Replacing my router?

[Mark300zx]

I am with Virgin Media and the router seems pee poor, would replacing it help with range and or stop it dropping out?

[sw67]

I put my last 2 Virgin hubs into modem mode and used my own router. No issues with speed or signal.

[Jenny Tailor]

sw67 said:

I put my last 2 Virgin hubs into modem mode and used my own router. No issues with speed or signal.

All the posts that come up on this subject seems to recommend the same course of action.

1/ Use the supplied kit as a router - and get your own kit to disperse around the house.

2/ Get your own kit to be the router and disperse around the house.

[Creg]

I’ve put my hubs 3 and 4 into modem mode but haven’t tried a hub 5.

If you haven’t already, you can follow https://www.virginmedia.com/wifi-max and have them send you booster pods to see if that makes any difference for you.

They did help for me but switching to a mesh system gave much more stable and consistent speeds through the house. The booster also didn’t feature a plug through for the socket which a lot of power line setups do.

[ARHarh]

Probably easier to put a wifi mesh system in, especially if your house is larger than normal. It works for most who want an easy to set up solution and allows access points to be placed around the house rather than relying on a router sending the wifi far enough and the connected devices being able to send a decent signal back.

[Mark300zx]

My main problem is it dropping out, I can right by the router and it takes a couple of minutes for it to wake up and give me a wifi signal!

[xeny]

I had a superhub 3 where the WiFi was garbage. Attach too many devices and the router's web interface stopped responding and the WiFi essentially stopped working, even at short ranges. I moved to using a UniFi lite to provide wifi, leaving the SH3 to provide routing and wired connectivity and this worked well.

I now have a SH5 and the WiFi on that is fine/excellent, to the extent that I decommissioned the Unifi AP and moved purely to using the SH WiFi, as it wasn't gaining me any performance or reliability and was costing me a little electricity.

[Whoozit]

Mark300zx said:

My main problem is it dropping out, I can right by the router and it takes a couple of minutes for it to wake up and give me a wifi signal!

Any single wifi point won't be enough to cover a house in my amateur experience.

Superhub 3 couldn't get through a double skin wall -> now in modem mode

TP-Link three-antenna wifi router was better, but didn't reach bedroom/kitchen at the opposite end -> now purely a DHCP server (and recently added a gigabit switch for the LAN connected devices to talk faster, basically desktop + NAS for large photography files)

The wifi solution in place now for a few years is a Tenda mesh system. It took four units to increase coverage to acceptable levels, no wonder the single-point solutions struggled so much. I can now get 4K streaming video in the kitchen, which wasn't possible before.

[xeny]

Mark300zx said:

My main problem is it dropping out, I can right by the router and it takes a couple of minutes for it to wake up and give me a wifi signal!

Easiest option is switch it to modem mode and add a router (smaller house) or mesh (larger house).

If you've got a lot of thick internal structural walls, look at running some wired network and buy a mesh that allows a wired connection (ethernet cables or network over powerline) between units(called a wired backhaul)

The faster you want the wifi to be the higher end the kit will need to be.

[wyson]

What he said above.

Given how how much people pay per month and how much a decent router costs, its no wonder most of the free ones are garbage. On Hyperoptic, I saw the freebie router they gave me cost £12.

Upgrading to a mid range Wifi 6 model costing about £150 will be a serious improvement.

[Whoozit]

Mmmm. Partly prompted by this thread, I looked into my slowish wifi speed. Turns out the base-level Tenda MW3 mesh wifi nodes are capped by a 100mbps LAN ports at all the nodes including whichever main "router" unit. Which is not great when that's being shared out to a dozen devices including three or four simultaneous streaming videos.

A <£200 investment later in Tenda MX12 nodes, and my Virgin Media 250mbps is fully available *to my phone*. Which is mind blowing. I also tracked down a few old Cat 5 cables (max 100mbps) and replaced with Cat 7. Now the new annoyance is the speed of writing to the NAS network storage drives.

[xeny]

Whoozit said:

Now the new annoyance is the speed of writing to the NAS network storage drives.

? Reasonably recent decent NAS drives should manage to keep up with gigabit speeds for decent sized files. If you're dealing with lots of small files then you'll need to fill them with SSDs which will get expensive.

Admittedly pretty much anything feels slow compared to local NVMe SSDs even with a large budget to play with.

[Whoozit]

xeny said:

Whoozit said:

Now the new annoyance is the speed of writing to the NAS network storage drives.

? Reasonably recent decent NAS drives should manage to keep up with gigabit speeds for decent sized files

The NAS box has a gigabit LAN port. But it's 10 years old so the internals may not be super fast, and the two drives are 6 years old 5400rpm in RAID which IIRC I chose as they were designed for reliability not speed. Doing a LAN speed test, both read and write are 161 Mbps.

Edited by Whoozit on Saturday 7th January 11:00

[Captain_Morgan]

Whoozit said:

xeny said:

Whoozit said:

Now the new annoyance is the speed of writing to the NAS network storage drives.

? Reasonably recent decent NAS drives should manage to keep up with gigabit speeds for decent sized files

The NAS box has a gigabit LAN port. But it's 10 years old so the internals may not be super fast, and the two drives are 6 years old 5400rpm in RAID which IIRC I chose as they were designed for reliability not speed. Doing a LAN speed test, both read and write are 161 Mbps.

Edited by Whoozit on Saturday 7th January 11:00

What was the test?

Is there a possibility of confusing Bits & bytes?

[Whoozit]

Captain_Morgan said:

What was the test?

Is there a possibility of confusing Bits & bytes?

Literally, LAN Speed Test. And no.

[xeny]

What do you get with a copy of a simple large file, say an OS iso or similar, i.e. best case scenario?

[Whoozit]

xeny said:

What do you get with a copy of a simple large file, say an OS iso or similar, i.e. best case scenario?

Ta. I get 25-35 MBps writing. More than that when reading, between 35 and 70 MBps, which suggests it's a drive or hardware limit on the writing speed.