03-26-2018 08:22 PM
Wife and I are debating moving back to Telus now that they're doing the 150/150 package in our area, previously it maxed out at internet 50. We had switched to the shaw 150 which cost less and was obviously much quicker. Now that we're moving back I'd like to ask some questions about things for those who know better.
We live in a duplex style townhome, we're a bit of a square layout spread over 3 floors. The shaw and telus bonded connections both enter in an awkward location in a hallway on the third floor, strangely opposite of the main electrical room for our units. A previous owner has run cat5e from the modem location to two of the three bedrooms on the top floor and another line (thankfully) goes to the basement. I have coax lines to various places in the house and standard cat 3 phone lines but they all merge in the telecom room outside our unit in a semi-shared space that only myself and other strata members have access to.
Our WiFi has always sucked, top floor is great, middle floor totally passable, basement was unusable. I recently installed a TP-link AC1750 with DHCP disabled and run a secondary SSID off the cat5e in the basement. When I did some renos in the basement I was able to wire cat6 into the walls so this single drop distributes to our home theater, computers, NAS, consoles, etc with hardwired connections through a switch.
So questions:
1: Will Telus as part of the installation be willing to relocate the modem to another place in the house? Does it run off coax or telephone cables? (or something else entirely?)
2: If not able to relocate the modem, would they install an additional jack for the ethernet somewhere? I am considering running the modem in bridge mode and putting the TP-Link router in charge, hopefully positioned in the middle of the house to eliminate the annoying dual SSIDs that don't hand-off nicely.
3: Can anyone help me understand why my 5ghz network coverage is so infrequent? We have minimal amounts of wireless devices in our house and problem has persisted through both Telus and Shaw, plus supplied modem/routers and the TPlink. Signal strength can be perfect with zero obvious drops but every so often (say once or twice per hour) the service will full stop over 5ghz band for about 5 minutes then return to full speed (180mb down on shaw currently). No warning, no change in signal strength, just loses connection to net. 2.4ghz doesn't do this and runs all day every day but at a slower speed. Due to the layout of our house and complex my nearest neighbors are 25+ feet away and wifi scans don't show much interference around me.
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03-26-2018 09:26 PM
03-26-2018 09:26 PM
03-26-2018 10:09 PM
03-26-2018 11:48 PM
I have tried many options over the years and gone through many of the frustrations you have. I started using a mesh system a little over a year ago and I am the happiest I've ever been. The one I use is the NetGear Orbi. I have one base unit and two satellites. The computer I'm using now is wired through a docking station to one of the satellites but we also have quite a few devices on wireless. No problems. I can't speak for every solution, but the mesh solution has done it for me, and the advice you've been given by nighthawk is very good.