Redoing my home network setup

[Oblivious]

I've been using a 6 year old Netgear WPN824 V3. Our new house is big and the router is downstairs... Upstairs everything is getting bad connection so I think it's time to upgrade. I want to list what I was thinking about doing and you guys please give me feedback and opinions.

Downstairs I have wired to my router is -
PC
Xbox 360
Xbox One
Ethernet cable to upstairs

Upstairs -
PS3 wired to downstairs

As you can see I use all 4 LAN ports.

Here's a couple of ideas I've been thinking bout.. Keep my Netgear downstairs (even though it's dated) and wire an asus rt-n66u upstairs and set it into ap mode and wire the ps3 to it too. But I do want to know if keeping the Netgear will limit my connection since it's so old.

Or buy a wired router for downstairs since everything is wired in downstairs and either get an asus rt-66u upstairs or even a wireless ap.

Let me know guys... I'm fairly new to networking.

 

[thiggins]

The WPN824 has 10/100 Ethernet. So if you have Gigabit Ethernet devices connected to it, it is limiting throughput.

If you have no wireless devices downstairs, you will be better off putting a router converted to AP upstairs, connected via Ethernet.

 

[Oblivious]

So if I go that route should I get something that has a wired gigabit connection for downstairs to maximize my throughput?

Would this be good for downstairs?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833704130

 

[thiggins]

So if I go that route should I get something that has a wired gigabit connection for downstairs to maximize my throughput?

Would this be good for downstairs?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833704130

Sure. But only needed if you have Gigabit devices.

 

[Oblivious]

Everything besides my xbox 360 is gigabit and I stream a lot from my PC to my ps3 and I read that upgrading my router and using cat 6 cables would improve my streaming.

 

[thiggins]

Don't bother with CAT6. You should be using routers with Gigabit ports. You can always just uplink a cheap 5 port Gigabit switch if you want to keep the NETGEAR. You are only concerned about local traffic, so the 10/100 ports of the NETGEAR won't be a limit for internet traffic.

 

[Oblivious]

Local traffic and better wifi for wireless devices upstairs. So upgrading to gigabit downstairs won't benefit my gaming systems none?

 

[thiggins]

Gigabit is going to help only for moving large files around. Even 100 Mbps Ethernet can handle 1080p HD and latency isn't going to improve by going to Gigabit.

But we are not talking big $ here. Just go for it.

 

[azazel1024]

Well, technically gigabit has 1/10th the latency that fast ethernet does, especially in a store and forward switch design (which is effectively all consumer switches). Since things are being transmited 10x faster the buffer on the switch fills 10x faster before it forwards on the packet(s) to the next stop. So if you look at something like a 10Kb buffer, that would take 1us to fill before the switch forwarded the packet. A gigabit switch would take .1us to fill the buffer and forward it.

Granted, there is absolutely NO way you'll notice the difference in latency when you are talking microseconds or fractions of a microsecond, but technically a gigabit switch with gigabit clients IS going to have lower latency than a fast ethernet switch.

The only time though you'll really notice it is moving a fair amount of data. It can be a lot of small files or one big file, but once you start talking more than 20-30MB of data you'll start noticing a big difference if both clients are gigabit capable. I doubt too many people will complain if it takes 1-3s to transfer a file(s), but once you start talking 50-100MB or more, sitting there for 5-10s versus maybe a second is a pretty noticable difference. Talk about a gigabyte or more of data and you are talking maybe 10s versus 100s.

For streaming, yeah, 100Mbps is more than enough to handle BR 1080p streaming. However, if you have a fair amount else going on, especially with the same clients or paths involved over the network, like a big file transfers or something, that can be a choke point having only a 10/100 switch/router.

Personally I'd consider getting a new router (with gigabit ports) for downstairs and moving the old netgear upstairs and putting it in access point mode (connect it LAN to LAN with the other router, disable DHCP on the netgear. Set same SSID and passwords on both and you are done). Or if you don't want a new router, just get a cheap gigabit 5 port switch. They are all of $10-15 these days for a cheap one.