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Squeezing out the bandwidth

Posted on July 30, 2004 
Filed Under Misc.

I wanted to take 10 minutes this morning to get the Tivo on the network, and it ended up being a 2 hour adventure. I had enough of the mountain of cable mess behind my desk. I needed to add a switch because I was out of ports. So this morning, I unplugged *everything* and started over. Still a little wild on the floor but I minimized the mess on top and more important, I can reach the port panel on the wall.

In addition to the new Tivo, we also signed up for “Vonage.”:http://www.vonage.com Our phone bill averages over $100 a month, most of which are services and fees. We’ve been thinking about VoIP for a while, and decided to give it a try. Can’t beat $30 a month for unlimited local and long distance with voicemail, caller ID and call waiting included. I also love that we can configure everything about the service through the Internet. We could have gone with “Optimum Voice”:http://www.optimumvoice.com/index.jhtml but that requires us to change our phone number. With Vonage we’re able to keep the number we’ve had for the past 8 years. We added a 2nd absolutely-no-anything except local incoming/outgoing phone line for $8 a month for our alarm system. Everything else, including Tivo, now goes through our cable modem. I want to be sure I’m getting the most bandwidth through it that I can. I know that the cable wiring from the outside is excellent. We had Cablevision here when we redid the house and it has a dedicated drop that’s never split. The sound quality with Vonage is okay, but not crystal clear. Especially when I’m doing stuff online at the same time. On Monday I’m going to trade out our ancient 3Com “Sharkfin” modem for a Motorola Surfboard which is supposedly much better. Cablevision was very accommodating when I called. The router is a “Netgear MR314 802.11b wireless router & 4 port switch”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00005NOKT/002-8249728-6428863?v=glance (so old, it’s not even on Netgear’s site anymore). I just added a “Netgear 8 port switch”:http://www.netgear.com/products/prod_details.php?prodID=132 as Eric’s computer, my G5, my PC, the kid’s Mac & the Tivo make five needed ports. The range on the MR314 is okay, not great. My PDA can’t pick up the signal from the bedroom (more about that later).

Any recommendations/suggestions about wireless routers? I haven’t shopped for one in about 2 years.

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