Solving a Problem and Upgrading All at Once – Sweet
At home we've been having a real issue with Comcast where the speed was so unreliable that it became almost unusable. Huge pain in the rear. So we've gone through the Comcast angle and on Friday they came out and swapped out the cable modem and when Liza connected her machine directly to the cable modem it was fast, but after going through all the network in the house, it was slow. So it was clear that I had another issue to clear up.
All my tests in the house were showing me that the network wasn't the problem. Everything was fast, all tests showed things were just fine until I wanted to leave the house - then things got hit-or-miss. While I was doing some of these tests in my office I noticed that the LinkSys router's network port and the LinkSys 16-port 10/100 hub's network port were going offline and then back online. The router has only 4 ports, and I need the 16 for all the things in the office. But this was the first clue that there was something else going on.
My next test was to get on a machine on the hub and ping a machine on the router. When I did that and let it run, I could see that packets were getting dropped. HA! I was onto something. There seemed to be intermittent connectivity issue with the router and hub so off to BestBuy to see if they had what I needed. Thankfully, they did.
I picked up the NetGear WNR3500 wireless-N router and gigabit 4-port switch. I decided that while I was replacing the hardware, let's go gigabit and get a good wireless-N access point in the bargain. I also picked up a Netgear 16-port gigabit switch to replace the 16-port 10/100 hub, should that be the problem. Thankfully, it was just the router and when I got the new guy in and configured I saw marked speed improvements right away.
What a relief! I had enough evidence to think it was one of the two, but I'm glad it was the first one to replace and it means I can take my time replacing the other just to get to gigabit wired network speeds in my office. Nice upgrade, but getting a functional link to the cable modem was essential.