Unclog the tubes!

October 8, 2010 5:53 PM

I live in a student co-op with 17 people, and i have unofficially become the person in charge of improving the internet for our house. I'm looking for advice on how to optimize our setup. Technical details lie within.

For daily usage our speeds have always been usable, but nothing great. I am looking into switching ISPs and getting a faster service, but our options are pretty limited and I was hoping to get some tips on optimizing setup in our house (specifically the wifi setup) to make the most use of what we have.

The current setup:
We currently have DSL service with Speakeasy that is quoted at 3-6 Mb/s download speeds. Our DSL modem sits in the basement (of a 2 story house) and is connected to the WAN port of an Airlink 300N wireless router. Being in the basement however, this router is almost never used for wireless access. One of the LAN ports from this router connects to our house server box, the second connects to a D-Link 24 port Gigabit Switch that then runs CAT-5 cables through the walls to all the rooms in the house, and the last two ports connect to CAT-5 cables that run up to the first and second floors to two Linksys WRT54GS routers (running DD-WRT) that serve as our primary wireless access points for the house. Both of these routers have their WAN connection disabled and are set as DHCP forwarders to the main router downstairs.

To my knowledge, very few people connect to the to the hard wired connections in their rooms, and most people just use the wifi from the two linksys routers. The problem is that the typical speeds i measure while connected to the wifi (in the same room as the router) are about 1Mb/s download. By connecting via ethernet cable to one of the linksys routers or one of the room connections I can usually measure speeds between 3-5 Mb/s depending on who else is connected.


I know that wifi is always going to be slower than an ethernet connection, but i feel like under optimal conditions i should be able to get some better speeds than i have been getting. Also, the whole setup has really been cobbled together over the years, and I'm not sure if it is the most effective hardware configuration. If you have any advice on setting i should tweak on the routers, some hardware upgrades (probably within the range of a few hundred dollars) that would go a long way, or any other way i can get some more juice out of our network, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

posted by cognitio to Technology (10 answers total)

1 Mb/s is all you're going to get out of an 802.11g router. You could swap those routers for 802.11n routers, and then anyone with a new enough laptop would be able to get more speed, but as someone who formerly was the computer chair for a student co-op, don't - dealing with bandwidth hogs is bad enough as it is, there's no need to further saturate your pipe. (We ran into issues with 25-30 people sharing a 10Mb/s pipe, and various users soaking up all of the bandwidth with bittorrent and viruses, making it hard for everyone else to rely on the connection.)
posted by spaceman_spiff at 6:02 PM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'd run an extension from the line in the basement upstairs and put the main router next to the gigabit switch. For minimal cost and network reconfiguration, you'll have an 802.11n connection where people can reach it.
posted by zippy at 6:53 PM on October 8, 2010

Sorry, I meant to say you can then move the main router and DSL modem upstairs. This also makes maintenance easier as you have the key equipment in one place.
posted by zippy at 6:54 PM on October 8, 2010

I haven't had DSL in years, so I'm not sure where the bandwidth bottleneck is-- could you get another DSL modem on the same plan for something like $10 extra a month? That way you could split the downstream load between two wireless networks, maybe one N for people who can use is, and the other G. Or the wired router on one and another wireless. Each should have the bandwidth that your current setup affords.

(At least, that's how I would do it with cable Internet. With DSL, would only having one phone line choke it further upstream than the modem?)
posted by supercres at 7:37 PM on October 8, 2010

A few solutions used by my friend in the same situation (student coop, but his is 200 people +)

1. Buy a seedbox on a huge pipe, outlaw bittorent inside the house but give everyone a login. People love this, because it means bittorent is super fucking fast, but the connection everyone has to use daily for other stuff isn't clogged by BT seeders.

2. Pass out a good antivirus on thumb drives or CDs. Make sure everyone has actually run it. Your house is small, but their house ended up having about half of the residents roped into a botnet, which predictably caused their bandwidth to slow to a crawl.

Additionally, if you're a student coop, see if you can leech onto the school pipe? Forget an ISP if you can get on some delicious academic network internet2 goodness..
posted by maize at 7:41 PM on October 8, 2010 [1 favorite]

I can usually measure speeds between 3-5 Mb/s depending on who else is connected.

I'm not sure what the problem here is. If your speakeasy like is under 6mbps which it sounds like it is, then this is the speed you should be getting.

Your bottleneck is your slow speakeasy line. Wireless G in real world scenarios floats anywhere between 6 and 24 mbps. On average you're getting around 12mbps. That's almost twice the speed of your speakeasy line, so the wifi is not an issue. What you should be looking at is a faster ISP. Do you have Comcast in your area? Or FIOS from Verizon? Or AT&T Uverse? Plain-jane DSL is really the worst option nowadays.
posted by damn dirty ape at 8:37 PM on October 8, 2010

I'll go one step further and say that that expensive Speakeasy DSL is no longer worth it the premium. I had a circuit with them for about 10 years (and also worked for them) but about a year ago switched to a Comcast business circut (yes, they'll install them at residences). My monthly bill got cut in half but my speed tripled, and the line has been rock-solid. If it's more bandwidth you need that's the easiest fix.
posted by bizwank at 12:07 AM on October 9, 2010

Response by poster: I definitely agree with you, bizwank, that speakeasy is not worth the premium, and that's why we want to switch ISPs. Unfortunately there is not a lot available on our block. Comcast is available, but i am pretty strongly opposed to doing business with them in general. ATT U-verse is available, but only up to the 6Mb/s speed, which is no faster than our DSL line. It looks like the only option we have for getting better speeds is to get dual ADSL2 lines from sonic.net (who are actually very nice to work with), and end up paying about the same as we are paying now.

zippy, i have also been considering the idea of moving the Airlink upstairs to see if that helped speeds at all for those who can use wireless n.

It sounds like the bandwidth is definitely the biggest bottleneck right now, and I will just have to see how things improve if we up our service speeds. If anyone else has some general tips on network configuring that might be useful even after we upgrade speeds, feel free to share.

thanks everyone!
posted by cognitio at 10:41 AM on October 9, 2010

Comcast is available, but i am pretty strongly opposed to doing business with them in general.

At work I have us using a Comcast business account as we long outgrew our T1. I'm paying for the 22/5 package but in reality am getting more like 50/5 and with speedboost its 100/5. When I call business support I get an American who depending on the tech is surprisingly competent and at worst someone who will escalate my call when requested. The level of service between residential and business service is night and day. The line is around $100 monthly and has so far been extremely stable. My experiences with the local telco monopoly are too depressing to recall, but I will tell you that Comcast is as good, if not better, than those guys. Dont let your personal politics intefere with doing your job and providing the best service to your clients.
posted by damn dirty ape at 11:50 AM on October 9, 2010

I would add more access points as a first step if everyone is using wifi and attempt to take care of your intternal connectivity first.

Use non overlapping channels and multiple access points per floor. Turn down the power levels if they interfere with each other.

Ask your ISP if they can provide you with a graph of your traffic use to see if you are indeed starved for bandwidth before buying something new and getting locked in a contract.
posted by gog at 8:52 AM on October 10, 2010