[SGVLUG] Recommendations for > 100 MBbs routers

[Claude Felizardo]

The TimeWarner bundle promo ended so the rate went up so I decided to
give Giggle Fiber a try.  That's giggle with an I, not two O's.  They
bought out Champion cable in Arcadia/Monrovia so it's fiber to a node
somewhere in the the neighborhood then coax to your home.  With TWC I
was getting 80-90 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up, obviously capped for what
I was paying but we'd get drop outs constantly and the speeds would
vary so much depending on time of day.  Giggle claims on their web
site that most users get over 300 and when I talked to them last year,
they said because they do not offer cable TV and had fewer subscribers
this meant they had plenty of capacity.

I had the installer pull a brand new cable and run it to my wiring
closet because I was keeping TWC for TV programming and phone for now
-- will try asterisk so Paul's talk was timely.

Using Giggle, the upload is hitting 20 Mbps up but down is less than
TWC at around 50-70 Mbps which is a far cry from 200 Mbps so I was
disappointed.  Now most of my equipment is 10/100 with cat5 home run
to a wiring closet where I have the routers installed (TWC and Giggle)
which can then connect to a switch in the closet then to various drops
in the house including two with switches because I have more equipment
at those locations.

I did upgrade one of the switches to a TP-Link SG108E which is an
8-port 10/100/1000 smart (web) switch with speed indicator LEDs
(10/100/1000).  It has a menu option to test the connections and it
will report cable lengths in meters as well as confirm connection
speed.  Now the newest router I have is a TP-Link WDR3600 with N600 or
an older Netgear WNR200 both of which I was using when I still had
DSL.   Both have 4 gigabit ports but no indicators lights.  Measured
cable distance from remote switch to closet is 18m which is about what
I expected.

For testing WiFi, the only AC device we haver is my son's smartphone,
everything else is G or N speed.  For wired devices, the only thing
where we could run some kind of speed test was the Xbox One and the
best speed we saw was 140 Mbs down and that was when we connecting the
Xbox directly to the modem and cycle power so it will give up an IP.
Otherwise going through the WDR3600, we're getting usually slower than
TWC for download but upload is much better which will be good for
trying to backup to the cloud.

Now when I ordered Giggle Fiber, they suggested I get at least an
AC1900 router, the installer pretty much said the same.  I could see
doing that if we had more AC devices but since most of our equipment
is only N speed, I was hoping that my wired computers would see a nice
speed increase but I'm wondering if my older router just can't push
the data fast enough.  Is this really the case?  The TWC rented Arris
router has 4 gigabit ports and is doing better than the older router.
I have not tried the WNR2000 yet because the specs say its only
capable of N300 wireless.

So does anyone have suggestions for replacing my old router?  I may
need to pick up another gigabit switch for the other room if replacing
the router makes a difference. And the speeds has seemed to get better
since the first day - do modems need to be tuned?

Claude