Advice on home network

remoteboy

Hi,

Apologies in advance. This may be a headwrecker of a post.

I'm looking for some advice on the best way to configure my home network.

I'm on UPC broadband and have just been upgraded to 120mb. They sent me a new modem - UPC UBEE evw3226 cable modem. If I connect directly to it either wired or wireless I get the full 120mb. Happy days. However I have two issues

1. There doesn't seem to be any way to add a static route on the router and I need this for Netflix on my Roku box.
2. It doesn't throw far enough to reach my attic where I have quite a few devices.

To solve the first issue I connected a TP-LINK WDR3600 router directly to the UBEE and set it up as the DMZ host. I then connected all of my devices directly into the TP-LINK. This works fine but my connection speeds max out at 50mbs (wired or wireless). Don't know if there's any settings in the TP-LINK that's throttling the speed so much. The UBEE has a gigabit ethernet port as does the TP-LINK so would have thought the speed drop off would be negligible.

To solve the second issue I have an ethernet wall socket downstairs which runs all the way up to the attic. I run a cable from the TP-LINK into the wall socket and at the other end I connnect a cable from the wall socket into at Airport Extreme Base Station, which gives me wi-fi (plus wired) in the attic. The max speed I can get via either is 20mb. So i'm losing 100mb in total. 70mb between the UBEE and the TP-LINK and 30mb between the TP-LINK and the Airport.

Is there anything I can do to mitigate against the speed loss, while stil ensuring all of my devices can see each other (I'm running a Plex server downstairs with clients accessing it from both downstairs and the attic).

Thanks for reading.

Michael

ED E

First off, I assume the 3600 is running stock not Tomato or DDWRT? Assuming so then WAN to LAN throughput is in excess of 900Mbps, see here.

That being the case, I suspect this is the Ubee's flaw rearing its head:
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=94062345&postcount=122

See the rest of the thread too, but basically if it links at GigE fine, but if it falls back to FastEth then you're stuck on 30Mbps(maybe 50 in your case). Try a new patch cable.

Work on this first, then sort the Airport. But to test that, connect a laptop to the ethernet cable feeding the airport and run speed tests, that'll show you if your cable run is sh1t.

remoteboy

Thanks Ed. Looks like the patch cable was the problem. Swapped it out for a different one and getting 120mbps via the TP-LINK now. I'm gonna check the rest of my cables now.

Thanks again.

Michael