I am about ready to make my first big network change since our move 14 months ago. Although network changes have been on my mind, our DSL modem fried itself last week so this is a good time to reconfigure (and document) everything.
This is going to be my second experiment with 802.11n networking. Back in mid-2007, I bought an Airport Extreme from Apple when it was first released. Although I never finished a blog post about it, I was not impressed with the performance so I returned the AE.
Now
Our current home network setup is probably very common and mostly works. We are renting a 2-story townhouse so our networking constraints are fixed and inflexible. We have to connect Mac's and PC's and several other devices that share a 1.5MB DSL connection.
Our DSL modem is upstairs in the office connected to 3 PC's and a NAS drive (Dlink DNS-323) with wired ethernet cables. We also have 3 devices downstairs in the living room which are connected wirelessly using the default DSL modem's 802.11g network our ISP provided.
The living room has an HTPC (Windows XP), a PS3 and an Xbox. The Xbox had an 802.11b wireless device which stopped working in our last move because it did not support WPA so the Xbox is not connected unless I feel like pulling out my 100' cable and running it through the house. We have tried to watch movies on the HTPC that are stored on our NAS but access too slowly to really watch them using a PCI 802.11g card. The PS3 works great wirelessly but is not able to access files on our NAS because of DLNA protocol errors. (No, I had never heard of DLNA before either.)
Goals
My goals for this network upgrade are the following:
- Access movies and music from a shared drive with HTPC and PS3
- Access the network faster (for movies) and lower latency (for games) using 802.11n (4x faster than 802.11g)
- Connect all 3 devices (PC, PS3, Xbox) wirelessly
- Simplify my HTPC by removing a PCI card for wireless networking
New
I will detail the results in a second post soon.
