Performance Under the New Regime

If you've been following my recent adventures in networking you know that I recently transitioned over to an entirely new router from a new vendor. Some of the things that Asus emphasized with this unit was speed and range. Both were important to me since I'm running on a FiOS connection that provides 75Mb downstream and 35Mb upstream. I certainly want to be able to use as much of that pipe as I can.

It's text book that if you want to see the results of a change you need to take a baseline. I also wanted to see the difference across devices. Speedtest.net provided performance information used below. I should note that I also run multiple tests on each device to ensure that no single result was out of a reasonable range.

Network Overhaul

I have just over a dozen network connected devices in the place not including any roaming devices from friends or family. I'm expecting this number to only grow over time. Having a capable traffic cop in the house is a pretty high high on my list of home technology issues. For an extended period I have had issues on my network wherein my computer refused to perform appropriately on my Linksys (Cisco) equipment. While most things are connected directly to the router and mostly via WiFi, I still have several devices that connect via wired Ethernet.

The "fix" for my issue was to connect my desktop computer directly to the vendor supplied router and everything else was behind the Cisco network. This caused a lot of problems with media sharing and similar activities since computers on different networks won't talk to each other without fairly creative and complex configurations. For a while now, it seems Linksys has been producing far more retail products than updating the firmware on the stuff they have already have. As a result, even though I was running on a mid- to upper-market Linksys E3200 High-Performance Simultaneous Dual-Band Wireless-N Router, fixes, improvements, etc. were very scarce.

I didn't really relish replacing the router since it was fairly new still and seemed to work ok with every other device I had. But, replacing my Alienware beast was inconceivable at best (and no, there are no open slots for another network card/USB networking is hokey.) Unfortunately, with as much stuff as I've been doing on the home network, something had to give. 

Luckily, a gift card came my way. While it wouldn't cover the cost of a new router, it would take the sting out. Not as much as I thought, given the unit I ended up going with, but it was something.