Recently I upgraded my router at home. There was nothing wrong with my old router, I just wanted to upgrade especially since I have a new plasma TV in my basement that is WiFi capable, so I didn’t want my video streaming experience to be hindered due to my router. My old router was a Linksys WRT54GS and was very reliable. It was compatible with the B & G wireless standards but not with the newest standard, N. After doing some reading on the subject the wireless N standard was my best bet for getting the most out of streaming to my television as well as supplying wireless access to my laptops, iPhone and Kindle throughout my house with minimal interference.
I decided to pick up a Netgear N600 WNDR3700 Wireless Dual Band Gigabit Router. I won’t be covering all the spec’s of this router on this post since frankly there are too many to cover without boring you to death. For more details on the router you can visit the link above and you should find all the technical information you want. The two features I will mention that were very nice for my particular situation were: dual band frequency and USB access. Dual Band is very nice to minimize signal loss or degradation. The router transmits in both so if one is being interfered with by other electronics, walls, wiring or what have you, the signal loss won’t be as great. It transmits in both 2.4 and 5.0 GHz. The second feature is the USB storage access on the router. By using this you can connect an external hard drive directly to your router, access it from your wired or wireless devices and share those files, pictures, videos and music to anyone using the wireless network. This is extremely handy, for example, if I share my music with my wireless network so I can play them upstairs, that’s fine and dandy, but what happens when my computer is not on? That’s right, no music upstairs. With the USB access setup, I can save my music on the external HD and have my wireless music stream, whether my computer is on, disconnected or otherwise.
The real reason I wanted to share my upgrade experience of my router is two fold. My Samsung TV was very easy to setup to share my video and music files. As a matter of fact I watched a movie last night streaming it wirelessly from my desktop to my plasma TV. I noticed no quality loss, the audio matched perfectly with the video and I really can’t think of anything negative to say about it. The best part was that I was able to browse the Internet and even download some software at the same time without any skipping or chopping of the picture. The second reason is to note the speed increases I’ve experienced even on my wired desktop computer. Prior to my upgrade using the Linksys router my Speedtest on average was close to the following:
Linksys Speedtest
After upgrading to the N600 Netgear router, using the same test, I achieved the following marks:
Netgear Speedtest
As you can see the download speed of my Comcast Internet increased around 7Mb/s! The best part about this is that the same holds true for my wireless connections as well as the wired. While I didn’t see much change in the upload speeds, they did not drop, which is just as good as it was before, so no reason to complain.
All in all, I guess what I’ve learned is that the saying that “you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone” can be morphed into a new saying: “you don’t know what you’ve got until you get something better”. Albeit, this doesn’t hold true for everything, it sure proved to be so in this instance. If you’re thinking of upgrading your router, or just haven’t even thought about it in a while, you might want to check on what hardware you are currently using and what options you have. Sometimes, as they say, “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze”, but in my case I was able to “squeeze” some extra “juice” out of my ISP.