It could be worse. We have chicken wire, plaster and sheetrock.
We’ve had continual difficulty with wireless service for the last year-ish. Just last week we resolved it as one of Crapcasts techs uncovered that our modem was never properly installed on their network. The year old router is just peachy. Crapcast’s customer service is legendarily shit.
[quote=“Raoul, post:19, topic:67885”]However, my G/F has Time Warner and they provide a truly shitty router that I have not been able to replace or configure (and I work in tech). You can’t connect another router to it, you can’t use another wireless base station instead of it, and any config changes (including changing the name or password) are immediately overwritten the next time it is restarted.
[/quote]
My parents have a TWC all-in-one cable modem/router/VOIP box that I think they’re required to use. I just turned off the wireless, enabled DMZ and hooked up a second router (loaded with Tomato) of my choosing. It’s double-NAT’ed which isn’t ideal, but the throughput is still perfectly fine and I find Tomato extremely easy to deal with.
This sounds interesting to me. Our netgear router is slowly dying, time for a new one and cheap sounds good.
The house was actually built wired for cat 6, so I might stick a second router in upstairs anyway, to help.
… yes I am? I have an airbook and a desktop mac. I use the airbook most of all because I don’t need to be in one place to use it. Outside on the patio, in the basement, upstairs in my studio, in the living room, laying down, sitting up, standing, which I do all of. My desktop is in one place in one room all the time, static, I am not static.
The solution to bad wireless technology cannot be to revert to wires.
To go forward we must go backwards?
I have TWC in Austin. I bought my own modem (which paid for itself after about a year), but had to also keep their modem for phone service. That’s fine because they now don’t charge me for it, it just sits there and has nothing to do with my home’s internet. Everything downstream of my modem is obviously configurable by me.
The Wirecutter recommended my router the RT-N56U for all of about 2 months. It’s a good, configurable router, but didn’t last long in the best/recommended spot. I’m not sure anything will help in my situation, though, because wire lath. Thanks, Obama.
If AC wireless isn’t very important to you but you like DD-WRT or Tomato, check out the ASUS RT-N16. The memory and cpu are excellent and DD-WRT runs flawlessly on them.
Have you seen the D-Link Alien Space Routers? If I had one I’d pose it with the antennae pointed down, like legs, and put googly eyes on the carapace.
It can be tricky to implement roaming across multiple wireless access points, so if you can do the whole house on one it’s generally a good idea. I have multiple routers and switches but I only run one AP.
I am jealous of your wiring! My house is very old, much patched and hacked over time, I’ve got every kind of lath you can image (including expanded steel and riven wood) and I’ve gotten more than a few bloody knuckles running cat6 through the walls… worth it, though. Streaming is always best over wires.
Technically wireless is older than wired communication. We sang, hollered and made smoke signals long before the telegraph, eh? 
But good cabling - in particular, fiber optic cabling - will always have the key advantage of signal containment, which preserves precious shared commons for roving uses. Cabling is a more elegant method for a more civilized age.
Don’t get me wrong, I love good cabling as much as the next person…
But the solution to bad wifi in the home cannot be reverting to cables. Lets just make the wifi better! ;p
Been using Buffalo for years with no problems.
Put Tomato on the older ones and the latest one had DD-WRT installed.
bug ugly
You’re living a 2005 lifestyle if that works for you. Don’t you have internet connected phones, tablets, Rokus, Sonoses, Chromecasts, etc, etc, etc in your home?
Upward, not forward!
Yes, they look fab too! No idea if they’re actually any good though (I’ve had mixed success with D-Link)
I recommend getting the worst of both worlds by re-introducing microwave waveguides for ‘wired wifi’. Just run a waveguide from your AP to each wireless device you wish to use and you are all set!
[marketing voice]
The best thing about the OnHub is that it’s a closed box so you’ll never know what Google is doing with your data! That and the fact that Google will get to see ALL your data. And, they are literally in the middle of your network so a man-in-the-middle attack becomes SUPER EASY!
[/marketing voice]
I’m really not that paranoid about Google, they’ve got all my data already, but I’d rather not let them inside my network (I mean, aside from my two android gadgets and my chromecast) because I’m very sure they’re capturing a ton of metadata off all their products.
Buying based on looks is probably not a good idea for tech gear but I go get the OnHub’s point about being pretty enough to just sit it on a shelf in plain sight.
As far as the gist of the article, I’d suspect that the problem is a crappy internet connection at least as often as it’s the router.
I wonder if there’s a market for a home network engineer? Comes to the house, does some tests, installs some gadgets that will test over the next week. Comes back in a week, pulls info off the gadgets and makes recommendations as to wifi/router/internet connection, etc. Probably wouldn’t find enough folks willing to pay but maybe there’s a market. Internet connections are awfully important now.
No private citizen is willing to pay a fee commiserate with the misery of debugging wireless communications issues.
Proposed photo caption: Cable-Granny is watching you masturbate.
Comcast is up to the same shenanigans. Set that all-in-one-panopticon to “access point” mode, throw my shitty Linksys router on there, and while they’re still able to inspect my packets, at the very least they’ll have to do some decryption fuckery to really get at my information. Or they could just ask Google, b/c by now they know everything about me.
