wilkes

Yeah, I saw that after I posted. I missed it the first time reading the thread on my phone. But Flo still didnt explain very well why a faster speed may require a newer modem. Most people think because their modem is rated at 100mbs, that it can handle a faster DSL connection.

Fins, Flo mentioned that in the last sentence...

"Either way, neither will likely speed up your internet browsing and downloading speeds, unless you are paying for a 20Mb or higher speed."

Flo is half right.

Typical computer users arent even doing any file sharing or networking inside their home. They are just connecting to the internet, where their speed is dictated by their ISP. And that less than the intranet speed of any router.


However, what Flo isnt considering is the factor of fiber service. When ISP speeds were all under 10mbps, there wasnt a problem. But while all routers are rated at least 100mbps, that is only the intranet speed. That is not the speed the WAN port is capable of. Many routers (especially cheaper ones) have severely reduced speeds on their WAN port. So if you now have fiber service and are supposed to get one of the new faster service packages, your router could be restricting your connection speed to the WWW.


If you do decide to get a new router, as I already suggested once, go to Amazon and order one of the Buffalo brand routers.

Only if you need more range than G gives you, or are transferring REALLY LARGE files or many smaller once internally on the network all the time. If you find yourself sitting and waiting while a movie, or 10,000 MP3's transfer from one computer to your laptop for instance, then you would benefit from the N speeds. If you are doing the occasional office documents transfer, a movie once per week, or 50 or less pictures at a time, I would just suffer with the G speeds.

If you ever plan to stream movies to your TV from a PC located elsewhere in the home, get an N. If you are using netflix or something else where the content comes directly over the net to be displayed, stick with G.

Either way, neither will likely speed up your internet browsing and downloading speeds, unless you are paying for a 20Mb or higher speed.

Thanks Aunt Flo. You just saved me some money. My router is a G and is working fine but I was told I needed an N....whatever that means.

Granny, is there something wrong with your old router? As long as it is a G router or better, and you don't need additional range, it's just fine.

OK guys, this is way over my head but I do have a question. Recently we had fiber from Wilkes Tel. installed. I have a router purchased at Walmart about 8 years ago so I know it needs to be replaced. We have an old desktop, and old laptop and a new laptop. My question is where do I purchase a new router and what brand do you recommend?

First may i suggest, the next time you decide to buy a router, try the Buffalo routers. I get them from Amazon and the best one only runs about $80. Their wifi range is much better than any of the other off the shelf consumer routers. They are more in line with the Cisco commercial gear. I set one up with the default settings and compared it to a $400 Luxel high gain antenna. I found almost no difference in the performance.

Second, it is very possible that the problem is with the physical connection, either in your house or between your house and Century Link's switch. In your house could just be a wire or connection has gone bad (copper tarnishes and terminals get faulty with surges that come in). If you have any DSL filters in place you may also try removing those. Very often solutions for these problems arent as high tech as you would expect. You may also need to get your service provider to send someone out to check their line. I had a speed problem with Charter where after hours on the phone with their script readers they finally had a tech check their lines and found it was their problem. Of course, it also required me taking my modem outside to the d-marc and connecting it to their line coming into my house to get them to finally stop trying to say it was user error.

I see what you mean! The -d switch definitely responded fast going to the router, but the hops themselves were a lot slower. The average hop to Google was around 700ms. I ran tracert immediately after, and the average hop was 35ms, but with a major delay on getting the IP.

I'll still try changing the DNS servers later tonight, just to see. It's about time to go eat a piece of pecan pie now, though

You can google how to do a hard reset on the zyxel if you need to take it back out of bridge mode.

Another problem I had with embarq is slow DNS service. Do the tracert with the -d option, such as 'tracert -d google.com'. That leaves out the hostname lookup. If it is faster, change your DNS servers temporarily to the free servers at opendns. They are 208.67.222.222, and 208.67.222.220. You can change it just on one workstation if you want to compare your pc against a second one on the same network, or change it on the router if you want it to be the default for everyone. If configured like most, you can also try using the same dns servers that gowilkes has as authoritative. I switch mine back and forth for testing dev and production websites. Embarqs DNS always seemed sluggish to me, charter's are OK but still overloaded.

Flo, the current modem is a 660. The link you sent helped, but my interface was a little different; I had to click on "Wizard" to change it from Routing to Bridge mode.

Luckily, I didn't have any problems, because now going to 192.168.2.1 is dead, and 192.168.1.1 is my router! So I don't know how to get back in to the modem settings.

Running tracert, this had an immediate impact on my connection speed. Probably not enough to notice, but on paper it's faster. I went from an average of 39ms /hop to 26ms, so that's pretty good. It also took out one of the hops in my router, where it hopped from 192.168.2.1 to 1.1.

I do notice one thing that's kind of odd, though. When I run tracert, the first connection is to 192.168.1.1 (obviously). The hops return at <1ms, but when it gets to the point of loading the IP, it takes 4 seconds for the IP to pop up and move on to the next one. Is it taking that long for my router to respond on each connection? That would definitely explain things.

AFAIK, I don't have any torrents running, unless you consider Thunderbird to be a torrent. All I really run is a text editor, a few tabs of Google Chrome, and Thunderbird. Of course, I run Putty as needed.

Bennett, I use HiJack This regularly, and don't have anything unexpected running on any of the computers. Excellent point, though.

I would also recommend assigning static IP Address to all devices lessen the DHCP request.

FLO has a good point about torrents

Also check each PC with hijack this to make sure one on has auto proxy you IE of firefox setting

Either way I think your really close.

Is it the Zyxel 600 or 660?? You can log into it's web interface to view your signals from there...You MAY have to plug a pc directly into it though, as it configures itself in a different subnet than what you normally see.

Also, if it IS the 600 or 660, try setting it to bridge mode - otherwise, you are actually using two routers, and that zyxel is doing its on NAT, dhcp, etc..

Here is how to change it on the 660:
http://support.earthlink.ne...ernate.php

Also, when I had embarq, I found upgraded firmware for the 600 series that helped when torrents were overwhelming it. It was running out of memory with more than 100 open connections at once. One of the later firmwares for it corrected the problem there, but my lowly linksys wtrg54 router was still having memory errors. A custom firmware upgrade on it cured it there.

Are you doing a lot of torrents? Even if you keep the speeds low, the # of connections will quickly overwhelm a 'home' router if more than 100 or so...some handle it gracefully, others dont.

The speed issues have been intermittent for awhile, but have recently gotten worse. Generally, the speed issue would affect Melissa's computer more than mine, which was why I suspected the router in the first place. When I would run tracert, the first hop to 192.168.2.1 would show 1ms, but the last return on that first hop would take 3-5 seconds to show up.

I did replace the network cable going from the modem to the router, but that had no impact. I have 4 devices plugged in to the router and one more that connects wireless, and since they all have the same issue then I figure it's unlikely to be all of the cables going bad at once.

I found that if I rebooted the router then speed would increase, but then slope off over the next couple of hours. I still have the same problem with that, though, so the next step is the modem, or the line itself. I would prefer it to be the modem, though, because that's a LOT easier and faster to replace! LOL

FWIW, the modem I'm using is the generic Embarq DSL modem. I don't think it shows anything for usage other than the light flashing, but I might try flashing it before replacing it.

First make sure all of your cables are good. Intermittent connections can be due to a cabling problem. Next

I would have a tech come out and check my signal level. Or if you modem shows the db level i would watch for spikes via its ip setup. Any movement on signal level causes a loss of connectivity.

Now make sure all of you flashes are up to date.
I would also search dsl reports for hardware isp information
Personally I don't like combo devices but they can work. I am interested that you saw a big increase in speed from a new router. the modem or signal may be the most likely problem

Also Try google for tcpip tweak from speedquide.net may be a patch for vista or 7 that can help

good luck

I just bought a new router for my home; a Netgear N600 Wireless Dual Band. I saw an immediate improvement on internet speed.

But occasionally, the speed drops off (a lot). When I run "tracert google.com", it looks like the modem is the bottleneck, and usually I can restart the modem to solve the problem.

With this last tracert, the modem responded in 1400ms. After a modem reboot, it responded in 67ms.

So now I'm thinking, should I have gone with a router / modem combo, but the best that I found was an N300; so, I'm guessing that I would lose some range with this? I'm in a split-level house, so range is pretty important.

Do you guys think I should exchange the N600 for a combo? Or keep the N600 and buy a new modem? If I get a new modem, I'm looking at the Netgear DM111P for around $45, but I'm open to suggestions.