What would be the benefit/purpose of cascading a router? Could it help me?
I've kind of read into this but I don't fully understand its purpose and don't really see if it would help my issue.. While I game on my PC I experience huge 3-7 second "lag spikes" fairly often and my latency gets pretty high as well which makes gaming near impossible. I have a linksys wrt54g2 router in my apartment. I have 3 wireless connections running off of it and 1 wired connection. When we had a bedroom as a gaming room we all used it wired with no problem what so ever. Now everyone on the wireless when they game experience the same problem as I do and the wired connection is always fine. Though it is better when no one is really home though the issue will still happen here and there. I'm getting great signal strength, 15megabit download speeds on speedtest.net, and I do see occasional packet loss when I do a ping test. I've also heard wireless works on half duplex and that means it can't send/receive at the same time? I've gamed off my laptop before wireless and never had this problem, it always just seems to be the wireless card I have with my desktop which I might add is a Linksys WUSB600N v 1.0. So my question is, what is cascading? could this help the issue we are all having? Are there too many wireless connections running off a basic router? Could my issue be better resolved with a PCI wireless card for my desktop? I have WIndows XP Pro, SP 3, 2gb DDR3, I3 processor. I've done firmware updates on the router and opened all ports needed to play the game in question. I've also changed the channel the router was broadcasting on with no luck in performance.
Which is better: separate modem and router or combined?
I prefer separate units.Cable modem technology does not move nearly as fast as WiFi router technology. If you have separate units you can simply upgrade the router. I think I used 7 or 8 different wireless routers with my old reliable (Arris) Motorola SB6120 cable modem.This also gives you the advantage of locating the modem in one area and the router in another. For example, my network equipment was all located on top of my laundry cabinets. This location was convenient and worked well for the most part, however the WiFi signal was weak in many areas of the house.Original WiFi Router location was in empty space above.The solution was to relocate the wireless router into a more central location. This was accomplished by running a longer Ethernet cable between the cable modem and the router’s new location. I was amazed at the improvement in WiFi range that this simple change made.Relocated router on top of plant shelf in den.Another advantage to having separate units is that you can change ISP technology and still use your old router.Recently my cable Internet provider (Cox) upgraded my neighborhood to fiber. They offered me a good deal and I had Cox Gigablast Internet installed. The new fiber Gigabit Internet required a new ISP supplied modem (you can see it mounted on the wall above the laundry cabinet in the picture above). The great thing was that all I had to do was unplug the WAN Ethernet cable from the old cable modem and plug it into the new fiber modem and my network was back up. No hassle, no reconfiguring a new WiFi device, etc.Again, If it were me and I had the option ( Some DSL devices are not available separately), I would choose separate units.Good Luck …
Is it a bad idea to have two routers for ONE internet connection?
I'm planning to get 2 routers: one in the living room for everyone and one in my office. All using the same connection. Someone told me that it's a bad idea, but how would it be? The same amount of internet will be used, I'm just buying an extra one so I can plug my ethernet cable in.