Deleted
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Post by Deleted on Dec 12, 2017 12:58:53 GMT -5
My geek friend was running about 20? servers for his business and used Araknis networks- good equipment.
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Post by garbulky on Dec 12, 2017 16:18:25 GMT -5
So if anybody else has any config suggestions in the router they can give me, that would be nice. So far it seems to be working. Remember bandwith and security are of no concern to me. Just reliable connection.
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KeithL
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Post by KeithL on Dec 12, 2017 16:46:25 GMT -5
Wire is ALWAYS the better choice - if you have the choice. - faster - more reliable - no reception or distance/speed issues - no interference issues - and even the cheapest wired switches seem to be reliable and blazing fast I totally agree with Keith Norton just came out with the "Core" router that is suppose to help with wifi overload. I have Linksys WRT1200ac with a switch expansion ($20), no problems. I prefer to run cat5 when I can. If you have an old router, many can be re-flashed to be used as a switch only. |
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Post by garbulky on Dec 12, 2017 16:49:53 GMT -5
Wire is ALWAYS the better choice - if you have the choice. - faster - more reliable - no reception or distance/speed issues - no interference issues - and even the cheapest wired switches seem to be reliable and blazing fast I totally agree with Keith Norton just came out with the "Core" router that is suppose to help with wifi overload. I have Linksys WRT1200ac with a switch expansion ($20), no problems. I prefer to run cat5 when I can. If you have an old router, many can be re-flashed to be used as a switch only. Its for smart home devices like wifi light bulbs, light switches, amazon echos etc - wireless modes. I have all my critical internet stuff hard wired. |
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klinemj
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Post by klinemj on Dec 13, 2017 17:53:20 GMT -5
With as much as you have spent on the smart home devices, it might make sense to just get the latest router if you keep having issues w/the old one. Frankly, I was having issues a couple years ago and fought and fought them. I followed reco's hear and bought a new ASUS - and...wow...all issues gone. While we don't have a lot of the smart home devices (yet), we hit the wireless pretty hard - and NO issues. Peace of mind carries a cost. And, with what you can get for $150-$300 is amazing these days.
PS - I do hard wire what I can - but I can't do it all. And, with 2 teens and 2 adults in the house - we hit the wifi hard!
Mark
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Post by Gary Cook on Dec 13, 2017 20:47:13 GMT -5
I have no idea what you guys are talking about, all of my apples talk to other apples, no problems.  Merry Xmas Gary |
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Post by millst on Dec 14, 2017 11:35:08 GMT -5
The upsell is on. OP wants to keep that underpowered router. No need to spec top-of-the-line consumer routers and prosumer stuff like Ubiquiti. I believe the WRT160N has a hard limit of 32 devices. That is probably the point where it becomes totally unworkable (poor performance starting well before that point). You're probably experiencing issues since it only has 16MB of RAM. Try reducing the load on the router by keeping the devices down and turning off any features you don't need (remote services, VPN, UPNP, etc). Ensure you're using a channel that doesn't have contention from your neighbors (20MHz bandwidth helps, too).
Yeah DD-WRT is free, but I would never recommend that to somebody that isn't prepared to tinker for hours. Should also be ready to toss it in the trash if it gets bricked, which is less common these days (still happens, though). Most of the documentation is wrong/out-of-date and you're forced to dig through conflicting posts on forums. Tomato, Asuswrt-Merlin, or LEDE are safer bets for the less experienced. Ubiquiti products also not for the faint-of-heart.
Having said all that, you should really think about upgrading sooner or later. I had a very nice router (at the time of purchase) for many years and resisted upgrading. Didn't need the speed. When I did upgrade, it turned out to be a big difference. Devices that had had intermittent problems starting working fine. Others that were slow to connect, connecting instantly. Also, I can get signal much further away from the router now. A Netgear R6700 is pretty reasonably-priced modern router.
-tm
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Post by pknaz on Dec 14, 2017 12:02:13 GMT -5
I'll take a slightly different approach to my suggestions. Keep your existing router and add a Ubiquity AP for your modern devices that are capable of leveraging an 802.11AC wireless and let your older devices connect to your router's wireless AP. You may want to verify that the DHCP server in the router is configured to assign enough IP Addresses for the number of devices you have. Most routers are configured to only assign a portion of the total number of IP Addresses that are possible. Without getting too far into the weeds on TCP/IP networking, you should easily be able to configure your router to support 250 devices on your network. As an example, if your router's IP Address is 192.168.1.1, you can configure your router to assign IP Addresses from a pool of 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254. This solves a couple challenges you have, keeps costs low (Ubiquity APs are about $100 on Amazon), improves reliability and range, and improves speed (this is more important than you think, more on this).
In addition to the hardware limitations of the number of devices your router can keep track of in its contact list (As Keith mentioned), Access Points (APs) can only talk to 1 or 2 devices simultaneously. This means that if you have 5 wireless devices all trying to consume wireless bandwidth at the same time, they have to take turns. The benefit of modern APs with 802.11AC (or higher) bandwidth is that each device spends less time communicating with the AP and the devices can take quicker turns getting their information to/from the AP.
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Post by millst on Dec 14, 2017 13:10:07 GMT -5
OP doesn't care about speed. Doesn't make sense to spend money on something that complicates things. New routers cost less than $100.
The DHCP range is good to check to make sure that it is large enough for the number of devices present. However, increasing the number of IPs will not help if the router is constrained by its hardware.
AC only helps if the device has an AC radio. It's unlikely any of those IOT devices do.
-tm
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Post by LuisV on Dec 14, 2017 13:53:43 GMT -5
Listed above are basically all the points as to why I stopped using consumer wireless products and went with Ubiquiti instead; however, in certain instances you don't need to go with a full UBNT stack and that is how I initially started. For example, you disable the wireless portion of your current router and use one or multiple Unifi APs throughout the home for wireless functions. The existing router is only used for routing purposes and DHCP functions and that is sometimes enough offloading that the router can continue to operate without bogging down so to speak. I'm using their USG, Cloud Key, multiple PoE switches, multiple APs and their newer cameras. The NVR runs as a docker on my unRAID NAS server.
Support has never been an issue for me as the UBNT support staff is an email away or you can chat with them from within the Unifi web console. Their support forums are great, typically quick to reply and I've never experienced any problems from forum members... I would say they are just as nice as those in the Lounge. Their firmware and Unifi console releases have consistently introduced additional feature sets and are usually weekly for beta testers and once a month for the public. Case in point was the recent KRACK wi-fi vulnerability as Ubiquiti was one of the few companies that had a patch available almost immediately for their products.
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Post by LuisV on Dec 14, 2017 14:02:03 GMT -5
OP doesn't care about speed. Doesn't make sense to spend money on something that complicates things. New routers cost less than $100. The DHCP range is good to check to make sure that it is large enough for the number of devices present. However, increasing the number of IPs will not help if the router is constrained by its hardware. AC only helps if the device has an AC radio. It's unlikely any of those IOT devices do. -tm Understood, but why settle for just reliability when performance can be obtained by simply offloading the wireless aspect to something else that can handle multiple wireless connections without issue? Performance does not simply equate to speed increase, it also amounts to number of connected devices regardless of wireless band... 2.4 or 5ghz. He needs a robust wireless option that can scale... performance will be a by-product. |
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Post by 405x5 on Dec 14, 2017 14:03:32 GMT -5
My geek friend was running about 20? servers for his business and used Araknis networks- good equipment. Forget the thread I LOVE YOUR AVATAR!! (kept meaning to say it!) Merry Christmas Bill |
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Post by LuisV on Dec 14, 2017 14:09:30 GMT -5
Its for smart home devices like wifi light bulbs, light switches, amazon echos etc - wireless modes. I have all my critical internet stuff hard wired. Trying to understand the your wi-fi IoT devices... are the bulbs individual wi-fi devices or do they communicate with a hub? Safe to assume Belkin wi-fi switches or are they a different brand? |
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KeithL
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Post by KeithL on Dec 14, 2017 14:22:50 GMT -5
All routers have SOME limit as to how many devices they can hold in their DHCP table. That limit is the total number of addresses that router can hand out and keep track of. On some older routers and cable modems, that limit was as low as 5 or 10 devices (you might be amazed how fast the count adds up if you have a lot of gadgets) On most modern devices it's far higher. Once you get past a single router you sort of HAVE to understand what you're doing. For example, having two DHCP servers handing out addresses from the same pool would be a disaster. (If you have two routers with DHCP servers, you can disable one of them, or assign each a different set of non-overlapping addresses.) I'll take a slightly different approach to my suggestions. Keep your existing router and add a Ubiquity AP for your modern devices that are capable of leveraging an 802.11AC wireless and let your older devices connect to your router's wireless AP. You may want to verify that the DHCP server in the router is configured to assign enough IP Addresses for the number of devices you have. Most routers are configured to only assign a portion of the total number of IP Addresses that are possible. Without getting too far into the weeds on TCP/IP networking, you should easily be able to configure your router to support 250 devices on your network. As an example, if your router's IP Address is 192.168.1.1, you can configure your router to assign IP Addresses from a pool of 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254. This solves a couple challenges you have, keeps costs low (Ubiquity APs are about $100 on Amazon), improves reliability and range, and improves speed (this is more important than you think, more on this). In addition to the hardware limitations of the number of devices your router can keep track of in its contact list (As Keith mentioned), Access Points (APs) can only talk to 1 or 2 devices simultaneously. This means that if you have 5 wireless devices all trying to consume wireless bandwidth at the same time, they have to take turns. The benefit of modern APs with 802.11AC (or higher) bandwidth is that each device spends less time communicating with the AP and the devices can take quicker turns getting their information to/from the AP. |
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Post by millst on Dec 14, 2017 14:42:39 GMT -5
Understood, but why settle for just reliability when performance can be obtained by simply offloading the wireless aspect to something else that can handle multiple wireless connections without issue? Performance does not simply equate to speed increase, it also amounts to number of connected devices regardless of wireless band... 2.4 or 5ghz. He needs a robust wireless option that can scale... performance will be a by-product. Specifically here, OP is trying to avoid buying more hardware. Generally, complexity would be my concern. I feel one would be better off with a single device, especially a person that doesn't have networking expertise. -tm |
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Post by pknaz on Dec 14, 2017 15:21:30 GMT -5
All routers have SOME limit as to how many devices they can hold in their DHCP table. That limit is the total number of addresses that router can hand out and keep track of. On some older routers and cable modems, that limit was as low as 5 or 10 devices (you might be amazed how fast the count adds up if you have a lot of gadgets) On most modern devices it's far higher. Once you get past a single router you sort of HAVE to understand what you're doing. For example, having two DHCP servers handing out addresses from the same pool would be a disaster. (If you have two routers with DHCP servers, you can disable one of them, or assign each a different set of non-overlapping addresses.) I'll take a slightly different approach to my suggestions. Keep your existing router and add a Ubiquity AP for your modern devices that are capable of leveraging an 802.11AC wireless and let your older devices connect to your router's wireless AP. You may want to verify that the DHCP server in the router is configured to assign enough IP Addresses for the number of devices you have. Most routers are configured to only assign a portion of the total number of IP Addresses that are possible. Without getting too far into the weeds on TCP/IP networking, you should easily be able to configure your router to support 250 devices on your network. As an example, if your router's IP Address is 192.168.1.1, you can configure your router to assign IP Addresses from a pool of 192.168.1.2-192.168.1.254. This solves a couple challenges you have, keeps costs low (Ubiquity APs are about $100 on Amazon), improves reliability and range, and improves speed (this is more important than you think, more on this). In addition to the hardware limitations of the number of devices your router can keep track of in its contact list (As Keith mentioned), Access Points (APs) can only talk to 1 or 2 devices simultaneously. This means that if you have 5 wireless devices all trying to consume wireless bandwidth at the same time, they have to take turns. The benefit of modern APs with 802.11AC (or higher) bandwidth is that each device spends less time communicating with the AP and the devices can take quicker turns getting their information to/from the AP. Modems (Let's call these gateways, since they rarely are doing modulation/demodulation anymore) are a different topic, they are generally pretty limited (By the ISP, primarily, not their hardware capabilities) in the number of IP Addresses they will assign, with the usual assumption that there will be a downstream router. I've not seen a router in almost two decades (even residential class) that couldn't handle either an ARP table, DHCP table, or DNS requirements for a single Class C IP Address space. Adding a Wireless Access Point (AP) to his network isn't going to impact his router's capabilities or configuration.  |
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Post by AudioHTIT on Dec 14, 2017 15:30:11 GMT -5
Agree with the recommendations for a new router, and you shouldn’t dismiss the idea because you don’t need the speed. I think the key is adding a 5 GHz channel and moving all devices that can handle it to that channel, there will be less contention for the limited 2.4 GHz channel.
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Post by millst on Dec 14, 2017 19:00:29 GMT -5
I was all for 5GHz until I found out how limited the range is. All that uncongested bandwidth doesn't mean much when you have no signal.
Again, IOT devices probably need the range more than anything else. One reason why a lot of them don't even have a 5GHz radio.
-tm
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Post by socketman on Dec 14, 2017 19:05:53 GMT -5
Everytime i read the title i think it says Wife crashing,
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Post by creimes on Dec 14, 2017 20:12:46 GMT -5
All routers have SOME limit as to how many devices they can hold in their DHCP table. That limit is the total number of addresses that router can hand out and keep track of. On some older routers and cable modems, that limit was as low as 5 or 10 devices (you might be amazed how fast the count adds up if you have a lot of gadgets) On most modern devices it's far higher. Once you get past a single router you sort of HAVE to understand what you're doing. For example, having two DHCP servers handing out addresses from the same pool would be a disaster. (If you have two routers with DHCP servers, you can disable one of them, or assign each a different set of non-overlapping addresses.) Modems (Let's call these gateways, since they rarely are doing modulation/demodulation anymore) are a different topic, they are generally pretty limited (By the ISP, primarily, not their hardware capabilities) in the number of IP Addresses they will assign, with the usual assumption that there will be a downstream router. I've not seen a router in almost two decades (even residential class) that couldn't handle either an ARP table, DHCP table, or DNS requirements for a single Class C IP Address space. Adding a Wireless Access Point (AP) to his network isn't going to impact his router's capabilities or configuration. I work for BellMTS which is an ISP in Canada, currently at home I have 50 mbps down and 5 mbps up and we use the HH3000 Residential Gateway, I don`t use the built in dual band wifi as I have a Asus AC1750 router that I use in AP mode, I have been thinking of adding a Ubiquiti UniFi AP AC PRO for better coverage to the yard and detached garage. From all the WiFi and or slow speed repairs I have done it`s mostly either saturation/interferance issues or just way too many devices in the home, especially when the customer has IP TV Service and Internet and all these home automation products. Chad |
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