So heres the situation in a nutshell: I do NOT have enough speed on my network. I have Comcast cable broad band service for my ISP which works great. The problem is I have a router hooked up (an Airlink 101 AR675 300Mbs router)and on this router I have at any one given time 3 Xbox's, 3 PC's, 2 laptops, a PS3 and when everyone is at home 4 cell phones using the router! Slows stuff way down. The main problem is that I have set-up a program called PlayOn to stream media from my PC to all of the above devices but on the consoles the "stream" is slow and "jittery" and when I try to stream to my phone it "buffers" for like 3-5 minutes then plays fro a minute or two then starts buffering again. I also have a problem with my son's X-box's while they are playing any online game it seems they get kicked and it tells them their NAT is to restricted. I have port forwarded the X-box's for each specific game played with the same results. I have protforwarded PlayOn to help (seems to help a little with my PS3 which is connected wirelessly). I am looking to speed this up. Should I connect a second router? If so how do I set that up? Should I set up some sort of switch? Again how? Here are the specifics also: 1 PC is wireless (the one I am streaming from) 1 PC wired 3 X-box's wired 2 laptops wireless Phones obviously used on the Wi-Fi I am really wanting some help on this if anyone could please let me know what needs to be done. Thanks to all who check this out.
The first thing I would do is connect the PC that streaming via Ethernet cable . The reason is you might be bottle necking your speed if your wireless card or adapter is b/g . For your sons xbox , you might want to put the ip address its using on DMZ to make sure your routers firewall isnt blocking any needed ports .
check to make sure all wireless devices are using Wireless G, if one of the devices are in B the router will drop to 11mbits. set up a static network if possible. DHCP can cause issues with streaming and it will Free up some of your routers CPU and RAM. also check to see if your router can benefit from DD-WRT or Tomato, both are fast open source and chock full of features.
All my wireless goods are running wirless N, except maybe my PS3, I am not sure what that is running. What I am trying to do is expand my wireless network (and boost signal strength a bit) while adding a couple wired ports. I looked online about hooking up a second router to the first which then acts as a wireless access point (for my basement which gets a very week signal) and basically a switch adding at least three new ports (although you tend to lose one port in each router). Do you think this will work? I am going to try that DD-WRT (I will have to check and make sure my router is compatible) and appreciate the advice.
yeah with DD-WRT, its possible to set one antenna to send data and the other to receive it, this reduces the latency because the router can now perform both those operations at once. if its a gaming router it probably already does that though. the other plus is it allows you to increase signal Gain by modifying the DB levels of the transmitter. like i said if you haven't already setup a static network do so. the benefits are all worth it.
