handing out IP addresses to hosts!

Second, a wireless AP in a basement will not give good coverage to the rest of the house. Even if u show good signal on the bar graph the signal quality can still be bad resulting in poor performance and slow speed!

Also, a wireless scan with advanced capabilities(channel/frequency, DB signal level, etc.) needs to be done to check for other APs and what channel theyre operating on. Channels 1, 6, and 11 are the non overlapping channels for 2.4ghz. If u have muliple APs then they need to be put on different channels, otherwise the 2 APs will interfere with each other.

 

[justsam]

At the end of the day, it is all about moving bits around.

If you are seeing speeds of 19Mbps and 5Mbps and that is the level of service you are paying for than you are good. Compare these on your worst case wireless connection to your local wired connection.

If internet speeds are good most likely your intranet speeds are at least fair. Do you do large file transfers among home computers?