Why, then, did I unplug it? Charter Cable performed a free upgrade from 20/2 to 25/3 service earlier this month, and I wasn't seeing anywhere near that kind of throughput on the LAN side of my network. I was lucky to see maybe 15/500k on a good day even before the free Charter upgrade, which left me scratching my head for answers. I attributed a lot of the slowdown to heavy usage of Charter Cable in my residential neighborhood, but I figured I could still see decent speeds in off-peak hours. Such was not to be the case, and I considered downgrading to Charter's 10Mbps service if I wasn't going to realize the speeds they promised. Then I received an email from Charter, telling me I needed a new DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem, please authorize their shipment of the modem to my household to better take advantage of the speed upgrade!
Well, of course I was all over that like white on rice. The new Ubee modem arrived, I installed it, and then went through the steps of having Charter provision it through their website. Once it was flashing all the lights in a happy pattern, I ran a speed test. Better, but not great. I saw 18/2, sometimes peaking at 20/2.5, but nowhere near the 25/3 advertised. Hmm...
Drilling through all the myriad posts over at http://www.linksysinfo.org/ led me to believe I was simply asking too much of the 125Mhz processor and lesser memory capacity of my early-model WRT54G v1.0. Comparisons of WAN-to-LAN speeds of all the home routers showed that the Linksys WRT54G-TM was the one I wanted, with more memory and a faster 200Mhz Broadcom CPU. I bit the bullet, bought one already flashed for Tomato 1.27 on eBay, and waited for it to arrive. Once in my hot little hands, I installed heatsinks on all the ICs that looked like they could benefit from additional passive cooling, placed the router in my basement comm rack, and let fly.
Voila'! 25/3 speeds now came up in the speed tests, although prime time network usage in my residential neighborhood can still put a crimp on that. Overclocking the WRT54G-TM to 225Mhz let the speed tests spike closer to 30/3, so for now I'll hold at that vs. overclocking to 250Mhz. (The router does feel noticeably warm to the touch at 225Mhz) My trusty WRT-54G v1.0 is still around, but it's getting transferred to my sister's home network to run on their Charter 5Mbps service, where it won't have problems compared to what I was asking it to do. In the meantime, here's what the Comm Rack looks like now, I fully expect to see another 430 or more days of uninterrupted service from the "new" router:
And the whole thing still looks pretty cool with the lights turned off, too!
5 comments:
why do you have a wrt54g and a wrt54b router/wifi ap in the same comm stack? are you hooking both up to your cable modem to provide both b and g wifi to your home?
why do you have a wrt54g and a wrt54b router/wifi ap in the same comm stack? are you hooking both up to your cable modem to provide both b and g wifi to your home?
why do you have a wrt54g and a wrt54b router/wifi ap in the same comm stack? are you hooking both up to your cable modem to provide both b and g wifi to your home?
That's a Linksys WRT54G-TM router in the bottom of the stack, a Linksys WSB24 Wireless Signal Booster in the middle of the stack, and a Linksys 8-port switch at the top of the stack.
The Linksys WSB24 is simply an RF amplifier to boost the Linksys WRT54G-TM's wireless signal strength beyond what the Tomato firmware and the longer antennae can do. Even though it was originally sold as an 802.11b signal amplifier, it works great as an 802.11g booster, since both protocols transmit at the same frequency.
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Is this possible?
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