Can you hear me now? Tales from a Cisco voice instructor » wireless

Fast, Real Fast Wireless

Dave Bateman — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:00:52 +0000

Over the years the speed of wireless networking has increased. I remember when it maxed out at 11 Mbps and it served most everyone just fine. Many wired connections were still running 10 Mbps, so no one really noticed. Then 100 Mbps wired connections starting becoming popular and all of the sudden wireless seemed slow. Over the years it has increased, but never seemed to keep up with the speed a wired connection could offer.

Some folks in Japan are trying to speed up wireless transmission rates to speeds once thought impossible. They are using what they refer to as the “T-ray” band. It is a section of electromagnetic spectrum that falls between 300 GHz and 3 THz. By using this band, they have been able to achieve speeds of 3GB/sec. That’s pretty darn fast. However, you shouldn’t get too excited just yet. You won’t be seeing a “T-ray” router at Walmart anytime soon. Right now it is just a proof of concept and it’s range it pretty short. But I think it is a glimpse of things to come.

Need a Faster Router?

Dave Bateman — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:06:43 +0000

If you find yourself transferring large files between devices over your wireless network and feel it just takes too long, you might want to checkout Netgear’s newest router when it comes out next month. They claim that you could see speeds of 1GB. That’s fast – so fast I am not really sure why I would need it. Currently I am transferring data at my home at around 54MB. I don’t feel I am waiting too long for anything, but I am sure there are those out there that will feel they just have to have one.

Netgear R6300

For those of you that do find the need for that kind of speed, the device you will be looking for is called a R6300. It is based on the 802.11ac technology, so in order to get those kinds of speed your other devices will need to be 802.11ac as well. Currently that is going to be a little hard to do since it officially isn’t even a standard yet. That should occur later this year, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping some companies from adopting it. It has been rumored that Apple may support this technology in its airport products later this year.

So, if you need to be on the bleeding edge and have the fastest, you should get ready to order the Netgear R6300 next month. By the way, it will set you back about 200 bucks.

Solving Home Router Problems – Automatic Router Refresh

Dave Bateman — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 00:58:49 +0000

Home wireless routers are great and yet frustrating at the same time. It seems that no matter what brand or model I get I have intermittent problems. At least once a week and sometimes as often as everyday one of my PCs fails to connect to the router. When this happens, I start running trough the normal troubleshooting steps, but the majority of the time the only thing that fixes it is to reset my router. Everything then functions fine for a at least a day and then another one of my PCs stops communicating.

The other day I was working on a router and found a “Refresh” setting. It allows you to pick a time of day that the router will perform a reboot. When I saw this I thought, “why didn’t someone think of this sooner?” Of course, this wasn’t the same model router I have at home so mine doesn’t include this magical “Refresh” setting. But this did lead me to a solution for my router, a solution so simple I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. I plugged it into one of those lamp timers that you can pickup at the hardware store.

I used a digital one so that I could pick precisely when it would turn off and back on. I set it to turn off everyday at 5:59am and turn on at 6:00am. At first I was going to have it reset at midnight since that seems like a logical time, but since I often set large uploads to occur after I go to sleep I determined this wouldn’t be a good idea. And, of course, I don’t want the router to reset in the middle of a late night Call of Duty match! So there you have it, a simple man’s solution to those aggravating home router lock ups.