I have over 50 Mbps BT fibre with Zen internet, they provided a modem and I use my own DD-WRT router WRT320N. Was a good router, but since moving to the new house, the wifi has rarely managed faster than 20 Mbps, the limiting factor in my setup. Currently the router is at a central location in terms of wiring, but a terrible location in terms of wireless. The modem is in the living room on ground floor, almost dead centre of the house, I've wired a CAT6 to the garage converted study. The router sits near to the mains consumer unit and has 2 wired clients with a switch hanging off it. The switch connects Synology NAS and NAS's backup client (HP microserver) under the staircase, I had TV aerial guy drill a hole from study to get power and CAT6 there. Basically everything is wired up like this: Code: Desktop NAS v v Modem ---- Router - Switch | ^ TV Backup (- donates a long-ish distance, more means longer; arrows mean relative close wired connection) What I'm thinking is to move router next to modem, and put a switch where the router is. Something like this: Code: Desktop NAS v v Modem > Router ----- Switch - Switch | ^ TV Backup Would this work? are there any performance hits for wired clients? I always thought it's best to have main router at the centre of the network, is this statement true? I blame the mains consumer unit for bad wifi speeds. Is there any other cause? Due to size of the house and the fact it's surrounded by roads (apart from study connecting to neighbour's garage, no other house within width of a small road), I am thinking with the router out of study away from my closest neighbour I can enable 40MHz mode without upsetting anyone. Will this boost speed at extreme range, eg garden? I am also thinking about wiring up stuff near the TV. Could I add a switch to the TV location (aka 2 switches hanging off a switch)? If I do, how would traffic from NAS go to the TV? Finally, expensive way of solving my wifi problem is getting a new router. Could this help? Any recommendations? 802.11ac routers worth paying extra for? (RT-N66u £100 vs RT-AC66u £150)
AC would probably offer better speeds, but as well as a new router, the receivers would have to be AC too.
There's no reason you cannot link the switches like you want, it'll work fine. Gig switches are so cheap now.
Probably not. AC uses 5Ghz which penetrates walls about as well as a musket shooting fluffy cotton balls. What you're planning should be just fine, so long as both switches are gigabit. In fact, when you look at it, it's exactly the same as your existing network - a router is just a 5 port switch with layer 3 functionality, so instead of uplinking to the internet, the additional switch is just uplinking to your router. Store and forward switching is less than a quarter of a ms tops, so you're not adding any noticeable latency.
