Finally – Noted Improvement!
So I had my first breakthrough; replacing the main router (and keeping the Asus repeater router) really helped out. Ping times stayed stable, and everything just generally felt to respond better. That said, I still wasn’t thrilled; I lose connection in the garage yet, the Sonos stuff still acts up sometimes, and generally I wanted better, so I kept on fiddling.
Next I realized maybe just getting the wifi signal from the basement to the upstairs was part of the problem, so I moved the basement router up to the living room where I had my only other Comcast connection. (The house was previously very poorly wired for coax, and I yanked it all out when I moved in. Wires were ran along baseboards and it was just sloppy everywhere). In addition, I moved my NAS from the office down to the living room as well, to provide my music library to the Sonos devices. Again, noted improvement, in fact, now I finally felt like things were generally good at this point.
Working in the garage a couple weeks later, I noticed that it was still slow out there. Doing some speed test showed single digit bandwidth (<10Mb), so I thought OK lets dump the USB dongle for an actual WIFI NIC. Replaced the USB dongle with a NIC, that had an extended/seperate WIFI antenna, and it REALLY woke up. 100Mb+ woke up, so I’m like “great, another problem solved”, or so I thought. A..gain.
Now I could tell things still weren’t reliable, and at this point I’m ready to just shell out the bucks for all new gear. I should have done that from the get-go, but I also wanted to experiment and learn; I AM an IT person afterall, and this could happen at the office too.
Considering how well stuff works at the office, my next step was basically to replace the consumer-grade gear with pro-sumer or enterprise-grade stuff, such as Aruba APs. I also intended to seperate the router and WIFI hardware, so I could put APs where I wanted them and didn’t have to be physically associated with the modem. Lastly, hammer in hand, I’m ready to bust holes in walls if I have to, BUT let’s try one more time.