Which router would be best?!

[Ednossa]

Hi, I'm new here. The main issue that I have is the following.

I'm on a work site in the middle of the forest on Northern Quebec, Canada.

This is the setup we have to make our dorms have internet.

We have 1 satellite dish, connected to a modem which is then sent to a router.

This router has three Ethernet wires that go to dorm A, B and C. In each dorm, we have 2 wireless routers, one at each end.

I believe the initial router that splits the internet to the three dorms is failing, because it stops working every now and then. I would like to know what would be best router for this situation. I'm mainly afraid of having some sort of bottlenecking at this router.

I have also been assigned the task of replacing 2 of the dorm routers for allowing a better connection to each dorm as well as increasing the signal distance.

Any help would be appreciated as I need to have all this by next sunday, 4 pm.

Thanks !

 

[thiggins]

Before you go buying equipment, you need to do some more investigation and provide more data.

1) What equipment is currently used (manufacturer name and model numbers)?

2) What is the temperature environment of the equipment?

3) Is all equipment on UPS (battery backup)?

4) What is the power source and how stable is it?

5) What is the down and uplink bandwidth provided by the satellite service?

6) When the primary router stops working, does it still have a WAN IP address? If you disconnected the router and connected a PC directly to the satellite modem, do you have an internet connection?

7) For the dorm routers, what do you mean by "better connection" to the main router? They are connected via Ethernet. You can't get any better connection than that.

 

[Ednossa]

1) What equipment is currently used (manufacturer name and model numbers)?

Just some basic D-Link router, wired only. I dont have the information on it and the sticker has been ripped off. (Why, beats me...)

2) What is the temperature environment of the equipment?

Temperature ranges from 15-22 degrees celcius. (59-77F)

3) Is all equipment on UPS (battery backup)?

Basic store bought powerbar.

4) What is the power source and how stable is it?

Power bar with surge protection. Plugged straight in the wall and its connected to the hydro-dam we are working on. Hasn't dropped power in 4 months.

5) What is the down and uplink bandwidth provided by the satellite service?

The service we have is provided by Xplornet and the package is supposed to be 5Mbits/sec download 1Mbits/sec upload.

6) When the primary router stops working, does it still have a WAN IP address? If you disconnected the router and connected a PC directly to the satellite modem, do you have an internet connection?

When it disconnects, we have all the computers saying connected without internet connection. When we plug it directly in the modem, there is a connection.

7) For the dorm routers, what do you mean by "better connection" to the main router? They are connected via Ethernet. You can't get any better connection than that.

What I meant is mainly the distance. Someone at the end of the dorm may only get 1 bar of connectivity and it will go from no signal to 1 bar. By better connection I was just worried that if there are 12 people on 1 wireless router it would cause a surcharge of information on that router and cause it to become sluggish.

 

[thiggins]

Thanks for the replies. Helps a lot.

Your ISP bandwidth is pretty low, so any router will have enough wired routing throughput. There is no risk of "bottlenecking" by the router not having enough throughput.

Yes, 12 people on one router with only 5 Mbps of bandwidth to share is going to result in very unhappy users no matter what router you use, wired OR wireless. There simply isn't enough bandwidth to go around, especially if people are trying to stream or run Torrents.

The only thing that will help is more bandwidth, which you can't get.

To solve the disconnect issue, just swap in another router. I have no specific suggestions about reliability since I don't test it. But routers with 10/100 ports are going to run cooler than those with Gigabit.

 

[Ednossa]

Thanks for the info,

I will look into getting a cooler router as well as installing a new satellite dish on the dorms. That way we can reduce the unpleasant experience by at least a little bit.