Trying to Re-Organize my Fraternity House's Internet Routers

During busy hours, our fraternity house's Internet always goes haywire. Download works but web pages won't load. So I'm going to re-wire the whole house.

It's a three stories house with basement. We have around 20 people living in the house. So I'm going to list my plan. Please criticize or offer me any help or suggestions you have. Anything is appreciated.

Plan:

1. Upgrade our internet service from Comcast. Right now, we are using Comcast Cable Business internet. We have 12mbps download speed and 2mbps upload. We will upgrade it to 22mbps download and 5 mbps upload. This should help ease some of that congestion during rush hours.

2. Simplify our wired/wireless connection. So we will have three wireless routers connecting to the Cable Modem. Each wireless routers will provide wireless internet specifically to each floor of the house.

Is there any settings I should be aware of when setting up the wireless routers?

I know about Channel Interference so I will set each router's channel to different numbers.

 

Do you have to go Wireless? I'd say if you can get away with it, drop a few Gigabit lines where you can, and give each floor its own Switch/Router.

Have the cable modem go directly to a wired switch, and connect all of the wireless routers to that switch. Might be a good idea to go with 5GHz N wireless routers/cards as well.

You might want to look into ways of controlling what types of traffic have priority.

 

Do we really need a switch?

So I just re-did the setup in our house.

So it's like this:

Cable Modem - connect to Second floor Wireless Router WRT110 (Wireless N)
Cable Modem (same modem as above) - connect to third floor Wireless Router DIR-625 (Wireless N)

do I still need a switch?

and how do you set priority?

 

No switched needed with 2 modems.

 

Nah, you won't need a switch. But you should think about testing your routers. Find a time to get a couple of computers and pound the routers with internet traffic. You need to simulate a rush hour traffic jam and see how the routers will hold up.

Not all routers are made the same and it will go a long way towards preventing future headaches.

 

no, we only have one cable modem. However, the modem itself has 4 sockets.

 

still no need for a switch.

 

Web downloads or torrent/emule/dc?

I guess it is the latter, so you would need something to do load balancing. Either by software (old desktop with linux) or hardware (one box between your modem and wireless modems).

Setting up private network with a dc++ server is probably one way to solve the issue, since most people are anyways downloading same movie at the same time. It worked great at the local university until it became too public and was shut down, after shutdown the campus network had similar issues as yours now Then they introduced load balancing, blocked p2p, download limits and other punishments for downloaders. I think today the uni networks is pretty good, if you can think of something to do that doesn't violate rules.

 

maker and model of all of your networking gear, please.

 

I think most of the routers in Netgear's SMB Class supports load balancing and fallover.

 

he's already listed the routers in a previous post. Plz read.

 

Now our fraternity's internet speed is much more consistent. Turns out, some dude set up our internet connection incorrectly... He linked Modem to Router to Router... So any computers in the house has to go through two routers before it hits the modem. I just simplified it and now it goes from router to modem directly. Since there is 4 sockets in our modem, I just use one socket for each floor. So 2nd floor has one router connect to one socket and the third floor router connects to another socket.

It's much better now. However, we still might consider buying a faster speed plan. Since we use Comcast 12mbps plan. I think 22mbps will be much better.