Help me improve my network
 

My network speeds are 25mbit down with 1mbit up. I am using the provide cable companies modem which is a some Motorola docis 3 modem with a netgear 3700. I always have about 5 computers on the network at a time and sometime up to 10+ devices.

When I moved here I added 2 computers to the network. They were using some decreped brandless router from the cable company. I could litterally not do anything on the internet without it being slow. I replaced the previous router with my netgear 3700 which really helped make hulu/youtube not buffer every 3 seconds and gaming. When everyone is actively using the internet it gets slow, for obvious reasons. Gaming wise I will sometimes have an excessive ping, like 300-500 more than I usually do. It makes me lag pretty bad. The router is in the opposite side of the house in the floor above me so I could not route an Ethernet cable easily to myself even if I was not renting.

Is my router not enough?
Do I not have enough bandwidth?
Would a powerline adapter to myself help?
Can I prioritize myself in the network with QOS or something else?
DDwrt?

I have tried using QOS to throttle the certain people but it does not work.

When i was sharing a house with 5 people, it could get quite slow. I determined this to be because we were all using wireless. If you have a few devices doing decent traffic, it will cause delay as wireless is built on collision avoidance, and uses time delays and such to avoid collisions of packets. Powerline ethernet would get around this.

With that said, if you can get dd-wrt on your router, it has bandwidth monitoring tools so you can see what the actual live usage of the router is and troubleshoot further.

You could implement QoS, but if they're all paying for the internet, thats kind of a dick move.

Its possible that a higher quality router might help. ie one that advertises multiple simultaneous connections at once kinda thing. But id try dd-wrt first and see if you're bandwith use is okay.

Your router is plenty,are you using the 5ghz band or the 2.4? Is everyone using wireless N or are some still on G? mixing clients between two wireless standards slows the whole thing down. If I was you I would make sure everyone is using N and set the router to only broadcast a 802.11n signal,put all media devices on the 5ghz band and PCs on the 2.4

The internet is payed for by my roommate and and I. I would not throttle him. Because he is a nice guy he wants lets the neighbors use it too. Since I am the only geek of the house I get control of the network. I know at times some of the neighbors are downloading torrents also, which is partially why I want to throttle them. DD-wrt would help with the network monitoring.

I was pretty sure my router was enough. As far as I know everyone is useing 2.4ghz. In my house there is no dualband capable wireless adapters. I don't know about the neighbors though. My roomate and I are using wireless N but I do not know about the neighbors.

So your router would show if its running mixed N+G or just N. If not, dd-wrt definitely does. It might also show what standard people connect with, but not sure.

Today I finally finished my custom router build. I have a pentium 4 machine (soon to be VIA ITX combo) fitted with onboard NIC and a PCI NIC. The OS is only 75MB in size and it is a DHCP server and firewall built into one. The OS is called IPfire and along with a WAP54G Access Point, it is the fastest I have ever seen my internet without plugging straight into the modem.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

Sounds cool. I may have to do that one day. That pent 4 or any via is faster than anything you will find in a router. My netgear has a really fast 600mhz... which is fast for a router.

Edit: I looked it up. Ip fire looks pretty cool.

I noticed something weird yesterday. My internet was being insanly slow, as in taking more than 3 seconds to load a simple web page such as this one. It had been awhile since I reset the router so I figered that might fix the problem. I reset the modem and router. I also noticed at the time that the modem was hot to the touch. I went back to the computer and could not connect to the internet and could not. I tried reseting multiple times, checked with the isp for outages, and general windows diagnostics. I spent an hour and could not get it to work. So I then instead did some laundry. The next mourning I reset the modem and router again, now that it was cool, and it worked.

Coincidence? I know heat and silicon don't go together very well. There is not much I can do to disapate heat better from the modem either.

I would throttle everyone else except you and your roommate considering you two are the one's paying for it. Maybe it will be incentive for your neighbors to get their own if they don't get to use all of your bandwidth. If you're router supports and runs well with DD-WRT, I would give that a try and see if your neighbors really are the ones slowing it down.

My router does actually not accept dd-wrt. Mine is the version 3 which is not supported do to an architecture change.

Are you sure that the network itself is slow? I know that occasionally the DNS servers I use will take a little longer than normal to resolve a host name. Are you testing based on pages loading or have you tried using something else?

Next time this happens just try pinging a known IP such as 8.8.8.8 or 8.8.4.4 (Google DNS servers.)

If the response times are high, maybe tracert in the command prompt could shed some light on the problem. (I'm assuming you're using some version of Windows.)

I did that with an old Pentium 2 system and it was slow as *insert curse word*. Did it with Freesco I think it was, or possibly Smoothwall.

A P4 has a little more power than a P2 and supports more and faster memory. :p

Either way gateways don't need a whole lot of power. I bet the P2 could handle better if it was a bare *nix install but that doesn't give you the ease-of-use that some of these other solutions offer unless you're one of those people who consider updating DHCP, BIND, and networking through the CLI easy. :p

Letting "all the neighbors" use your connection may be nice and all but it is really a bad idea even if it did not affect your bandwidth which it obviously is. Somebody's second cousin visiting town downloads something like cp and the Secret Service kicks down your door.

+1: This too, you're liable for what they do on your network. It's also a gaping security hole IMHO.

*: Updated to reflect edited post.

Especially Freesco is very VERY light and can be run from a floppy afaik. The point is while the concept is nice for most users it's just a waste of electricity. It's fun to do, but from a practical standpoint few people have any use for it. IMO. :)

I have tried open dns and google dns actually. Open dns is faster for me according to namebench.

Next time it does get real slow I will do a tracert.



Personally, I would kick them in a heartbeat. But... they are staying on none the less.

When my network seems fast.


When being slow.


Both tracert were done on my laptop over wireless from the exact same place.

Are you sure it's not just the site you're connecting to? It's not your connection in general, that's for sure. If all your bandwidth was being eaten up you would see those number be higher on the second run. Is it only HTTP traffic that goes slow?

You may want to grab Wireshark to see how many wireless packets are flying across your network when it happens. You might be able to tell if someone on the wireless is doing it, but I'm not sure if that is the case.

You might want to tell your roommate that people are downloading illegal content on your internet and that you're liable for it. As much of a "nice person" he wants to be, it's not a good idea and you might find that the only way to find out if it's the other people on the network is to kick them off it and see if it still happens.

You may be able to argue with him that you're paying for half the internet but your neighbors are using 90% of it, so maybe he should be paying 90% of the bill to cover your neighbor's usage? Just because he pays half doesn't mean he should have all the say in how it is used and be able to give away your portion of the connection. The internet should work when you need it to because you're paying for it. Your neighbors are not.

Just out of curiosity, would you happen to be going to college or be living near a college campus?

Your hardware is fine. DD-WRT may help and may be support for v3 soon. QoS will not help you. If you can hard wire yourself it would help you

Someone sent me a steam message after I went to bed last night. I came back to find it with this. I, or maybe just steam, losing a connection A LOT. Usually just for a minute it seems, except once which was for 8 minutes. Is this typical of steam or am I really losing internet at about every once or more per hour? Seemed odd so I figured I would ask.

Edit: I was gaming last night and it happened to me. First time I actually have seen this happen. Totally lost internet on the computer so it is not steam.

Sunday, February 24, 2013
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and why wouldn't QoS help? Some router might not have a very good QoS control though and not be able to define exact clients like mine can.

Also limit the BW on the guest networks if your router has it to 802.11b speeds and see if that helps as well... I do that as well as having QoS.

http://www.paessler.com has something called PRTG that can do really good monitoring as well.

I can define exact clients. It just tells me it is already a rule... but its not. The netgear 3700 is full featured.

The PRTG thing. I found that, installed in my computer. Then I think I realized I had to have it installed on everyones computer but I can't do that. I just have access to my computers and the router.

Can you limit the speed of the guest networks?

Yea P2 is NOT recommended for a router. P4 or socket athlon 3200+ with atleast 1GB DDR