Home Network Upgrade
I decided to upgrade my home network components this month. My house was wired by the builder with Cat-5e which is 1000-BaseT capable. But I still had a bunch of 100-BaseT hardware, include my old Linksys wireless router, which worked fine, but I was never was that fond of. Recently when we lost broadband access for over a week I found out that the router wasn't able to provide DHCP to my home computers without the connection to Comcast. This really sucked.
I'm no stranger to buying network components. These days, the options really come down to D-Link, Linksys and Netgear. I've owend stuff from all of them, and I've had stuff break from all of them. I like D-Link's routers the best because I think they have a nice web based configuration, so I decided I might as well buy all D-Link components. Plus they have the new 802.11n wireless access points. Once I discovered that D-Link is doing money back offers until the end of Feb 2007 I surfed on over to newegg.com and purchased:
One thing this gave me the opportunity to do is to get the router and cable modem out of my bedroom where the Linksys has
been sitting on a table for over a year. My home has an OnQ home network cabinet, which has power inside the cabinet and can hold an 8 port switch and a cable modem just fine. But putting a wireless router inside a metal box is not a great idea (bad for the radio waves and all that). What I really wanted was a shelf above the cabinet where I could put the modem/router. So I built a small shelf, ran the wires down through the wall and put in a wall box with power, cable and Cat-5e connectors. You can see the finished result in the picture.
What's the verdict? So far, so good. The extra network bandwidth seems to make everything a bit snappier. The router has some QoS features which ought to help our VOIP sound quality for our telephones. The wireless network was a breeze to setup and the transmission strength is amazing. I'm getting 100% signal strength over my entire house. Lord only knows what all the radiation is doing to my nuts, but I guess that's the price you have to pay to surf the web in front of the TV.