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!
