Need some networking help and advice.

ZenicaNJ · Apr 17, 2013

Hi,

My old Dlink DIR 825 has failed and in the course of replacing it I've been doing some research into wireless routers. I connected my laptop to the Netgear R6250 and a USB hard drive to the Netgear, I was getting transfer rates of 18 MB/second. A one gig file took 40 seconds to copy from the hdd and 57 seconds to copy back. Nothing else was connected to the Netgear except the cable modem.
My Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller Ethernet controller reports a stable 1Gbps connection to the Netgear. Shouldn't the file transfer closer to the speed it transfers when connected to the computers USB 3.0 port?

Ideally this is the setup I would like to have so if anyone has thoughts or suggestions to help me achieve this, it will be greatly appreciated. I will be posting this on one or two other networking forums so if you belong to a few and see this post on a few sites, it's just me!

I have an HP laptop with an Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1030 "2.4Ghz only" NIC as well as a Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller Ethernet controller.

There is a Linksys PAP2T voip device, an HP CP1525NW printer connected by wireless, a few iPhones & iPads along with an Android pad, a home built desktop and another HP laptop that has an Intel 82567LM gigabit Ethernet.

I also have a few USB 3.0 hard drive enclosures that currently connect to the newer HP laptop.

I would like two wireless routers running 802.11ac, one as an access point and the other as the main internet router for the home.

The hard drive enclosures would connect to the access point, everything else would connect to the primary router either by Ethernet or wifi.

Right now, the hard drive enclosures reach transfer rates of 190-225 MB/second
and I'd like to retain as much of that speed as possible.

So, a few questions come to mind as I've done research on this...

Q1) If the enclosures are physically connected to the wireless access point, would the computers needing to access a file on them do so through the access point by wireless or the main router by Ethernet cable, since the access point is also connected to the main router by a much faster wireless? Only the two routers are capable of 802.11ac speeds. For a computer or iPhone to access the access point directly would mean a slower wireless speed.

Q2) What do I need to ensure all gigabit devices are transferring data at or as close to the theoretical limit as possible?

Q3) Can files attached to the access point be made to be accessible from the outside internet?

Thanks for reading and offering any help.

David

bill001g · Apr 17, 2013

The largest issue you have is thinking that a router is a storage controller. They add this on as a freebee. The only way you are going get good performance from a network based storage device is to buy a real NAS device that is designed to transfer data on a network.

I am hoping you are planning on cabling your AP to your main router and not using wireless. If you use wireless you are using the device as a repeater instead of a AP. Repeaters at the very best get 50% rates and they degrade greatly when you start putting a lot of traffic over them.

Don't expect to get much over 500-600m on even a ethernet cabled connection. You need to do many special things like run jumbo frames with a large MTU to get the higher performance. This really only works on a dedicated storage network, running jumbo frames on a common network causes massive issue with things that do no understand it.

802.11ac will likely buy you very little unless you can find nic cards for your equipment. There are very few on the market because the standard for 802.11ac is not set. How well 802.11ac actually works in people house is yet to be seen. First the coverage is much less because the signal is absorbed easier. Also to get the 1.3g rate they assume you can get 4 clear channels and get clean enough signal for mimo to function. Even though in theory there are lots of channels on the 5g band you can really only use the bottom 4 and the top 4 with any true reliability. Many of the ones in the middle are subject to preemption by radar...so if you router detects the local tv station is using its weather radar it will disable those channels. This can be random since they don't run the radar all the time.

Also like 802.11n you do not want to mix modes. You want to run the 802.11ac on the 5g band and disable support for all other types, otherwise it will degrade the performance to allow support of the older protocols. You can run your other stuff on 2.4

ZenicaNJ · Apr 18, 2013

bill001g :

Thank you for your reply...you have presented several issues I hadn't considered. The first being that the second router will be treated as a repeater and not an access point if done wirelessly, which is the plan. I have to have the hdd enclosures connected to a wireless system, they cannot be connected by cable to the rest of the network.

Knowing this, what would you suggest as the best way to accomplish this? Pretend for a moment that cost is not a factor, how would I connect them by wireless so that speed isn't suffering? What would you forecast is the best possible wireless speed that I could expect or anticipate?

bill001g · Apr 18, 2013

The problem with wireless is it is half duplex. This means only one person can transmit at a time but there is no actual control of who transmits and when. You end up with transmissions over the top of each other with units having to retransmit and use random delay techniques trying to avoid their retransmitted packets getting destroyed also.

Even in the simplest 2 station copy file type you still have the small ACK packets going back so even with just 2 wireless devices you already get collisions and the more data you attempt to send the worse it gets.

The common number you will see people get is about 20-30m. This is mostly based on your standard single channel 54m g or n. If you use dual channel n (ie 150m) you will see reports of 60-75. Now when you go to 300m this is dual channel and mimo. Because mimo is just transmission of a second radio signal over the top of the first you already need very clean bandwidth to make it work. I think that is why you only see about 100m.
I would guess 802.11ac will follow a similar pattern. The key advantage it has is that it is using 4 channels instead of only 2. This means if it would used the same encoding as 802.11n it would get 300m but they say it gets 433m. I would bet it will be similar that you get a little more than half in real use. The so called 1.3m stuff assumes you can run 3 mimo streams over the top of each other. Any one who has tried to really get 450m 802.11n 3x3 mimo to work knows it only works sometimes.

My guess is that people will get about 300m on a constant basis out of 802.11ac in real world applications. I think the only way to get faster is to run 8 channel 802.11ac when that comes out. Problem is there are not 8 channels grouped that do not risk radar shutdown, you would have to use the 2 4 channel blocks and use some method to bond them. But what this also says is when people try to get the so called 3g 802.11ac they will use ALL the 5g channels. So if you live in a dense area and all your neighbors also try to use all the bandwidth then nobody will get very good results.

The only way I have seen reports of being able to obtain higher speed is to not use 802.11 protocols. Many outdoor WISP systems use the same 5g frequencies and very similar data encoding but they control who can transmit and how much. Motorola canopy is one of them. Could you use them indoors ? most likely but they are expensive units.

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Need some networking help and advice.

ZenicaNJ

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bill001g

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ZenicaNJ

Honorable

bill001g

Titan

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