I ended up calling my ISP and was able to just about quadruple my speeds. Went from 120Mbps down and 10 Mbps up to 400Mbps down and 40Mbps up. For less than $5.00 difference a month in price and to top it off got a 6 month special pricing. I’ve already had to replace one cable run in the house from cat 5e to cat 6 and plan on redoing the other runs once the additional parts arrive from amazon.
My current network equipment is as follows:
ARRIS (Motorola) SB6190 docsis 3.0 modem
ASUS RT-AC66U B1 Router.
2 x unmanaged netgear 8 port gbe switches (needed due to not being able to run all the wires in certain areas thru the walls)
a 24 port unmanaged netgear switch
I know the modem would need to be replaced if i went with the gbe internet connection from my ISP.
My question(s) are / is there anything else that I would need to do / upgrade?
I don’t understand why you’d need to replace cat5e, if it’s good cat5e it’s good enough for 10Gbps for short distances.
The router would be my first next thing to upgrade, but it’s not strictly required. (two 1GHz cortex-a9 cores should be enough for your 440Mbps throughput if you don’t need complicated VPN stuff). If you’re happy with 802.11ac, you can relegate the ac66u to access point duties. If you want more router performance for e.g. VPN or want it to pull double duty as a small server, consider getting a small SBC like a modern raspberry pi or an odroid or a NanoPi - they’re way more capable than any spider like consumer router you can get.
The one run i did had an issue with getting the full speed and I just prefer to have the wiring all the same (My personal ocd kicked in and don’t have the will power to resist it!). The router is stuck at one end of the house and doesn’t cover the full house. Thinking that a vpn may not be a bad idea with the way things are going.
I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t over looking things. Thank you for the suggestion of the sbc. Will look into it!
Possibly a bad cat5e then.
A VPN is more useful now that you have 40Mbps up, you can use it to access things in your home when you’re out and about.
For wifi range - more than one access point (or router working as an access point) is the way to go, unifi u6-lite / u6-lr (or similar tp-link eap620 ; Belkin rt3200 ; Linksys E8450) are all about a $100-$150-$200 each, depending on various offers. You could get 2 or 3 spread them out to blanket your place with wifi, connect each one with ethernet to your LAN and enjoy speedy and reliable local wifi.
Agreed that the cat 5e connection was bad and have no one but myself to blame since I’m the one that did the install! Also part of the reason why my ocd kicked in on replacing it all. If I messed up one - did I mess up any others?!?! Did the install when I was in my 20’s as a learning experience and have learned a lot since then and still learning / wanting to learn more about the stuff.
Yea the vpn is something I want to look into getting / using but as you stated my old isp connection wasn’t the best for it. It was the best service in my area for the longest time and never looked to see when they upgraded (never got any sort of notification stating they had better packages either).
Recommendations are welcome as well as programs for remote access. I’ve used TeamViewer in the past for stuff. Not sure if it’s still relevant?
Been Looking at the unifi u6-ap-lr and putting it upstairs and in the middle of the house to fix the wifi coverage.
the router you have can do OpenVPN server and Dynamic DNS. DDNS will make it easier to connect to it from outside, your IP maybe changes from time to time.
regarding Teamviewer, i use it about 1-2 times a week, works great for me.