Our Wi-Fi systems -
how to work around a router with
a mediorce radio.
We saw a statistic the other day that makes us think we might be on the right track with our WiFi / home network upgrade plans. It is this - 6/20/2020: IBM asks 75,000 employees to continue working at home for the foreseeable future, plans to reduce their office space by 50%. IBM is generally a smart outfit. So let’s also be a smart outfit with this project and use the precision mindset we honed when working alongside guys with fancy EE degrees from places like M.I.T., Rose Poly, Cornell, and Purdue. But those days are gone, many engineering jobs have moved to the other side of the Pacific, and it seems IBM is telling us the days of large offices or labs filled with people might be gone as well. Looks like we’ll be working at home for some time, so let’s set about improving our home system. Measurement - we can’t tell where we are, or if we’ve gained or lost ground until we can measure. For our yardstick we picked the Ookla test offered at speedtest.net. We don't even want the minimal expense of a multimeter. This investigation has a budget of zero. We want to use free test software. There may be better or worse testing apps, but we like Ookla because of the variety of operating systems they serve ( Windows, Mac, Chrome, etc ). Next we’re setting up our test lab at an undisclosed location away from our normal Germantown haunt - so if we really foul up something, we won’t crash our home-network for days on end.
At present we have a new gateway supplied by the phone company that we pay for internet access ( a gateway is a modem and a router in the same box ). We upgraded our service level, and committed for a few dollars more per month to get a lot faster service. We began assessing our system by attaching 5 foot cable from the gateway directly into a computer. Then we measured a speed that ran, after five successive measurements, at 3% to 5% less than the advertised speed of the internet provider. This, in our view, is a very acceptable level. Next we tried various locations in the house with different phones using WiFi instead of a direct cable.
The newest phone we have is an iPhone that is about 20 months from when it was first introduced (10 months from when we got it). The spec for it is 802.11ac or Gen 5. The gateway the phone company gave us is an Arris NVG458, which is also Gen 5 spec. We should have fairly decent WiFi, but let’s test….and this is when we said ouch…bad system. The throughput on our best iPhone, an XR in the same room as the gateway is 77% of what we can do from the Cat 5 directly wired computer. Things got worse as we went into other rooms with the same phone on WiFi. We tried a lesser phone, a Moto 6, and were even more disappointed — this one only delivered about 30% of the speed we got from the directly wired computer. Next we tried out laptops, some 2015 vintage MacBooks and some Dell Chromebooks. Same results - big disappointment - they do nothing near their potential. Sure, they appear to work well, loading type on a web page, but actual testing reveals our WiFi is wasting half or more of the speed we’re paying for every month. No wonder we get the spinning circles and delays on any heavy sort of work like large files or video meetings.
It’s time for us to rethink this WiFi thing. We know that neither the phone company nor the cable company are cheating us on the advertised speed, “the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves” to put it in Shakespeare’s words. If we rely 100% on WiFi we will continue to be miserable, but it’s impossible to go 100% wired — the Alexa type devices, the laptops at the kitchen table no longer have a place, the phones and tablets do not easily accept network wiring. We need to make this an intelligent hybrid system. Our guess is this that thing is a Pareto distribution, i.e. 20% of our devices account for 80% of our data consumption. A home network is generally only as good as its weakest link. A slow device hogging most or all of the lanes on the freeway gridlocks the entire system. Here’s where we’ll start. So let’s shove the big data users on a wired system, leave the 2.6 band for IOT ( internet of things ) devices like Alexa, Ring doorbell, etc., and set the WiFi on our laptops, tablets and phones to the 5.0 GHz band where their greater data usage and mobility gets better speeds from the router.
First step in our plan - find out what’s up with this Arris router. Further reading, testing and watching the thing that has replaced the instruction manual, the engineering data sheet, and science journals (sarcasm intended) - YouTube - has made us realize the gateway supplied by the phone company has an underachiever WiFi radio inside. The videos make sense - our wired performance is good, our WiFi performance borders on terrible. There are no antennas nor antenna ports on the outside of this router, and therefore it has little room for us to easily improve it. The gateway has four wired - goes-out-it - ports on the back. So we’ll try mapping out our household this way — Port 1 will go to a good WiFi radio router we’ll select later. Port 2 we will cable to a switch that will feed the local room via cables ( three computers, one VOIP phone, so a 4 port switch will do ). Port 3 will go to the next room over, we’ll string a cable into there and plug it into another ethernet switch, and that switch can calbe to other devices. Port 4 we’ll keep open for now in case we find a different need later.
We’ve gone into far more detail than intended, and so need to leave even more details for next time. For now, let us provide you with with a way to access the router to turn off WiFi or otherwise modify the router — in your web browser type https://192.168.1.1 or, possibly https://192.168.254.254 — check your router manual to be sure of the right address. Also be careful, find out how to reset the router completely in case you make some bad entries. The initial login is usually user = admin , password = admin but once again, check the manual. Also, after we’ve turned off the mediocre WiFi radio, we’re going to cascade our Port 1 into a good WiFi router. To learn how to do this, check here - https://www.wikihow.com/Cascade-Routers The thing we called a switch is a device to expand the number of ports, more properly called a gigabit ethernet switch and available for ~ 18 to 25 dollars at Wolfchase Best Buy or Walmart, or the Lowes on Winchester, and of course online at Amazon, Newegg, eBay, etc.
Our WiFi home network has become a hinderance.
Our WiFi radio is way too slow.
Big gains by simple means. Bringing our slowest devices up to speed.
Sending our internet connection into the electric breaker box.
Why this information from a law firm?
How, you might ask, does a law firm have any bona fides in this subject matter. A staff member whose first encounter with the digital world was Fortran on a Univac, followed by IMSAI CP/M S-100 bus, manufacturing using 3870 Mostek microcontrollers (2 kilo bytes of onboard ROM!) then 6805 & HC11 Motorola, Intel 8051, etc. etc... for years... plus a few US patents involving RF devices along the way in these areas is our credential. When the isolation happened this year, we realized we could and should help our clients stay current with their health & safety isolation and distancing needs while we worked with them on their family, estate and tax law matters. So you see above the kind of --additional -- advice and service we have been dispensing over the past months.
